On Poetic Objects and Poetic Economies
I got the letter E. A capital letter, and wrapped in the crumpled dictionary page. It was a talisman. It was scrappy. It was a performative—nonmoneyed, in this case—transaction. As Chris handed me the letter, as I reached out my hand, I saw him look at me through the screen of the performer’s mind. I looked through the audience’s eyes, glancing, not taking too much, not making the kind of eye contact you would on seeing a friend on the sidewalk. The E was an object—one in a long lineage of individual letters made flesh. Sesame Street, or the embellished initial capital in an illuminated manuscript. As an object, and as an object bequeathed to me in a particular circumstance, I loved it. How many poems get to be loved like this?
Poetry exists; the rest of my world encroaches. The more attention I give it, the more real it is. I love to give poems a place at Fringe, and I like that I can put as much white space around them as I want. Inserting little 4-em spaces in html above and below the text feels like smoothing out a sheet. Clear out, Internet. A poem is here. And yet my heart breaks that the poems exist only in that still-small space, embodied only in the way that everything online is embodied: enscreened. I wish I had the money and time and visual expertise to give these poems back to their makers in graphic form.
Since I don’t, poets, I am offering this challenge: After it’s had the chance to live online a while, affix your poem to a page. One you can give out, or barter for snacks or a drink, or sell for a few bucks. If you are worried about your design skills, and most of us should be, call upon one of the many designers around us to help you. Yes, there is much bad design; yes, your poem might not look the most amazing; yes, do it anyhow. Conversely, a nice visual setting doesn’t make a bad poem good. If you are concerned about this, choose a poem by someone else—or one of your own that has already been published. And if you are one of the fine folks who are doing something like this already, for your own work or for that of others, in your living room or in a letterpress studio, I applaud you. Don’t stop.
Because I want us to give the poems all the help they can get. Or, properly, the support, because the visual should not supercede the poem itself. As Jennifer Tappenden puts it, “All design must originate in the poem, and the poem must remain legible. This is because the poem is the reason for the design and not vice versa.”
In some instances, it could be desirable to play with this more. Jessica Spring and Chandler O’Leary, who together make the Dead Feminists broadside series, place quotes in grand, complex visual context. O’Leary draws the typography herself; Spring letterpress prints each broadside. One of my favorites is about a women’s collective who wrote a cookbook; the letters of part of the quote float in molded Jell-O printed in translucent ink. At the Ladies of Letterpress conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in August 2011, they spoke of making the reader work a little to get through the quote, pushing the text through the visual. For short things, this demand for engagement seems good; for a poem of any more than two or three lines, though, the text should be the thing.
You may be wondering how to answer the many other questions involved in this making. One that can be easily eliminated is size. A 5-by-7-inch flat card is good—it is compatible with other such efforts, as well as with the mail, and its proportions are pleasing. Or go even smaller with a 4 1/4-by-5 1/2-inch card—easily cut down from a letter-sized sheet and therefore easier to make with scavenged paper. Not bigger? you wonder. Consider: there are only so many walls in a house, so something big that assumes it should live on a wall will have a limited life. And some poems you don’t want to see all the time. A small card is transparent about its purposes, but it can be tucked away. Jennifer Flescher says, “Poems that appear in magazines are often very different than when they land in books—if they do—so I hope that some of the poems I publish will hang around a little longer . . . be passed on, be stuck into those books, maybe.”
Choose a pleasing and durable paper. A nice card stock will do, or something finer—or a cut-up paper bag. Some traditional broadsides feel breakable—on fragile paper, with perhaps an initial letter embossed in gold. It’s easy to feel that you’re messing them up just by touching them. Something a little more usable will be good: smallish, sturdy, well-designed but not looking down its nose at you.
Make it. Allow it to exist in time, and try again. And try new things, and get better.
If you are worried that considerations of the visual and of exchange are a distraction from poetry itself, well, they could be. But one of the reasons it gets hard for me to sit down and write is that the contexts of my world pull me away from poetry. I’m outside of academia right now, but this happens to people within it too, I’m sure. It may seem like a digression to devote time to placing an individual poem in space. But in fact, when I do this, I find the energy and conversation the object generates tends me back into making and reading poems. Making poetry visible allows one’s community to support and encourage it.
So for those of us who find it difficult to squeeze into the lines defining one specialty anyhow (and there are many of us), or for those who wish they had an easier way to share the work they do with people inside and outside the poetry world, why not stretch out a little? Why not set a poem down in a meadow, let it breathe, and then pick it up and offer it, with your own hands, to a friend? Yes, you spent ages making the poem and now the manufacture of the meadow is also up to you. But nothing complex is required. A good typeface and good cardstock are plenty. If your paper and your own handwriting have some character, these and a nice pen or pencil are plenty.
You will be repaid expansively for your efforts. You will be in good company. And—to turn a hope into a prediction—that company will yet increase.
