at first i thought of doing this as a comment to a post on adam fieled's blog, but found even the short version would be too long for that. hence

i love the print chapbook for all the reasons adam states. i have been preaching to swedish poets & my local constant readers about how almost all the interesting new poetry, at least in north america, is published in chapbooks

the e-book or e-chap has some advantages & some disadvantages to its print counterpart. the, to me, most obvious disadvantage is that it lacks the tactile delights of a printed book, which in the case of the chap is often beautifully & lovingly designed & produced. the most obvious advantages are ecological (using less natural resources) & the potentially unlimited readership. as for the risk adam sees with poets sending their second rate work to e-chap presses, that strikes me as a strange practice. but if poets do that they will have to live with the fact that their second rate work will be available indefinitely to anyone who wants to read it. & i for one don't submit anything that isn't exactly the poem(s) or manuscript i want it to be at the time. posterity will show what's good & what's not

the two e-books i have forthcoming in the near future, more about them when they're released, are fairly different from each other. one is a poem, or 150-some poems/fragments, mostly culled from a couple of older, only partly functional, unpublished manuscripts, with some new ones added. that one was submitted for e-book publication because it felt too long for a print chap & too short for a long book, which to me makes it the perfect length for the e-book format. the reason i chose chalk editions is that i think they have published some fine things. the other one is a selection of prose poems sporadically written over three years or so. i was thinking of who to submit it to & if it should be print or online. then felino of differentia press asked if i had something i wanted to submit & as i was completely happy with the prose poem manuscript that was the one i sumitted. ye readers will have to judge if either of them is second rate