A Recent Obsession

[Note: This essay was originally written as an article for The Collegian, a campus publication. However, for various reasons the issue in which this article was supposed to appear was never published, so I am taking the liberty of publishing it here, with minor edits. I want to post this while it is still fresh, before returning to material I'd neglected.]

"And so you make your place in the world by making part of it –
by contributing some new part to the set.... The world is not yet done.”
~Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland, p. 69.

I did not write a Senior Thesis. I took the English department's Comprehensive Examinations instead. Sometimes, that bothers me. Sometimes, I wish I was walking away from Washington College with something a little more tangible than a degree. Oh, for a thesis to rest quietly in Miller Library's electronic database or to hand with grave dignity to my mother and father, to be able to say "Here. Now, leave me alone."

I chose not to write a thesis in part so I could devote my time to my poetry, to write and shape a portfolio, but last semester I was still a bit hesitant about presenting a notebook full of poetry to my parents. They're quite supportive, but it still didn't have the same weight (in my mind at the time) as fifty pages of critical analysis of someone else's poetry.

My solution came in mid-Fall '07, when I was sitting on a table in the Literary House's Print Shop with Marian Robbins and Lindsay Lusby, both seniors as well and both enthusiastically involved in the Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts Workshop. We were brainstorming projects that might go beyond our usual, though fun, jobs for the Literary House.

Bookmarks and broadsides lay about us in stacks, and blank, hand bound journals filled the shelves behind us. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if I could combine the printing and the binding to create not just a fine poster but a book, one with text inside. What if I printed my own poetry? A fine letterpress edition would beat out a book slapped through Lulu.com.

But might be awkward to print a book of my own poems. Chapbooks have a long, respectable history, but as a poet who is still a fledgling, I thought it might be a bit vain. What would distinguish my effort from a "vanity press" but the old-fashioned technology?

I said all this to Marian and Lindsay, in fewer words. And they each said, "Me too!" - to both the desire and the concern.

"So let's print one book of poems from all three of us, together," I suggested, and we did.

"To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product:
the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process.”
~Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland, p. 5.

It wasn't that simple – and if it had been, we wouldn't have had so much fun. Yet the quote above says the process only matters to me (and my comrades in rubber-based ink), so I'll try to simplify.

The first, most important step was editing our poems and compiling them into a cohesive manuscript. This involved long nights on the floor of Lindsay's living room, poems spread before us in an ever-shifting black and white mosaic. We emerged with a fifteen-poem manuscript, with five sections of three poems each.

None of us realized it at the time, but the decisions we had to make in ordering and grouping our poems foreshadowed the decisions we would have to make in compiling our final portfolios in the spring.

The Print Shop has a spectacular 30" monitor for a PowerMac equipped with Adobe InDesign, and we took full advantage of it for the design stage. We had to imagine the finished book, what size and shape we wanted, how we wanted it to feel when held in the reader's hand – then translate that to the page.

Next, we applied to the Cater Society of Junior Fellows for funding, because we realized that unless we bought polymer plates of our manuscript, we would not have the time or energy to complete our project.

Usually, when printing a postcard, I would hand set the lead type, letter by letter. Instead, we emailed our digital manuscript to Boxcar Press in MA, and all of our poems returned whole and Braille-like on thin plastic sheets that we applied to a base for the press. This allowed me to draw the title page art, though for the rest, we used "cuts," images the press already had hidden in the basement.

We spent two weeks printing, cultivating sore arms and ink-streaked skin. We squeezed out forty-ish hours between classes and homework. Between the three of us, we cranked the press' handle about 6000 times.

Now, after selecting paper colors and textures, we are binding. This includes collating, folding, sewing, gluing, cutting, and more gluing. This stage will continue until 18 May, 2008*. I know what I will be doing over senior week, and I would not trade it for anything else.

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone."
~"Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot

To Eliot, we stand among the dead, amidst relationships that change as we set forth our own art. While as poets, Marian, Lindsay, and I are of course aware of the English canon and our conversations with it, for this endeavor we were also as printers aware of the weight of history, of Gutenberg, of John Ruskin, and William Morris and the Kelmscott Press.

I like also to think we must find meaning and strength as artists in others, in community. Neither Marian, Lindsay, nor I would have undertaken this task alone. Yet because we did, we stretched ourselves through every stage in the birth of a book.

I can graduate happily, because I managed to find an adventure that required I draw from my poetry and art classes, not to mention the Letterpress Workshop. This perhaps is my thesis: an intensive, interdisciplinary effort to shake my fist in the face of the internet, and more importantly, to make the lonely art of poetry that of a community.

In May, I walk away from WaC with something tangible: a book. My share of our 200 copies, that is.


*Process is as yet still ongoing, even beyond 18 May 2008. Projected completion date has been revised.