Some Colors…

Some Colors Will Touch Regardless by Travis CebulaAnother book I enjoyed from the Handmade/Homemade exhibit I saw last week was Some Colors Will Touch Regardless, with a poem by Travis Cebula and designed by Fact Simile Press. The press has a yearly chapbook contest, and Cebula was a runner-up. Fact Simile designs and publishes an artist book for the 3 winners.
The book is a simple Japanese-bound set of cascading pages, each colored at the bottom and hand torn. The color strips echo the title, and in addition, the poem on each page mentions the color on its edge. The presentation is a simple structure but elegantly dovetails the poetry inside.
Unfortunately the edition is sold out, but look here to see more books published by Fact Simile.

Book Collecting: Summer Day | Winter Night

Summer Day | Winter NightI haven’t written recently about my fledgling artist’s book collection, so I spent some time today looking at my books. The one to the right is called “Summer Day/Winter Night.” Claire Van Vliet has printed Ruth Fine’s linocuts into an accordion book. What attracted me first was the riot of colors, but what I like about it is that summer is one side (the green pages in the photo) and winter nights are on the other.

Book Collecting: White Tulips

White TulipsA favorite in my collection is White Tulips, ninety-nine haiku by Ronald Baatz. Leonard Seastone of Tideline Press in upstate-New York designed the book, which he handset in Elizabeth and Carolus type and then letterpress printed on dampened, vintage Barcham Green Hayle paper. Single and fold-out pages alternate throughout the book, with the fold-out ones hiding more haiku for the reader to discover. There are 3 cream-colored strips of ribbon in the binding that make the cover even more beautiful.
Baatz writes the sort of haiku I aspire to:

shadows of branches
like dark roads
on winter’s snowy map

new clock ticks louder
than the old clock ever did
this for ten dollars

clothespins —
like skinny wooden birds
on the line

The Poetry Dispatch blog has written a bunch of posts about Baatz that include both haiku and longer poems. One of the posts quotes Norbet Blei on Baatz: “(he) sees the big picture in small, seemingly simple poems; publishes in obscure, small presses; appears invisible in today’s world of raucous voices. Silence. Every poem is a new awakening to an old truth we seldom find the words to say or see. His work is difficult to locate but worth the search. He lives in Mt. Tremper, NY. There he goes now…”

mountains disappear in fog
and i want to go right along
with them

And White Tulips is available from Joshua Heller.

Book Collecting: Warwick Press

A Flowing printed by Warwick PressFor my birthday this year I got another letterpress printed poetry chapbook for my collection. It’s one I saw at the Codex Foundation Book Fair, from Warwick Press. Peter Fallon’s poem “A Flowering” starts

They were not on the maps.
Notes of their known habitats
recorded nothing here
or hereabouts.

and is about looking for evidence of bears on walks in the woods. It’s beautifully printed, with small bear tracks across the bottom of the page and cover.

Book Collecting: Pulp Painting

Klage by Hesse, printed by John GerardAt the Codex Book Fair last week, I stopped by book binder John DeMerritt’s table to say hi and admire his wife Nora’s new book. We started talking about paper, and John said to be sure to look at the pulp painted papers made by John Gerard at the table across from him. I was immediately entranced by the beautiful papers and bought the chapbook on the left. It’s very simply made — an accordion text block with a letterpress printed poem is pamphlet sewn into the covers, but it shows off the paper so well!
To make a pulp painting, specially prepared pulps are applied to a freshly made sheet of handmade paper, sometimes with the aid of stencils, sometimes freehand, so that when it all dries, the finished sheet of paper fully incorporates the image. Several years ago, we had an article in the Ampersand about Claire Van Vliet’s large pulp painted broadsides — you can see two of them online: What evaluation we make of a particular stretch of land… and this glorious one called A Scribe of Kloster Eibingen with pulp painting, letterpress and silkscreen.
I seem to be in a poetry reading mood recently — the Hesse poem in my new acquisition is in German, but I found a translation online by Joseph Knecht:

Lament
by Hermann Hesse

No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen to stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.