Research: The Shape of Poetry: A Typographic Exploration of Poetry and Synesthesia (2015) by Boliang Chen

“the transmission history of poetry depends upon visual forms”

— Boliang Chen

Title: The Shape of Poetry: A Typographic Exploration of Poetry and Synesthesia
Author(s): Boliang Chen
Journal/Publisher: a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Design
Year: 2015
Pages: N/A
Source: ProQuest
Notes: Design MFA candidate Boliang Chen explores the relationship between the typographic presentation of poetry and synesthesia in order to see how graphic designers might produce emotional reactions to poetry. Through research and practical application, Chen hypothesizes that a synesthetic typographical design could make poetry, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, more accessible to contemporary readers. This thesis might provide a good foundation for making a case that poetry broadsides, through their design and tactility, offer readers a different experience of a poem than a book, literary magazine, or online publication. I might ask myself whether or not the poetry broadside, particularly those with a high appeal to the physical experience (paper texture, letterpress embossing, etc.), appeals more to a synesthetic experience of the poem than other reading formats. I very much enjoyed reading through this thesis, and I find that the ideas here are really fascinating, even if I feel that some of its leanings toward visual poetry might detract from the experience of the craft of the language. Questions I still have as I walk away from this reading are:

• How might some of these design elements be distracting for some readers? Could some of this typographic design be heavy handed?
• Does the use of highly stylized typographic design draw the text more toward graphic art rather than poetic art? Is there a difference? Should we make this disntinction?
• Can synesthesia be triggered outside of the typographic elements? (My thought is yes, it can be and is.) How does typographically triggered synesthesia really enhance the poem? Does it provide a soundtrack equivalent to what the poet intended to be orchestrated, or is it like playing new music over an old film? Should the poet’s intention be the graphic designer’s goal?

These are all productive conversations to have with myself, and I appreciate Chen’s help in engineering this line of inquiry for my project. I’ve included some screenshots from the thesis, but otherwise this thesis is available through ProQuest databases.

pg. 5

pg. 7

pg. 16

“One study indicates that synesthesia is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.”

“‘And your very flesh shall be a great poem.’— Walt Whitman”

pg. 17

 

pg. 19

“The origins of poetry may well reside in sound and song. But the transmission history of poetry depends upon visual forms.”

pg. 21

“Orientation is…[a] graphic code that does not derive from or lend itself to vocal rendering. But vocal analogy maps onto the visualization does not simply impose an arbitrary relation of sound to sight.”

pg. 22

Three reading models: word shape, the serial letter recognition model, and the parallel letter recognition model

 

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Chen then goes on to demonstrate his research into synesthetic experiences and typographic practices through several examples. He sets Shakespeare’s Sonnets in various ways. One example appears below.

pg. 33–34

Extracurricular Reading: “Broadsides for Broadband: Digitizing the People’s Literature of the 17th Century” by Allison Meier

Although it’s a year old, Hyperallergic‘s article “Broadband: Digitizing the People’s Literature of the 17th Century” by Allison Meier  fascinating read about the English Broadside Ballad Archive’s digitization of 17th century English broadsides—and it’s relevant to the work I’m doing at Offset! Here’s an excerpt:

The EBBA launched in 2003 at the Early Modern Center in the University of California, Santa Barbara English Department. It is currently focused on archiving over 1,150 broadside ballads from Houghton Library at Harvard University. These join recent additions from the National Library of Scotland’s Crawford Collection, as well as material from the Pepys Collection at the University of Cambridge’s Magdalene College, the British Library’s Roxburghe Collection, the University of Glasgow’s Euing Collection, and the Bindley and Britwell collections at the Huntington Library. While broadsides generally date from between the 16th and 19th centuries, and come mainly from in England, Ireland, and later North America, the 17th century is  considered their heyday.

One challenge for the EBBA is conveying original context and social meaning. In addition to high-resolution scans, the open-access archive has facsimiles with more legible modern transcriptions alongside the messy, old, gothic, black-letter typeface that was often quickly set. There are also recordings of singers, unaccompanied as they would have been on the streets, replicating as closely as possible the aural aspect of the ballads. Whether warning of damnation or giving a eulogy for a lost soul, a popular or traditional tune would be suggested on the broadside for the rhymes.

Check out the article at http://hyperallergic.com/201120/broadsides-for-broadband-digitizing-the-peoples-literature-of-the-17th-century/

Where I’m Coming From

Broadsides of Claudia Emerson’s “I” come off the 1907 Chandler & Price platen press at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. May 2015.

The moment I sold out of the broadsides I made of Claudia Emerson’s poem “I,” I wanted to find a way to give the broadsides a larger audience. I’d spent weeks and two letterpress classes setting the broadside—my first and, so far, only major letterpress project—and so I wanted to honor my own work as well as the incredibly gorgeous poem by Claudia. But how could I? The thing I had made was in a limited run. It was scarce in the world, precious to me.

