typeset & letterpress

A  small experiment, conducted at The San Francisco Center for the Book, on a small poem of six lines he'd written four years ago after a trip to the Aegean.

A failure in many ways--he'd forgotten to make a proof, several letters were upside down (his bad)and the typebox (Stymie 14) mixed upper & lower cases (not his bad). He'd not put enough space between stanzas, so that the couplets he'd written the poem in were no longer couplets.

After correcting the type and arranging the furniture in the bed of the press, the type loosened line by line and he was forced to correct it with tin and copper slivers inserted with tweezers. It was painstaking work, for which he had no innate talent; had he done it right the first time, the exercise would have been unnecessary.

However, after much fine work, it was what it was and it is what it is. His partner in the project, Tim, inked the roller. Then he, the writer of the poem, cranked out ten copies of his first project as typesetter and letterpress printer on 80. lb paper.

Tim asked him what he thought. Well, all the words are there, he said, but the cuts made on the linoleum block that looked so good to me look more like the pattern of a Hawaiian shirt on the paper than the shoreline of Samos. 

All poetry is experimental poetry, acc. Wallace Stevens.