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Intro

This summer I began work on a publishing project called Rampage Party Press, which I’ll spend the next year developing as my thesis project to complete an MFA in Book Arts. Before this program, I received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I studied poetry. In so many ways, Rampage Party Press is the culmination of my last five years of study and work, and I’m very grateful for the time, funding, and support that the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Fellowship offered me this summer. I have long-term goals of starting my own publishing house, but for now, Rampage Party Press will be an online poetry magazine with accompanying handprinted broadsides (basically just a fancy word for poster).

Part One

Before I get down to business, I’m going to dedicate part one of this blog post to some of my more general/abstract thoughts on poetry. If you’d rather read about what I did this summer, you can skip to part two! Here I go!

*Ira Glass voice*

The word poetry comes from the Greek word “poiesis” – which means “to make”. Poetry began as an oral form – it was spoken or sung. We have no actual way of knowing how long humans have been making (speaking/singing/chanting) poetry, because there is no physical evidence for sound, duh. But perhaps, as poet Tracie Morris argues, poetry was the beginning of human utterance, perhaps poetry came first. I think this must be true, at least in the ways that language is inherently metaphor, inherently a suggestion of the actual thing, so to utter a word is to make a symbol.

We obviously still sometimes experience poetry as an oral art form – at poetry readings, in video performances, maybe when reading a poem out loud to ourselves, etc.! Poetry has always been an expansive art form, and now more than ever we have poets making amazing video work, digital poetry, performance poetry, and other multi-modal presentations of their poems. I can’t get into all that here, maybe a blog post/thesis/PhD project for someone else.

For this post, I’ll be focusing on the visual life of poetry, because today poetry is an art form typically represented in written language on a page (paper or screen). And when represented on a page, a poem shifts to a literary and visual art form, no longer necessarily an oral performance, but essentially the script for one.

“Form is never more than an extension of content.” –Charles Olson

It’s important to consider how got to this place of poetry on a page. It was through human advancements in technology, through humans making things! We learned how to make pigments out of minerals and rocks, we developed written language, we made papyrus scrolls then parchment then paper, ever advancing printing technologies, desktop word processors, the internet, and way more that I’m neglecting here. Poetry has changed alongside, through, and because of human technologies, and will continue to do so. I find this exciting and important!

A poem’s visual presence – through line breaks, stanza breaks, white space, type orientation, or lack thereof, etc. – has massive impact on the reader’s interpretation of the poem. And even if a particular poem isn’t so concerned with the visual, the vehicle that the poem is in matters too: the dimensions of the page, the typeface, physical vs. digital, the color of the paper/ink, all of these things impact the experience of the poem.

Putting a poem on a broadside that is meant to be in the world flat, hung on a wall or passed around, instead of bound up and closed up in a 5×8 inch paperback book –  draws attention to the poem’s visual and material life and expands our understanding of what a poem is and can do.

PART TWO

*End Ira Glass voice*

On the Rampage Party Press website, I will feature a new poet every two months or so, 4-6 poems each, one of which I will print as a limited-edition letterpress broadside. At this point, you might be wondering what handprinted broadsides have to do with digital publishing! I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a quick note about the online magazine.

Online magazine

Like I said in the intro, I might print physical copies of the magazine, but I’ve known since the beginning that I want a web presence. A website can reach much broader readership than small editions of broadsides or small editions of physical magazines. Building the website has been the most intimidating part of this summer for me. I knew that the website needed to be carefully designed to handle the formal demands of poetry. Too often, I read poems in an online magazine, and if I’m on my phone or my web browser is small, whatever, the lines of the poem get cut in the wrong spots, stanza breaks become less clear – the whole visual of the poem gets distorted. This doesn’t matter if you’re reading a news article or something, but as I’ve already completely convinced you guys, poetry is a visual art form – so this is like the equivalent of a movie being 10% blurry or an abstract painting being displayed sideways. I’m still in the very beginning stages of laying out the website, so I’m not ready to show images here, but I am excited to keep working on it.

Letterpress broadsides

Back to the broadsides and how they are some sort of digital publishing! I handprint on a Vandercook SP15, here’s my favorite one at North Hall:

You can read more about Vandercook printing presses here.

I typically start by designing a broadside in InDesign, in which I digitally typeset the poem. For this post, I’ll use my latest completed print as an example. This is the digital mockup of my poem, “Make Me Wait”.

The digital file is then turned into a film negative, which is placed on a photopolymer plate, and through a process of heat and light exposure, we get a photopolymer printing plate, the type is raised and everything else has melted away. Sometimes I make my own photopolymer plates, we have an exposure unit at North Hall, but this summer I had them made by the great folks at Boxcar Press. Here is one of the photopolymer plates I used for “Make Me Wait”:

Now we have a flexible plastic plate that I can use on the Vandercook! The yellow part is the text, backwards here, and is raised higher than the blue plastic, so that the type shows up when inked and impressed on paper. Here’s the finished product:

I do handset metal type sometimes, but designing digitally and using photopolymer plates saves me a lot of time (and grief), and makes it much easier to print future editions without having to reset the text letter by letter. Photopolymer also allows me to use typefaces that I might not have access to in metal, to be super particular about size, to incorporate handwriting, and long-term: to not have to store metal type if I end up having my own press one day.

