change it

Print is only a temporary arresting of the text—change it if you need to.

not imprimatur

Print is not imprimatur: A poem being in a book is not the poem’s imprimatur.

figures dancing

Reading a poem and thinking that the printed letters are figures dancing.

poem's apotheosis

Being printed as a letterpress broadside is the apotheosis of the poem.

one poem printed

Every poet should have one poem printed as a letterpress broadside.

eye poet

   In Miss Moore’s time…the poet found it indispensable to work directly with the printed page, which is where, and only where, his cats and trees exist.…We may say that this became possible when poets began to use typewriters. And we may note that Miss Moore has been in her lifetime: a librarian; an editor; and a teacher of typewriting: locating fragments already printed; picking and choosing; making, letter by letter, neat pages.
   Her poems are not for voice; she senses this herself reading them badly; in response to a question, she once said that she wrote them for people to look at….Moore’s cats, her fish, her pangolins and ostriches exist on the page in tension between the mechanisms of print and the presence of a person behind those mechanisms.

—Hugh Kenner, “The Experience of the Eye: Marianne Moore’s Tradition,” Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism (David McKay Co., 1970), edited by Jerome Mazzaro.

no type

A poem that resisted the stasis of the printed page.

skirmishers

Fighting an editor over suggested changes to a poem that once printed will be consigned to oblivion.

step into the same poem twice

Once a poem has appeared in print, I leave it alone. I can count on the fingers of one hand the published poems I have altered in any substantial way for subsequent reprintings. A poem seems to me to have an integrity born of its moment of creation that should be respected. The “later me” who might want to word things differently is no longer the same person who wrote that poem; I don’t entirely trust her impulse to meddle with it. Let her write her own poems.

I took me some years for me to realize that not all poets operate this way: that for some, the text of the poem is something considerably more fluid and mutable, even after it has appeared in print. One fellow poet recently quoted to me what she says was the watchword at a graduate writing program she attended in the United States: “It’s all a draft until you die.”

—Robyn Sarah, “Abandonment and After,” Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (Biblioasis, 2007)

audible line

Meant to be uttered, a line that resisted ink.

neutral surface

Paper as support, its own materiality is usually ignored. So the sense of a neutral surface that can accommodate any mark seems an ideal way of communicating freedom. At the same time printed material has the capacity to repeat itself endlessly and linked to distribution or manifestos—even freedom however idiosyncratic and inscrutable. And this tension is what surfaces and transforms the amnesia of the paper into a tension between the drawn and the printed. The mark and the letter.

—Ellen Gallagher, interview by Jessica Morgan (Institute of Contemporary Art in association with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2001)

type parameter

Bad typography can damage the text, but good/fancy typography cannot appreciably improve it.

low coverage area

A high ratio of white space to printed text. [Scientific definition of a poem.]

first script

No neatly printed page can equal the beauty of handwritten lines in a notebook.

find it free

Free for the taking, the delight in reading a good poem that one knows only a handful of other people know exists in print.