Machines & Space: V

In 2019, I taught a series of two-day letterpress workshops at the Boutique De Junque in Indianapolis. One of the workshops focused on broadsides and printers card with an emphasis on two color registration. I made it a practice to work each of the projects along side the students, so that they could see me working the typesetting and the production on the press. I produced this broadside at the studio Andrew Churchamn and I set up in the back of the Boutique De Junque during the fifth workshop along side a humorous printer’s card that. This broadside is from a series of poems based on William Carlos Williams work—integrating language from my day job into the structure that Williams erected.

I have always been an admirer of Williams’ work, Patterson and Spring and All are brilliant. He once wrote that poems “are machines made of words,” and that has stuck with me for over 30 years. And in the last few years I have been returning to his work again and again.