distributing type...

this whole bracketed bit is kind of useless:

[[where to begin? the first time in the press? first book? (certainly gummed rather than read, too long ago to remember)

maybe that since then, whenever that beginning was, things have changed, printing does change the way you look at books. You will say, oh lanaguage, yes, the impossibilities of communication. but isn’t this only one aspect? What about these letters? Each of which has been used countless times before, in so many words, meaning something (else) each time. The binaries of word & image, time & space, break down into a page made of lead & steel & wood:

“The physical manipulation of lead and wood blocks, the laws of increment and tension that governs letterpress as a medium, have shaped both the ultimate look of individual texts and my understanding of typography in general: design has no abstract phase in my work. With letterforms treated as players with attributes, as marked and weighted units introduced into the force field of the page, visual relationships established by variation, juxtaposition, substitution, reiteration and obscuration are literally constructed to carry out the optional paths and conflicts inherent in a text… Once meaning has been (shown to be) bound to material substance and form, closure—Freud’s goal of a solution to the rebus a dream presents—proves elusive.� Emily McVarish. from Poetry Plastique.]]

here’s the real beginning:

so I was distributing type listening to an old mix and the noise in the pipes and --

distributing type: in letterpress printing, after you have printed and cleaned, the last thing to do is to distribute: to take your text letter by letter and put each tiny lead letter back in its place in the case of type.

is that closure? is closure what shuts out the reader? what reader? wasn’t this my secret language? or was it more like a letter?

but, then, alone, it seemed to me that this half-distributed pile of little lead letters was the form this poem had always sought I would pick up pieces of lines and amidst the backwards letters I could not help recognizing words. picking up meaning, startling myself with words which seem sacred for having survived by chance, with the whole worlds that clutched at fragments. the world of the poem, but mostly my associations with where it came from.

-- and every so often the noises in the pipes sounded like another person coming into the press, and this always shook me.

Where the poem came from: in the miseries and confusion of freshman year, in the spring, in a copy of DoubleTake in the Fine Arts Library, I chanced across a poem by James Galvin, called ‘Leap Year’. I photocopied it and tucked it into an envelope in my notebook. It contained the line ‘Oh Persephone, home’s not where I / thought it was.� I started writing poems to Persephone. Here’s the last one, from about a year later, in Helsinki:

persephone, did you even wake up
maybe too early in the morning
and not know the season, under from
over, or maybe find yourself in
a place that is always cold and light
where the sky loses its blue, looks
like paper, and did you want
to write across it,
hades, I miss you?

persephone, does it occur to you
that I am talking to myself here?
i’ve lost my stars and muses
in the sun that won’t set

it was even more melodramatic than the preceding persephone poems, and i knew that should be the end. I began writing real letters to real people.

but when i returned to the states the following fall i thought maybe the last thing i would do for persephone was to print a book, called “song for persephone,� and a palinode. it would be small and modest, with little words on each little page, and it would look old, look like it was disintegrating, or had already. it would be hard to read but maybe there would be someone who would turn each little page and try to piece it together.

it wanted to be small and modest but it took a fucking long time to make. mock-ups, typesetting, printing, proofing, printing some more, assembling, binding. and just when it seemed long over, after critiques and openings and daily dramas, then there was distributing.

I don’t know which is harder, begining a project or ending. You distribute type, and there are these words, their different associations and lengths and weights in your hand. But you take them apart, and there’s just the simplest heartbeat tempo of single letters: e, h, t, space. I stood there, in between my poem (my freshman year, my neuroses and myths) and the world of afterwards, the one coming into being as the book was distributed.

Writing this now, I didn’t remember that line from James Galvin correctly. I found the poem to check it—it’s in his book, X—and I noticed another line, that seems more important now: “Forgetting about the future makes the moment / you live in slouch. / Excuse me while I digest this small galaxy.� It makes me think of a sci fi movie, one where the space-time continuum becomes visible, glows & undulates. We gaze out at together through the window of our spaceship, knowing that we are here & now, a small place, everything else bearing down around us.