Arran Jumper
January 30, 2011This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Some extracts from the pamphlet that I made at Nancy Campbell‘s workshop yesterday at the Poetry School.
As well as giving us something tangible to take home, working on our poems in this way really made us think about page layout in a different way. The poem I chose had been set out in a very particular way, which took me a long time to derive, but in transforming it from a 2 stanza, 14 line poem to an 8-page pamphlet, ideas of space and time were elongated in some places and foreshortened in others.
On one of the handouts Nancy gave us a quote from the artist-bookbinder Keith Smith:
Bookbinding at its ultimate realization is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space. It is not sewing but structure that ties together pages of a book. Binding must begin with the concept of text and / or pictures.
This hints at why it works so well for poetry and appeals to poets – for what is a poem if not a similar attempt to order time and space on an emotional scale?
[...] You can see images of Anne Welsh’s beautiful setting of her poem ‘Arran Jumper’ over at her blog Library Marginalia. [...]
[...] with the edges of poetry and art – something I’ve been inspired to investigate since taking Nancy Campbell’s Book Arts workshop at the Poetry [...]