In the Printshop / With Young Poets

Why would a poet, good with words, good with words in the world, good with worlds in the words, filled with things to say, imagining ways to say them, and simply loving the way poems, as one enters them, lead the poet to write them—why would a poet want to learn to work with type, layout, paper, print, pages, editing, distribution, etc.? Why would a poet want to make books? Why would a poet want to begin a literary press?

I can speak for myself, and will, but that is through a long lens of memory, as I was a poet who began to learn to print and make books almost forty-three years ago. Memory plays tricks, though, so I also spoke to students between two weeks and ten days ago in the printshop at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. All of the students there are young poets and fiction writers who choose, during the Summer Writing Program of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, to spend a week learning various things about the making of books, depending on just who is the faculty member leading them for that week. This summer, from 13 June to 17 June, that faculty member was me, and my group of five young women who named themselves "The Gentlemen of the Press" set small texts of their own, by hand, in type composition sticks, eventually to become small blocks printed onto papers of their choice, in one or more ink colors. My challenge to them, in a week in the SWP that was themed "Oracles & Cyborgs," was to allow the cyborg to dominate, and introduce something non-letterpress to their print, to add or augment or disturb in some way. Some people take letterpress as a bit too precious for my likes, so I wanted them to challenge that, and also learn something new, busy their hands and minds in other ways. Some drew, some sewed something onto their pages, some stamped, some chose other paths, and one simply printed more pages. So, they weren't exactly following my "rules," but I would rather them find their own way any day, around any press. Rather like what we do when we write poems. Know some rules and suggestions, but value independence, free-thinking, even some risk-taking. Then, after two workshop days (each workshop period being three hours only), they had the task of binding their pages together into an Asian-style side-stitched or "stab" binding, after printing title page and book front and back covers. Ordinarily we would have had four sessions, but Frontier Airlines simply did not fly their flights on time, or, in my case, not at all one night, so I missed (meaning we all missed) the first session. I have never been quite so impressed in such a workshop at what the young poet-printers accomplished, and how hard they worked to accomplish it, in such a short period of time, a time when they also listened to multiple lectures, panels, and poetry readings, including a couple by me; a time when I believe they were also all reading works new to them, and writing new works. My partner calls this week "poet camp," and in some ways it's more like boot camp, but it's also one of my favorite weeks of any year I am asked to teach there, this year being about my seventh time, but as I become one of the elders there, I may be losing count. That tricky memory again.

I know that when I began work in bookmaking, several years after I consciously began to know I am a poet, that it felt like an accident. I went to a conference on Charles Olson, and one of the fields in evidence there was that of small-press bookmaking, small books with lovely impressed text and illustration, on fine papers, sewn by hand, by one of the fascinating small presses of the time (this was 1978), Toothpaste Press (squeeze that tube of ink?), founded and worked in all its aspects by Allan Kornblum in West Branch...