Broadside Project – Page 2 – Green Chair Press Blog

Piem or Piphilology

For National Poetry Month I’ve been noticing where poetry showed up in every day life. Recently in the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin wrote about pi day and mentioned

There is a form of poetry known as a piem, in which pi’s digits are represented by the number of letters in each word. The best-known piem renders the first fifteen digits of pi as “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.”

Googling “piem” didn’t get me much, although eventually I found the letterpress poster to the left, by Toronto printer Amanda White.
Maybe people use poetry to remember other things? There are mnemonics to remember lots of facts, for instance “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” to remember the musical notes in the scale. Googling “mnemonic” I got more poetry to remember the digits of pi and then another term for piem: piphilology.

Letterpress Prints on Sale

All my limited edition letterpress prints are on sale for the month of April. Normally $18-$25, they are all now $12.

A Chair Is Still A Chair

From my press name, you might guess I’m slightly enamored with chairs, at least my own. Another person taking inspiration from a chair is Mark Gleberzon, who explains “I have been painting this same chair for almost 15 years as a tribute to my parents after taking it with me when I moved out. I love its form and architecture and always find some new detail I didn’t see before.”
The particular painting to the left was at the Architectural Digest Home Show and is a bit different than Gleberzon’s other chair paintings in that it has words. The words are from the song A House Is Not A Home (lyrics by Hal David). (Seen on Design Milk.)

The Problem of Describing Trees

The Problem of Describing Trees broadside It was a year ago when my husband & I decided to move to Santa Fe — it’s been a tremendous amount of work and stress to move our lives from one state to another, plus remodelling our new house pretty much ourselves. Last Saturday we celebrated with a restaurant dinner (ah! to wear a dress and heels rather than paint spattered jeans with the knee missing and a t-shirt with a thousand stains!)
Despite all the problems with our house, I would buy it again for the trees — we’re surrounded by pinons, russian olives, junipers & aspens. When the long to-do list gets overwhelming, I rejuvenate by watching the birds at my feeder or, more likely, listening to the aspens rustle. I mistakenly thought quaking aspens only made their fluttering noise in the fall when the leaves dried, but even the green leaves make a pleasing whisper when they rub together in a breeze.
Several years ago I bought the broadside above of Robert Haas’ poem The Problem of Describing Trees for the line “There are limits to saying, / In language, what the tree did.” When this week I finally got the chance to hang it up, it seems even better with the aspen tree images. The print is by Sara Langworthy and signed by Haas. Here’s the poem, and you can read an interview with Haas about the poem here.

The Problem of Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind.
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of summer
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Aspens doing something in the wind.

— Robert Hass

Quilt Prints

I’m a sucker for both tightly registered letterpress and quilt patterns, and I recently found 2 prints that have both! Krank Press has quilt cards printed in 5 colors and there are four patterns: pendant, hexagonal, “bento box” and spool. You can buy them separately or see a set of them all here.

The second one is an 11″x17″ broadside and 6 colors (!) by Cynthia Patrick in her Etsy shop here.

Rock-paper-scissors

My husband got me watching the TV show In Plain Sight with him by convincing me I wanted to see a show set in our new home — New Mexico. On an episode we watched recently, the 2 lead characters played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would have to do something neither wanted to do. I immediately thought that might be a good tool for me — moving and getting our new house in order has been full of chores no one wants to do (who’s going to call the city recycling again because they missed our pickup? Or worse, who’s going to call the manufacturer yet again because the appliance we bought has broken for the Nth time — I finally got them to take it back as a lemon…) I got my husband to agree to the rock-paper-scissors decider game, but then I saw the poster below (here) explaining how to win rock-paper-scissors every time — which I read immediately, and now can’t in all honesty play it with him. (Who knew there were tournaments and world championships!)
And while this post isn’t about book arts, it is about a well designed broadside…