In recent weeks, I’ve been asked this question by poets I’ve met over dinner or at readings I’ve attended or put together. Somehow, I’m always caught off guard by this question, as if by putting the “press” at the end, somehow a mission magically appears out of nowhere. But even if a mission is implied, it doesn’t really answer the question what the purpose of our little group of poetry folks are doing.

The short answer is a chap press and organizer of occassional reading events. To speak to the former: The chapbook is where the excitement is at (for me at least). You have book arts or e-chaps; you have a singular long serial poem or a tight collection of small poems; you have folks in their basement or folks, like us, out of our little English offices. However, the commonality is the chapbook usually breeds an intimate connection between publisher and poet, and quite often, the chapbook is common home for the established, the unknown, and the downright weird. I often find chap manuscripts take greater risks and have stranger ambitions than good many books–perhaps because the chap industry is less corporatized, perhaps because there’s so many it’s become an inherently democratic venture. I don’t know for certain–these are just my impressions.

But it’s that desire to build something democratic (as art can be) and somewhat offbeat that fuels not only the press, but also what is turning into irregular poetry events: a yearly poetry festival at various indoor and outdoor locations in Tuscaloosa with over 40 readers; a 24 person reading last Saturday at Greencup Books co-op where Birmingham and Tuscaloosa poets gathered together to read……And now, on October 3, between 10 am-1 pm, a 4 mile hike & reading experience, where readers pop up at odd intervals in the forest and read the work of writers in the hiking group (more on this in the near future).

Regardless of event, Slash Pine is looking to push the boundaries of what a reading should and should not be: fluid audiences, students reading next to “professionals”, a refusal to privilege or champion one aesthetic over another, experiments in physical space and ownership. We won’t ever became a regular reading series, if for nothing else, Tuscaloosa can’t support another one. BUT, when we do have reading events, we’re looking for events that are social as much as aesthetic–to build a community invested in the same enterprise–writing.

That’s part of a mission statement I suppose. Slash Pine: a press and occasional experiments in interpretive reading.