I learned from Billy Collins from this talk on Walt Whitman that Whitman designed some of the type for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, self published, printed and bound by Whitman himself.
“How poetry freed type” apparently, was 2017 a conference that explored “the ways in which Walt Whitman’s poetry and its related technologies, such as the printing press, shaped graphic design in America”.
“Letterpress technology’s rapid advances with the invention of higher-speed presses and typecasting machines gave poets cheaper access to do their own printing. This allowed avantgarde experimentation (especially the like of Parisian poet Apollinaire, and American humanists like Walt Whitman and Emerson) with typography and an ability to put pressure on word as image (rather than as music, as poetry functioned prior). by Aine Carr
Whitman keeps inspiring new generations of publishers and illustrators – here is an example: a 2014 publication of Whitman’s “Song of Myself, fully illustrated by Allen Crawford.
Tammy Garcia runs this great website about art journaling. If you don’t know how to get started or want to get inspired, go to Daisy Yellow. Tammy provides tons of ideas, tutorials and prompts. Here are two articles Art Journaling for Kids|Tweens|Teens and Art Journaling 101
A collage a day keeps the apple at bay. I am a big fan of Martin O’Neills collage work. Here is his website: http://cutitout.co.uk/ He did an illustration series for the Guardian a few years ago, and I bought every issue just for the illustrations.
Keith Bates – Rubber Stamp Mail Art. Keith Bates is a personal hero of mine. Not only is he a mail artist, but he makes beautiful fonts, including free ones, which I have been using. Check out the amazing type shop: http://www.k-type.com/
This book published by Tara Books combines so many things I am fond of such as 1) Indian tribal painting, 2) children’s books, 3) pictograms, 4) screen printing – all wrapped into one. So I just added a new category to my blog: a wish list!
Tara is an Indian publisher producing beautiful handmade books. Watch the hand production process of this book here:
“The Shufflebook … was sold at Museum of Modern Art’s store as a sort of (unbound) children’s book. The reader/storyteller is instructed to deal the cards that featured large illustrations and either a verb phrase (e.g., “slipped,” “got kissed”) or a noun phrase (e.g., “and my uncle”, “and 5 cows”). … The total number of the cards is 104.
The opening and closing sentence of the text on one special card says: “This is an anything book.” The text on the cover states: “There are over a million stories in this box. Shuffle the pages, lay them down and make your own story happen.” The text segments are written to combine into one very long (possibly run-on) sentence or several sentences. There is no text with capital letters and no punctuation. There are also 2 special pages with empty lines where the “storyteller” can write additional text …”
This is such a sweet project from a primary school in Germany. The children used a poem about winter by Josef Guggenmos as inspiration. A copy of the poem was glued onto a piece of paper and painted over with water colours. The poem was partially covered with opaque white. It gives the impression of snow softly covering the poem. The children only left those words and sentences they liked in particular. This reminds me of Austin Kleon’s blackout poems, these, in contrast are whiteout poems. You can see the entire series here: “Ich male mir den Winter”
A house of dust
on open ground
lit by natural light
inhabited by friends and enemies
A house of paper
among high mountains
using natural light
inhabited by fishermen and families
A house of leaves
by a river
using candles
inhabited by people speaking many languages wearing little or no clothes
…
Here are some stanzas of a poem I came across when looking for poetry which may inspire young children to write. The simple structure of the stanzas could be used as a model, offering endless possibilities for new poems.
Then, to my surprise I realized that this may well be the first computer-generated poem. Artist Alison Knowles (b.1933) and James Tenney used programming language and word lists for a poetry project in 1967, creating a poem of the following structure:
a house of (list material) (list location) (list light source) (list inhabitants)
in which combinations of the variables were randomly generated.
Alison Knowles’s A House of Dust is an early example of computerized poetry that plays on the unlimited possibilities of the random juxtapositions of words. To create this work, Knowles produced four word lists that were then translated into a computer language and organized into quatrains according to a random matrix. Each of the four lists contains terms that describe the attributes of a house: its materials, location, lighting, and inhabitants. The computer program imposed a nonrational ordering of subjects and ideas, generating unexpectedly humorous phrasing and imagery, such as “A house of dust, in a hot climate, using all available lighting, inhabited by all races of men represented, wearing predominantly red clothing,” or “A house of broken dishes, on the sea, using natural light, inhabited by vegetarians.”
Printed on perforated tractor-feed paper common to dot matrix printers of the time, Knowles printed out numerous pages of these phrases in the form of a long scroll. She then created a book of sorts by tearing off a block of approximately twenty pages at a time, folding it in the manner of an accordion, and placing it in a plastic pouch. Hundreds of variations of houses are possible, as every version of the poem begins and ends with a different set of quatrains. Knowles’s collaboration with the computer highlights the underlying arbitrariness of language, demonstrating how words acquire different meanings through structural relationships and shifting contexts.
A couple of years ago I found some of this green and white perforated paper with some kind of “computer art” among my dad’s things. It gave me such a weird flashback. All over a sudden, I was transported back to those days when computers and photocopiers were new and people started experimenting with their affordances. Remember the many photocopied hands and faces or other stuff, like … cats? I am digressing. Way back then, the computer paper stood for everything that was ugly, in my eyes. I like the poem and so I am reconciled with the computer paper. Now its retro.
I know, there are too many babies and kittens featured on the internet. But I cannot help posting it, it is just so funny and interesting at the same time, watching those two little people having a conversation. A favourite YouTube video, together with classic “Charlie bit my finger”.
The quote is by Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”
word and image 
