At the Margins: Chapbook Presses in Canada

Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued that the rules and currencies in artistic fields differ than those in financial or political fields of social interaction. In the restricted economy of the avant-garde, those artists who produce work for the least money or power gain the greatest influence among their peers. In the realm of Canadian ephemeral publishing, those presses that produce poetry chapbooks, broadsheets, and experimental books function in a field similar to that of the avant-garde artist committed to working in such a restricted economy. These poetry micropresses operate at the fringe of mainstream literary publishing, and they disrupt the publishing activity, changing it from a commercial activity into a creative practice for a small, but influential audience of other artists and producers. In this study, I draw from previous, smaller surveys of micropresses published variously by Angela Rawlings and rob mclennan, and I examine their outcomes alongside my own, survey of micropress publishers operating in Canada within the last 30 years. This study permits a clearer understanding of how these little presses transform literary publishing within Canada, and shows that the micropresses innovate both the aesthetics of contemporary poetry and the practice of publishing poetry. The presses draw influence from the little magazines that dot the Canadian literary landscape from the mid-1920s to the late 1970s, and that generally eschew institutional hierarchies in order to experiment with innovative publishing and distribution strategies. In doing so, the micropresses revolutionize the Canadian publishing institution, but fail to avoid being co-opted and undermined by that institution.
Description
Keywords
Literature--Modern, Literature--Canadian (English), Literature--English
Citation
Martin, C. J. (2016). At the Margins: Chapbook Presses in Canada (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25065