Guest Blog Post: Chapbooks on Cherokee

Photographs by Ann K. Hubbard

The Cherokee neighborhood is an inviting location for young, creative St. Louis City residents to make their visions a reality. Property is inexpensive and rich in history; galleries, antique stores and cafes abound; and a growing, diverse and interested community of neighbors and visitors is practically built in. Considering these factors, it makes sense that if someone were to open a shop focusing on poetry chapbooks, this would be the place to do it.

A week and a half ago on Saturday, July 18th, Maggie Ginestra, a recent graduate from Washington University with an MFA in Poetry, welcomed people into her new chapbook store, Stirrup Pants, for the first time. She is a new friend, and walking into her shop at 2122 Cherokee Street is probably the best way to get to know her. The front room, which showcases the books, has a calming, aquatic feel and is sparsely furnished with small antique and folding tables and the owner’s own handmade chandelier. Cozy places to sit in the middle room, like a small bed, invite people to make themselves at home with the books and each other, and in the back room, there are snacks, sometimes wine, and donated coffee from Mississippi Mud. The space and the conversations within often feel intimate, whimsical and nurturing, and the fact that the store is only open on Saturdays also lends them a level of immediacy and tangibility. The instant I picked up my first book on opening day, I knew I had a new ritual that might add meaning to the world around me -- I decided I would show up every Saturday, meet someone new, and always leave with one book for the week.

Ginestra’s great hopes for her shop are that it can lift up chapbooks (along with their writers and the publishers who care about them) by putting them in the hands of the people, and in the same moment, foster a sense of community. “By the time a book gets to me,” notes Ginestra, “there has been a lot of nurture to help that book go somewhere when it might have never gone anywhere, because it’s just a chapbook. So there’s something about chapbooks getting to St. Louis, getting to that little room that kind of feels a little magical.” The shop, which Ginestra opened in the storefront below her home, runs on a consignment basis, and publishers like Ugly Duckling Presse, The Catenary Press and Sarabande are thrilled that this St. Louis shop is a venue for their little books. New shipments arrive every week to bring fresh products to returning customers and friends, and Ginestra becomes acquainted with each book, so on Saturday she’s ready to answer questions and point recommendation-seeking browsers to those chapbooks she thinks they might appreciate and those that are too precious and rare to pass up.

Poems convey meaning in a far more condensed space than a novel, or even a short story. Not only can a poem’s form further constrict that space, but so can the form within which it is published. Chapbooks house only a few poems, or sometimes a single poem, in a smaller space that causes a reader to consider not the breadth of a poet’s work, but rather the existence and significance of the few poems highlighted within its limited pages.

“When I think about chapbooks,” says Ginestra, “I think about sonnets. All poets write sonnets. Why do all poets write sonnets? It’s like fourteen lines is what a mind can hold, and I feel like a chapbook has a parallel cohesion to a sonnet. You can read it in one sitting, but it’s complete. There’s a way in which a chapbook always resolves, but there’s not as much pressure on it to resolve.”

Some of the books are self-published, some are made with little funding, some are meant to be released more quickly than a regular book’s production might allow, and some highlight a single theme or a brief moment in a poet’s career. Ginestra loves that even though some of the presses are publishing more famous writers, “they are publishing weird stuff that didn’t quite become a book -- that didn’t quite go anywhere but where it could go -- and there’s a perfect authenticity to that.”

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Stirrup Pants is only open on Saturdays and that Ginestra does not display her full collection of chapbooks at any one time. If a poem is the perfect vehicle for giving weight to a thought, and a chapbook is the perfect vehicle for adding weight to a poem, then this little store, open during a small window each week, may be the perfect space to guide people into noticing these little works and to ensure they aren’t lost amidst an overwhelming array of books. --Dayna Crozier