GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
On Printing Poetry Aloud GLENN STORH AUG
First published in 982 by The Whittington Press in Matrix 2 Republished in Type & Typography (Mark Batty, New York 2003)
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
Five Seasons Press www.fiveseasonspress.com
WHEN a poet comes to the front of the platform to commence a reading he or she may — if the reading is a proper occasion — have to work hard to win the audience’s full attention: drink may be flowing, friends may be chatting, the air may still be ringing from a musical interval just ended. But even if the reading is a more sober affair the audience may not be prepared for the transition from everyday to heightened language. So the poet takes a deep breath (inspiration) and then, in a measured breathing out of the poem’s words, puts a spell on the audience (spell derives from the Gothic spill meaning recital).
GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
In eighth century Britain the same preoccupied audience was alerted to a recital by a loud ‘HWÆT!’ from the minstrel. ‘HWÆT!’ meant ‘listen!’ (rather than the literal modern English translation ‘what!’) and survives as the first word on manuscript transcriptions of many Old English oral poems. Thus Beowulf opens with HWÆT, We gar-dena in geardagum, þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon! which translates as ‘Listen! (or, Here we go! Prepare for a long journey!) We spear-Danes heard of the glory of the people’s kings in former days, how the princes performed deeds of valour!’ ‘HWÆT!’ could have cut like a knife through the smoke-filled air of the mead-hall. This formulaic shout, like the performance of the contemporary reciter, is needed to prepare the audience, tune the senses. It is the aim of this essay to consider how the poem on the page can alert the reader in a similar manner, can shout ‘HWÆT!’ to ensure that the poem is read as a poem and not as prose cut into differing line-lengths.
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
Many contemporary poets feel that printed poetry fails because a book simply cannot shout ‘HWÆT!’. Basil Bunting maintains that ‘poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music on the stave is no more than instructions to the player’. As a printer and publisher of poetry I must face this challenge, just as I must face the less specific challenge of such commentators as Marshall McLuhan who believe that print has reduced human sensibility and imagination. McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy makes interesting reading for anyone who has just been holding a composing stick with reverence. ‘Alphabetic man’, he writes, ‘was disposed to desacralize his mode of being.’ And he summarises thus: ‘As the Gutenberg typography filled the world the human voice closed down.’ The assertion, then, is that poetry is essentially performed, shared by an audience for whom traditionally its sounds had magical powers, and so is drastically reduced when read silently by one person sitting in a corner with a book. Firstly, the poem is not a communal event when on the page, and secondly it has no vocal energy since the modern reader does not, like the medieval manuscript reader, mouth the words aloud. (McLuhan describes how the scribe’s close-fitting words, with almost no punctuation, forced the
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
reader to vocalise in order to make sense of them, while a printer supplies sufficient punctuation for the reader to follow a complicated sentence with eyes only. Speed-reading techniques take us even further from the sound and feel of the words.) I hope to show that committed small press poetry publishing (where the publisher is also letterpress printer and sometimes poet — and it’s bound to be committed as there’s no money in it) can meet the challenge represented by silent, passive, solitary reading. A new book from a lively poetry press is an event, a performance in which poet, printer, publisher and reader all participate and, if successful, it is a book that will be heard. The poem is said to lie dead on the page, but what kind of page is assumed? Those who argue exclusively for the oral tradition do not distinguish between the standard mechanical page and the page produced with typographic skill by a lively imagination in sympathy with the sound of the poem. Many a poetry book from the big publishing houses, produced economically and quickly, has a look of sluggish uniformity about it: a standard layout grid has been applied throughout and minimal point size, leading and margins combine to give
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
Five Seasons Press www.fiveseasonspress.com
a feeling of tightness which makes a cage of the paper and ink, a cage in which to trap the poem. The reader doubles up to enter the cage for a text that may prove so self-effacing that he or she gives up and turns on the television — even though the poem may have held that reader spell-bound when recited at a local festival. The successful page, on the other hand, releases the text to meet the reader. Generous margins (with no unnecessary folios or other clutter) and ample leading create space and light against which the words stand like branches against the sky or images in stained glass: light shines through rather than on to the poem so each word is given a threedimensional presence. Sharp printing (ideally letterpress) of a carefully chosen face at least 12 points in size — with careful word spacing acting as punctuation where the poem demands it — is of course essential for the achievement of this effect. Silence and speech, as light and shade, work in measure on the page, the poem breathes, the poet sings in the reader’s head.
GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
Handbooks of typography are quick to recommend this face or that, this spacing or that for the setting of poetry, all with the good intention of slowing down the reading pace while keeping things tight enough to prevent the breaking of long lines. And some poets have been quite specific about the correct face for their work or for poetry in general. My intention is not to add to or disagree with these rules and regulations, rather it is to distinguish between poetry printed according to the handbook or house style and poetry printed according to its own particular shape, sound and sense. Happily a good deal of poetry resists any layout grid imposed upon it and forces the designer-compositor to listen with care and set as appropriate. A poem that breathes with long and short lines, long and short sections, forces the compositor to set and space accordingly. In this regard the hand setting of poetry for letterpress printing will always be more of an event, more of a collaboration between poet and printer, than will any cold-type system used for photolithography. The letterpress hand compositor not only feels the weight of each word — and the weight of the surrounding space — in his stick, he also has to wrestle with all the different margins as he locks up his four or eight pages in
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
Five Seasons Press www.fiveseasonspress.com
the chase. We have already seen the importance of these margins and spaces, the light essential to the black of the text, and only in letterpress do these spaces have such a presence during composition. In a page containing a poem set to a wide measure but with many short lines, the spaces will demand more attention, and weigh more, than the type. And I do not think it fanciful to suggest that the reader of the finished book can sense this long and laborious involvement of the compositor: it is an important part of the event. In his poem Ode to Typography Pablo Neruda described this aspect of the printing-a-poem-event. This extract celebrates a linotype event but it is still worth quoting. It also serves to illustrate the way words work in ample space.
GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
There are notable exceptions to the letterpress-only rule. A sense of immediacy attends many of the duplicated poetry publications — among the best are those from Writers Forum and Galloping Dog — a sense that there is no time for the lengthy business of conventional printing and publishing, a feeling that the poem must be typed, duplicated and distributed now if it is not to lose its voice in the process. And photo-lithography gives great scope for inspired jumbledtogether paste-ups of text and illustration simulating the act of creation itself: a remarkable example is the Big Huge issue of New Departures, which is in every way an event. So the book need not be an expensive letterpress edition in order to keep the poems within it alive; this would hardly meet the challenge that poetry has a traditional function within the community. But letterpress — which is the ideal medium for so many reasons — need not be exclusively expensive. Small presses have always managed to price at least some of their letterpress books very modestly: sometimes only pamphlets but often paper or board bound books too, usually subsidised by the collector’s items. These presses invariably go bust, but new ones appear to take their place. The letterpress books produced in London during the late 1960s from such
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GLENN STOR H AUG
On Printing Poetry Aloud
poetry presses as Trigram, Cape Goliard and Fulcrum were astoundingly cheap. Michael McClure’s Hymns to St Geryon | Dark Brown from Cape Goliard and Lorine Niedecker’s North Central from Fulcrum (printed by Asa Benveniste of Trigram) are among scores of books that launch their poems into the air, each page forever alive with the effort and imagination and pleasure that led the poem through the stick and on to the Wharfedale. There is a great difference between reading such a book and reading a standardised volume in a standardised series from one of the big houses. Only the former is designed for language that is working full out, playing on all its sounds and senses and so demanding an audience especially attentive with eye and with ear. No distractions, no crampings, only leaping words against enough white to cut out everything else in the world. The first sound such books make as we turn over the blank pages from endpaper to title-page, blank pages blanking out all our daily preoccupations, is a sharp and beautifully printed ‘HWÆT!’
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But, when writing unfolds its roses, and the letter its essential gardening, when you read the old and the new words, the truths and the explorations, I beg a thought for the one who orders and raises them, for the one who sets type, for the linotypist and his lamp like a pilot over the waves of language ordering winds and foam, shadow and stars in the book: man and steel once more united against the nocturnal wing of mystery, sailing, perforating, composing.
OK
From Ode to Typography by Pablo Neruda. Translation by Carlos Lozano © Chicago Review by whom it was first published (Vol 17 no1, 1964).