In the year since, I’ve spent a great deal of time researching and thinking about the relationship between a poetic text and its materiality, the thingness of it. The showing versus the telling of a text. Its concreteness and its abstractness. With this in mind, I wanted to honor poetic texts as objects with contents, with both material and ephemeral legacies. The idea that I could digitize broadsides, particularly those made with letterpress, and give them a larger readership while highlighting, even engineering, the tension between the poems’ mediums seemed a particularly evocative way for me to go about approaching my research interests. Therefore, here it is: Offset!

Hanging with the ChicMan in the Blackbird work room, March 2010.

So, what’s my background? why am I taking on this project? I became interested in digital spaces as vessels for poetic texts when I was an MFA poetry student and, later, adjunct creative writing instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University. There, over the course of four years, I worked in a variety of editorial roles—lead associate (managing) editor, lead pagebuilder, lead indexer, audio editor, copy editor, PR coordinator, and so on—at Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. At Blackbird, I learned some html and coding; I became familiar with the Adobe suite and other multimedia software; and I worked in image rights acquisition to gain permissions for images used alongside David Wojahn’s suite of poems “Ochre,” which first appeared in the journal and later in his book World Tree.

Blackbird 2011–2012 lead associate editor Ross Losapio, senior editor Mary Flinn and “associate editor emeritus” and lead page builder Emilia Phillips in the journal’s work room, November 2011.

Later, and briefly, I got to work within the Larry Levis Archives at VCU Cabell Library’s Special Collections in order to research poems for The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016) edited by David St. John. Here I was especially taken aback by the beauty of Levis’s handwritten and typed drafts, their damages and resiliencies: the dog ears, rips, coffee stains, creases, crumples, splices, juxtapositions, redactions, crossing-outs, etcetera. Blackbird is where I began to appreciate the thingness of digital spaces and the Levis Archives are where my love for the page caught.

I then signed up for letterpress classes with Paul Morris at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and that’s when I began to set the poem “I” by Claudia Emerson. The first run of 30 was printed on a Challenge Proof Press, and the second run of 35 was on a 1907 Chandler & Price platen press. I sold these broadsides (keeping one for myself, #21/35 from the platen run) to benefit VCU’s Claudia Emerson Memorial Scholarship fund. When I moved to New Jersey in summer 2015 to take a job as the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary, I began looking for opportunities to engage with texts in more material ways outside of the undergrad craft and workshop courses I teach and my current writing projects. I took a great collage class with artist Ben Pranger that allowed me to reorient my thinking about paper not only as a practical medium for words but also as art object, and I have asked him to advise me on this project, as I felt I didn’t have the vocabulary and approaches for thinking about this project as a curation of art objects.

I also applied to attend the Rare Book School’s class “Digitizing the Cultural Record” with instructors Bethany Nowviskie and Andrew Stauffer. I outline my reasons for wanting to take the course in my application:

I would like to take the Rare Book School’s Digitizing the Cultural Record (L-65) in order to pursue research into digitizing poetry publications. From archival scanning of letterpress broadsides and handmade zines to contextualizing the Poetry Foundation’s JStor interface for accessing back issues of Poetry, these investigations will help me understand the ways in which publishing technologies may have engineered poetic content and forms over the last century. Could advances in digitalization have shifted poetry’s allegiance to visual, rather than prosodic, forms? Do poets write differently or think of their audience differently because of the prevalence of online publications? How might the digitalization of pre-digital poems change the way we view, understand, and read them? Are there anachronistic connections between the charge of modernist poets, including those who appeared in early issues of Poetry, and the access, presentation, and experience of their digitized poems? Contrary to the wheel-spinning op-eds about the “death” of poetry, could poetry especially be poised to thrive and survive in the digital world?

In preparation for the course, I would like to compile a collection of recently published letterpress or linocut broadsides, particularly those whose demand exceeded their runs. I will gain permissions from the poets, publishers, and artists to digitize these broadsides (being sure to use high resolution scans that will capture imperfections in paper or print) and make them available through an online broadside gallery….

And the good news came to me: I got in! And I will be attending the course at the University of Virginia June 5–10, 2016.

With the course on the horizon, I have begun creating the framework to approach the project. In the last week, I have gained access to a large-format scanner, built the foundation for the project’s online presence, and started my research. Today, I will begin to send out queries to broadside publishers about contributing to the project via donation or loan.

I have several goals for the project. I would like to:

1. Post regularly about my research, progress, and the project on this blog
2. Have at least 50 broadsides with appropriate permissions for digitization
3. Learn how to build an effective and interactive online gallery
4. Launch the online gallery by October 1, 2016
5. Develop an index of resources for those scholars, writers, and publishers interested in poetry on the page, poetry in digital spaces, letterpress publishing, and poetic broadsides
6. Consider the relationship between mechanical and digitial publishing, material and online spaces, especially in regards to poetry, in a 20+ page research narrative

I hope that you all will join me in celebrating this project as well as the poetic page by following this blog, our Twitter (@offsetbroadside), or our Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/offsetbroadsides/).

Also, if you are a broadside publisher, author, or collector and you would like to donate to the project, please visit the Contact page for more information about how to contribute.