I have never been what my friends in the gay community might refer to as a size queen. With regards to poetry, what I mean by that is that the high-end fine press printing projects that transform ordinary poems into oversize broadsides or posters sometimes don’t work on me. I like a well-designed broadside as much as the next poet – one of my all-time favorite projects is one of Albany that was done by Chax Press in 1989. But walls, on which I suspect all modern broadsides were meant to be displayed, are precious commodities even in the largest of homes. The same space that a framed & matted broadside takes up on a wall could go to a taller bookcase – those two extra shelves could hold 80, maybe even 100 books of poetry, given how thin so many are.

 

Thus Albany has been one of only two broadsides I’ve had up framed & matted on the walls consistently for the past fifteen or so years, the other being “An Alphabet of Subjects (Contents This Notebook),” literally Louis Zukofsky’s original handwritten plan for Bottom: On Shakespeare, published in 1979 by his widow Celia. Zukofsky’s notes were written in a little notebook, 5 by 8 inches, from which this single page appears to have been saved. Blown up to more than twice its original size – and the broadside itself has a great deal of white space around it – Zukofsky’s handwriting is still minute & precise, a testament not just to the completeness of his vision in first contemplating this project, but his notorious anal retentiveness as well. But Zukofsky’s original work had been, after all, just 5 by 8, and there is not textual reason why Albany needs to be blown up large for the wall – it’s just lovely, that it’s only reason for existing.

 

In fact, I can think really of just two projects that absolutely required the large poster broadside format and could not have been realized without it. One is Robert Grenier’s Cambridge M’ass, published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press the same year as the Zukofsky poster. It is, I see from the bio notes – Grenier’s is virtually an autobiography – in the newest edition of In the American Tree, 40 by 48 inches, containing 265 poems. It is – or, in my case, was – a fabulous project. By putting up all of the poems on one page – text on little white squares of varying size floating against a black field – Grenier managed to attack the idea of order at least as deeply as the “Chinese box” publishing of Sentences, with its eminently shufflable cards.* Some “friend” – if only I could remember who – “borrowed” my copy of Cambridge M’ass in the relatively early 1980s & never remembered. [If you’re reading this, remember that it’s not too late to return it!] And by then it was already out of print.

 

The second project that absolutely demanded the large post broadside form was Ronald Johnson’s Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid, published as LVNG Supplemental Series, no. 1, in an edition of 366 in 1996. This broadside is wider than it is high, 19 inches by 25.The poem itself consists of 66 quatrains, printed in what appears to me to be 11-point Times Roman on a 13-point line. The first stanza is centered at the top of the page, the next two stanzas appear in the “line” beneath the first, one slightly to the left, the other slightly to the right. The third such line has three stanzas, the fourth four and so forth – there are eleven of these “lines” of stanzas altogether. The first three stanzas might give a hint of what this is like:

 

Then with a sweep

blindly eradicate

perception itself
afire with egress

 

step in a blink                    rolled door aside

blank as paper                   And stood beside space

few fields beyond               place of sepulcher

pure fallen Snow                in splice of time

 

It’s interesting that, unlike works with parallel columns, the visual set up of this piece never leaves on (or never leaves me at least) wondering whether I should read down or across – these are very evidently, even confidently stanzas, intended to be heard whole, each by each, even if we proceed between them left to right. It’s also interesting to see a line – it is very much that – that proceeds stanza by stanza, even if as here the effect is primarily graphic. Just to imagine how that curious invisible thing we call “the line” can be in any way different without simply going scattershot across the page a la Olson is a tremendous feat.

 

Unlike most political art – this is very much an AIDS poem, unapologetically so – Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid is some of – may even be – Ronald Johnson’s strongest poetry. One of course hears all the echoes of Zukofsky, as one does even in Johnson’s Milton in Radi Os, but the influence is so utterly put to new purposes that it’s transformed & the sense of Johnson as a derivative poet here is no different, really, than one gets in the work of Robert Duncan, who argued, at times convincingly, that all poetry needs to be understood as derivative. It’s a wonderful work &, when I get some extra cash, this is very apt to be the third broadside framed & up on the wall.

 

What evoked all this was that I’ve been getting Big Mail lately. Not just the Johnson, which Devon Johnston so kindly sent awhile back, but also Derek Beaulieu’s wonderful With Wax from Buffalo’s Cuneiform Press. This isn’t a broadside, but a book, a BIG BOOK, whose text is printed literally on a single sheet of paper that folds out the way car ads do from Sports Illustrated to reveal four exquisite little prose poems, set in 18-point type on 24-point lines. Like Albany, With Wax didn’t have to be so lovely, it just is. In fact, my copy arrived with the most beautifully printed press release – because of the dark blue handmade paper – I have ever seen. Not readable, mind you, but fabulous nonetheless.

 

But With Wax’s 12.25 by 9.75 inch format – the website calls it 34.5 by 24 cm, folding out to a 34.5 by 96 cm page – is just a pocketbook in comparison with Accurate Key 1.5, a supplement to Accurate Key, a Milwaukee-based journal that appears to publish all of its works in broadside format. Its inaugural issue came in a box (with a John Wieners poem printed into its inner “back” cover), even if the individual pages were ordinary enough 7.5 by 10 inch sheets. But 1.5 is 17 inches high by 8.5 wide – fit that into your bookcase! The works in both issues are quite wonderful – there is a Creeley in the inaugural issue & Alice Notely appears in both, plus some of the same Milwaukee poets I was praising here just a few days back, such as Stacy Szymaszek.

 

1.5 in particular reminds me of a time, many moons ago, when Kit Robinson, Alan Bernheimer & I (among several other non-poet folk) visited Hatch Show Prints in Nashville, back when it was still just down the street from the Ryman Auditorium, home of the original Grand Ole Opry. Hatch had been the primary printer of minstrel show posters in the South in the 19^th century and was playing a similar role well into the rock & roll era – the printers there did the very first poster for an Elvis concert as well as one for the very last show given by Hank Williams** – and then had been incorporated into the Country Music Hall of Fame’s preservation efforts. Being inside that ancient print shop, devoted almost entirely to poster-sized letterpress work, was like seeing how The Difference Engine really could have been computing in advance of electricity. What else is a print shop, after all? The poster-like size & feel of the works in Accurate Key 1.5 – there are only four pages or posters, by Notley, Szymaszek, Chris Martin & Anne Waldman – all have that same feel, which from this perspective is even more rare than the fine – but fairly traditional – letterpress sheets of the boxed first issue.

 

There were only 275 copies of the box and I can’t find any details concerning 1.5, but an email to singlepress@yahoo.com might at least tell you if any of these are still available.

 

 

 

 

 

* Michael Davidson used to tell a story of assigning Sentences to his students who would have to troop to UCSD’s special collections office in the library to inspect it, the undergraduates being ever so responsible and taking great care to not get the cards “out of order” only to get hysterical if & when Davidson himself happened by, came up to the deck and literally shuffled it in front of them. 

 

** To this day, Colin has a Hatch poster of a “circus alphabet” framed on the wall of his room.