Mandrakes and Materials

Today, Oni Buchanan gave a reading and demonstration of her poetry at the Literary House. She is highly attuned to form, and many of her poems play with her ideas of form and how the letters of the poems she writes can birth further, connected poetry. Many of her poems are actually two poems layered in such a way as to create a third, or poems inside poems.

In her Mandrake Vehicles, she takes form to a whole new level. She presents a poem in three parts, three large blocks of text, and, through flash animations, lifts "light" letters from each block poem to reveal further poems.

What I find particularly inspiring is the way Buchanan sees her poems - they are constructed word by word, letter by letter, and letters have vitality. They have the ability to move around on the page, to condense and speak further.

Even though she has taken her poetry into the digital format to give it literal movement, each letter has purpose, even the "light" letters, which, in one layer of The Mandrake Vehicles, form what she calls "detritus words" that rest below the poem.

She said that she had trouble envisioning her mandrake work in book form that would retain the fluidity of the letters, I can't help but think that she just didn't find the right book artist to help her. The traditionalist in me - hah, I work with moveable type - wants to see her layers formed by physical pages, transparent and translucent as she described in her talk. I'm imagining more pages than just one for each layer - extra pages that somehow show the tumbling of the letters... something that might even end up like a flip book.

However, regardless of my impulse toward traditional form, I absolutely love the elegance of the Flash solution.

Oak Knoll

Oak Knoll Fest is an annual Fine-Press Exhibition in New Castle, Delaware organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, and it is currently the largest held in North America. The festival is organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, purveyors and publishers of books about book arts, calligraphy, printing history, publishing, typography, papermaking and more. So it's not a surprise that the festival attracts book designers and Master Printers who bring their wares to showcase and sell.

The Master Printer at the Literary House Print Shop usually attends every year and invites students from his workshops to join him. I was one of those students when I was a Freshman, and in a week, I'll be going back.

The exhibition occupies the basement of St. Peter's School, which is cozy when full of vendors, despite the institutional ceilings with panes of fluorescent lights. When it's full of book lovers browsing art books and fine broadsides, the space warms right up. The vendors are open and eager to engage browsers in long conversations about paper, or their choices in designing a certain broadside.

This year, the Literary House Press has decided to participate formally in this community. We'll be displaying our fine broadsides, and a fine letterpress edition of a book by John Barth, Browsing.

I'll be better at holding up my end of conversation with other exhibitors, now that I have some experience. I can talk more intelligently about printing – the smile-and-nod technique shall rust in storage.

This year, I can point to our table and say, "I'm a part of this tradition. Look at what I helped create."