Readers of this blog will know that I do love categories – you can’t discuss something until you have a noun around which to put some language. One might think of, say, the School of Quietude as just, for example, “poetry” if one didn’t have a term through which to indicate that that cluster of extremists is far from the unmarked case of anything. Similarly, the early history of the prose poem was also, & perhaps even foremost, the history of a noun phrase. Without which Aloysius Bertrand’s little prose vignettes would exist today as so many indeterminate thingees.

 

Thingee, widget, doodad, whachamacallit – there are more than a few great synonyms for those intermediate phenomena in our lives that are not quite this, not quite that. In the arts, of course, we have intermedia, happenings, conceptual art, all of which carry at least some of this same betwixt-&-between-ness about them. And calling something post- very effectively is one way of avoiding having to say what just a thing might be, focusing instead only on what we know it is not.

 

One of my favorite forms of the in-between is that publishing entity best known as The One Shot. Not a magazine through lack of periodicity, but not yet an anthology for want of heft, The One Shot has a long & hearty history. One could argue, for example, that Tottel’s Miscellany (which Richard Tottel himself called Songes and Sonnettes), first published on 5 June 1557, was not merely the first collection of English language poetry & the begetter of the sonnet as fad, but was itself precisely a One Shot.

 

The One Shot differs from a book, most often, in that it doesn’t necessarily fall within the larger publishing program of a book publisher, with all of the implied social networking that goes into distribution. In that sense, it maybe more closely resembles all those books that emerge from presses that publish exactly one book & don’t quite know how to get the word out, get reviews, get it into Barnes & Noble. After all, what is a book that exists primarily in boxes stacked in a corner of your garage? Cartons of paper.

 

Sitting in front of me today are two excellent tho diverse examples of the One Shot – 7, a chapbook containing a collaborative poem penned by Jen Coleman, C.A. Conrad & Frank Sherlock, and Involuntary Visions: After Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, edited by Michael Cross & issued by Stephen Ratcliffe’s press, Avenue B. Tomorrow & Wednesday I’ll do a little contrast & compare.