My Continued Aspirations Toward Self-Publication

The task before me: take a case of Goudy Old Style 12pt and transform it into the mirror image of a poem.

Thirty-five lines, seven five-line stanzas. 1,234 characters, including spaces. Every character a minuscule* fragment of lead for me to lift from its compartment and slide into place in a composing stick.

When I copy a poem or passage into my word processor for class, I usually begin at the beginning, with the first letter of the first line or sentence, and proceed linearly.

With moveable type, I begin somewhere in the middle. I search out what appears to be the longest line, set it, and use the width of the line as a standard for every other line in the poem. Every line is separated by the lines before and after it by "leads," the line spacers. These guys are what we use to adjust spacing - instead of hitting "double space" on a computer program, I insert extra leads of the right length between the lines.

Setting the type oddly disconnected me from the poem itself. In order to process each line at a good pace, I had to hold about two words in my head at once, and then think of each letter in its order and follow through physically by reaching for it in the type case.

Recently, Mac gave voice to something I've thought for a long time, which is that when you set type, you cannot help but notice just how many times you use each letter. He spoke in reference to his tendency to pick cases of type only to find halfway through setting that he doesn't have enough "e"s.

But as I mulled further over this while setting my poem, I realized that that awareness of the individual letters, as well as the common clusters of letters, can be helpful in examining poetry.

I had thought I knew my poem as well as my own fingernails, but composing it brought out new qualities, gritty, technical qualities that lay underneath meter. Qualities that affect the whole feel of the poem. This is something more than mere alliteration. I am not quite sure yet how to define it, but I know that right now, I feel like I have caught a glimpse of the 0s and 1s behind a computer program, or the quiet cogs of an open watch.


*According to the Oxford American Dictionary on my Macintosh, the word minuscule, (which I initially wanted to spell "miniscule," a common error or alternate spelling), derives from the Latin term "minuscula littera," or, "somewhat smaller letter," in reference to what we call lowercase letters. The book nerd in me feels that I am using the word imprecisely. I refer to every letter, punctuation mark, and spacer as being quite tiny - my poem is not comprised of lowercase letters.