A
long night of printing last night (3 runs: 2 on one book, and 1 on the other). Here's an early photo of the drying rack, with the single sheets from
Hotel Winter drying in it.
Something I've been thinking about a lot with these books is how to incorporate imagery that feels appropriate to the poem without being overly illustrative
of it: I don't want
Hotel Winter to resemble a hotel room in any way, but I want there to be a clear and organic relationship between the poem and the book (why else go to the trouble of making books this way?)
So here's a bit about my thought process. In both of these books, I've focused mostly on book materials as imagery--for
Edgar Huntly, that meant using graph paper and maps as materials to bring out the sense of restless movement through the city (coupled with a semi-translucent endsheet with a squiggly line printed on it from a linocut). My original vision of the book involved all sorts of decorative sewing (using the sewing machine instead of the press to make the squiggly lines denoting movement), but then that felt like too many mixed messages (and too
done--and I didn't have a good enough reason for using both). I'm still binding the books with a sewing machine, though: I want there to be a trace of that thought process left in them.
Hotel Winter took me a little longer to figure out. Since it's such a short poem, with no stanza breaks, my initial thought was that the book should be a little mini-broadside with a wrapper. I kept thinking that (I even bought some chipboard to print it on, thinking that would give it some sturdiness) until I took a proof of the text on some Frankfurt paper and fell in love with the whiteness of the paper and the blackness of the text. So, a new vision: no hotel in the book, but lots of winter--crisp, snowy-white paper in a cover that looks like a starry winter night. (I knew from pretty early on that I wanted to use Cave Paper's "Galaxy" for the cover--a beautiful black flax paper with flakes of mica or silver leaf.) And it seemed only right to take the "image" on the would-be title page from the language of the poem itself, which transforms the word "zero" in beautiful ways. (Hence the drying rack full of zeroes, from the biggest wood type I could find.) Presto! While I was taking proofs of the book, I folded one down and trimmed it to the actual size the final pamphlet will be, and just about melted at how sweet it looks. More pictures to come...
Ok, so after a month or so of intensive writing/teaching and little-to-no book progress, I finally got back on the press this weekend to take some proofs for Matt Henriksen's Another Word. Which, friends, let me tell you, is a heck of a poem. And now that I'm rolling again, I'm totally freaking psyched about this book. Because not only is the poem great, but the book is also going to have as a cover image a beautiful photo by awesome Minneapolis photographer/all-around cool guy Rich Fleischman. And I've also commissioned a screenprint from letterpress intern/screenprinting aficionado/tornado of fun Jeff Peterson for the book itself. It's gonna be pretty. In fact, it's gonna knock your socks off. More images to come, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with the picture Jeff took of me in the letterpress studio at MCBA. Printing with other people=pictures of something besides my hands! Documentation! (Isn't the MCBA studio sweet, by the way? Look at all those presses!)
