Kyle Schlesinger on Contemporary Poetry Broadsides

Kyle Schlesinger has a great essay called “A Look at Some Contemporary Poetry Broadsides” in which he discusses the history of poetry broadsides and their contemporary design, over on Evening Will Come. A few excerpts follow, and it’s a fascinating read, with lots of examples.

 

On the Poetry Broadside in the 20th Century

In twentieth century America, the poetry broadside blossomed in the sixties and seventies. In the revolution of print culture spurred on by the New American Poetry’s intersection with the mimeo revolution and a new wave of innovative printers and book artists, the broadside became something of a radical courier for self-expression as well as a quick, DIY medium for social and political transformation. It served as an ideal way to promote and commemorate events such as Happenings, rock concerts, dance performances, and poetry readings. In turn, the construction and distribution of broadsides, magazines, and pamphlets became popular underground occasions for impromptu gatherings around second-hand Vandercooks, homespun silkscreen equipment, and saddle staplers.

 

On the Difference Between Broadsides, Handbills, and Pamphlets

It’s an elusive term, but broadsides are usually bigger than handbills and smaller than posters. They are often printed letterpress, but not necessarily. They often contain verse, but that’s not a requirement either. Like pamphlets, some broadsides fold, but that’s just my opinion, others would say that broadsides are a single, unfolded sheet printed on one side only.

X-Ray as Digitization Technology: On the En-Gedi Scroll

Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to ‘unwrap’ a parchment that’s more than 1,700 years old.
—Annalee Newitz, “One of the world’s oldest biblical texts read for the first time,” Ars technica

Lindsay Lynch on White Space & Typesetting, for The Atlantic

On The Atlantic, Lindsay Lynch writes about typesetting letterpress and the en space in “How I Came to Love the En Space”:

To understand letterpress printing, imagine that every letter you see on your screen is an object, a tiny piece of metal. Not only is every letter an object, but every space between every letter is also an object. Every space between words, every space between lines—every bit of white space is an object. When typesetting, a printer has to think about negative space as something tangible.

This is where the en space comes in. An en space is a rectangular piece of metal or wood whose primary purpose is to be smaller than the metal or wood type being printed. The en space isn’t type-high—it doesn’t sit proud like an ordinary character—so it doesn’t catch ink when it’s run through the press. It just holds printable type together in a tight grid, creating spaces between words. It is never seen, but without it, everything printed would be nonsense.

X-Ray as Digitization Technology: On the En-Gedi Scroll

Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to ‘unwrap’ a parchment that’s more than 1,700 years old.
—Annalee Newitz, “One of the world’s oldest biblical texts read for the first time,” Ars technica

Quote: “If words were material…”

—Brenda Shaughnessy, “(Side B)” from So Much Synth 

Quote: “the margins will…flood the text”

in the end, the margins will rise / over their banks / and flood the text

—Tomas Tranströmer, “The Gallery” (trans. Patty Crane) from Bright Scythe (Sarabande Books)

Quote: poetry and technology go “digit in digit”

For this quote, I’ll refer you to an interview I did with Don Share, editor of Poetry, back in 2014 as a part of the 32 Poems Prose Feature, of which I was editor.

Emilia Phillips: Does poetry lend itself to new media and innovative textuality more than other genres? If so, how?

Don Share: I don’t know about more, but poetry certainly can do that. We’ve got apps and a website and podcasts and digital publishing projects at the magazine and at the Poetry Foundation, so every day I see ways in which poetry and new media connect with each other. If you want to know why poetry isn’t dead, part of the reason is that it keeps happening. And so does the development of technology. They go hand in hand. Or maybe digit in digit! But there’s also a way in which poetry is rather conservative – in both the bad and good senses of the world. However it comes to you, a poem is a poem.

—from “No End to What Can Be Imagined: An Interview with Don Share”

Quote: “A well-executed book of poems”

To me the book of poetry provides the best vehicle for interpretive typography by the artist-printer. A well-executed book of poems has an artistic merit as an object beyond the literary merit of the poetry itself.

—Clifford Burke, pg. 3 of Printing Poetry: A Workbook in Typographic Reification (Scarab Press, 1980)

Note: I will use this text in later research annotations, and, as it’s a letterpress edition about printing poetry using letterpress, the text will hopefully appear in the Book Object series on this blog as well.