Category: Poetry

Wow! Did I ever hit the jackpot! So many great poems were submitted to my giveaway celebrating National Poetry Month. Lots of poets and verse I hadn’t read — good thing I didn’t make the criteria “my favorite” and instead selected a name out of a hat! As one entrant emailed me “selecting a favorite poem is akin to naming one’s favorite child! It simply can’t be done.”

And the winner of my broadside is Lauren, at one {crafty} writer, who submitted Mark Strand’s Coming to This.

Thanks again to everyone! Here’s a poem I would have submitted, one I never tire of:

Numbers
Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition —
add two cups of milk and stir —
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m giving away one of my one-of-a-kind Pattern Forms broadsides. That’s a detail picture of the broadside to the left. It’s a cut paper collage with a letterpress printed original haiku beneath it. The collage is 3-1/2″ x 3-1/2″, on 6″ x 9″ paper, and sits in a hand-debossed (recessed) panel. The type is handset in Baskerville; the paper is Somerset. You can see the entire broadside here.
To win, post your favorite poem in a comment below or email it to me by April 29th. The winner will be announced on May 1st. Be sure to leave an email address where I can reach you. The winner will be selected at random from the submitted poems.

Earlier this week I came home from my studio with an armful of just-finished broadsides (that’s it to the right). It needed a title, but that had to wait until I read my email. In my inbox was a blog comment from Juliet Doyle, who had read my letterpress adventures and said “I played around a lot with my dad’s old Adana as a kid, so the smell of ink is ingrained in my nostrils somewhere…” I could still smell the california wash I’d used to clean my press, so her comment made me smile.
But back to the task at hand: a title for my broadside. I pulled up my saved list of quotes and poems to use for titles, and there was the poem “Smells” by Christopher Morley, with the wonderful lines “And printer’s ink on leaden type” and “These are the whiffs of gramarye”. ‘Gramarye’ means magic and certainly describes how I feel about the results of printing on my press. So I had my title: Whiffs of Gramarye.

WHY is it that the poet tells
So little of the sense of smell?
These are the odors I love well:

The smell of coffee freshly ground;
Or rich plum pudding, holly crowned;
Or onions fried and deeply browned.

The fragrance of a fumy pipe;
The smell of apples, newly ripe;
And printer’s ink on leaden type.

Woods by moonlight in September
Breathe most sweet, and I remember
Many a smoky camp-fire ember.

Camphor, turpentine, and tea,
The balsam of a Christmas tree,
These are whiffs of gramarye. . .
A ship smells best of all to me!