For “Make Me Wait”, I wanted to use photopolymer instead of metal type because I wanted to use Iowan Old Style for the font, because that’s the font I used in my book Green for Luck (EastOver Press, 2024). So this broadside uses the same font at the same size in the same dimensions as my book! Iowan Old Style was created by John Downer, who lives here in Iowa City, and as far as I know it has never been cast in metal.

A lot of my work could simply be done with a digital printer, which is probably what I’ll have to switch to once I lose access to the North Hall studios, but there are a lot of reasons to handprint. I can’t run a lot of handmade papers through a digital printer. On a Vandercook, I can handprint on paper with any dimensions – I save all the scraps I can and print greeting cards, zines, etc. In some ways…it’s more cost effective…maybe? And if for no other reason: I love the impression in the paper, it’s very glamorous to me.

For “Make Me Wait”, I wanted to handprint rather than digital print for a few reasons. This is a poem about letterpress, so it made sense conceptually to actually letterpress it. I also wanted to use a reduction linoleum process for the image, also for conceptual reasons, to play with the notion of time and effort, of repeated but changed image.

Lastly, of course I love the process. I don’t think anyone does letterpress printing if they don’t love the process: the ability to play with the language of a particular poem as literal material, metal or plate, to work with the machine as a collaborator, to not know exactly how it’s going to turn out, to learn as I go.

Other design thoughts that went into “Make Me Wait”:

• I initially wanted to use newsprint, as this is what poetry broadsides would historically be printed on. But this broadside was printed for the Fine Press Association Keepsake Print Exchange, which has requirements on paper thickness, and newsprint was too thin. So I ended up going with a thin-ish paper I had laying around that is a similar color to newsprint. I thrifted this paper from Crowded Closet in Iowa City.
• I also initially wanted to print in red and black for the type, because these are the two colors that printers have historically printed in, all the way back to Egyptian papyri! I did use red for the title, but straight black ended up being too dense, and showed through to the other side, so I ended up using gray for the poem.
• The repeated image was made using a reduction linoleum process, and is a discombobulated traffic light (make me wait!). After printing the gray image on the front of the print, I carved away most of the block, leaving just one circle, that I re-printed in yellow on the inside of the print.
• The fold is another play with time, pause, the form being an extension of the content. Those few seconds of a reader unfolding the print to be able to read the poem is just about that: making them wait.

CONCLUSION

So as I’ve established, and completely convinced you, poems obviously don’t exist only orally, but they also don’t have to be 12 point times new roman on a computer screen and then printed in black ink on white paper bound in a 5×8 inch book – they can and should be so much more than that!

This is my Rampage Party plan for now. I’m open to and prepared for it to change as I keep chugging, as it has changed over the last eight weeks during this fellowship!

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you’ll check back in with Rampage Party Press soon…website incoming. 

Connie Chen’s final presentation and findings from the summer, Tampons of Tauromachy can be found on video here.

The following are audio recordings in both Spanish and English produced by María G. Marroquín Perez:

Recording in Spanish:

Recording in English:

Hi, good afternoon! My name is Aileen Tierney and I’m an English PhD student going into my third year at the University of Iowa. As a Digital Studio Summer Fellow, I spent my summer learning how to code in Python in addition to reading relevant subjects in my field of study (contemporary literature) such as electronic literature, digital poetry, and how to use code as pedagogy and art rather than being a solely goal oriented tool.

I found this time during the summer really useful, since I’m in a pretty pivotal stage of my program where I’m beginning to move into independent study. Developing skills such as self-motivation and time management is especially important as I’m transitioning from being in a classroom setting with readings and expectations already selected for me, to a more self-directed pace as I begin to work towards my dissertation. There definitely pros and cons to both stages, since the responsibility of setting and following through with your own goals is… pretty hard to do, but over the summer I’ve become more and more excited about the prospect of diving solely into my research interests.

My goal for the fellowship differed from a lot of my peers’ goals since I was concentrating more on skill acquisition rather than working on a tangible project. I completed an Introduction to Python course on a great website called Udacity, which was completely free, and had resources such as Youtube videos walking through a concept and a coding area where you can try out practice problems and see whether the code works or not. I’d really advocate this as a resource if anyone’s interested in learning a coding language, since it was completely asynchronous and pretty easy to use.

Since I spent a good amount of my time merely trying to wrap my head around what is going on in a block of code, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a script that I wrote myself. This is one of the final practice problems in the course that I mentioned, and it’s basically a generator that takes an input, someone’s first and last name, and spits out a type of flower that also begins with your first name’s initial.  Revolutionary, I know. But I’m pretty proud of it, since it finally works. I actually was having a weird issue with it this week since it wasn’t working in my terminal for some reason, and my studio contact Nikki was really trying to help me with it and we couldn’t find out what was going on. If I were teaching a class or something I’d be like “okay let’s try and troubleshoot why this isn’t working” and heckle my students into finding the problem. But last night my system updated or something and it miraculously worked, which further confirmed my belief that sometimes walking away from something for the night or a few days, taking a lap, and coming back to it is a great and productive practice.

Going forward, I’d like to continue learning more advanced skills in Python. Which is funny because when I got to the end of the course, it basically was like “You know that really frustrating math stuff we made you do like figuring out how to code a factorial? Actually, you can just download these library packages that just does it for you.”  But you have to know what to do in the first place. I’m anticipating using Python for textual analysis and possibly more creative stuff like interactive poetry generators. As I wrap up, I’d like to thank my studio contact Nikki White for her help during the summer, the Graduate College, as well as our course instructor Stephanie Blalock for the hard work and attention she’s given to everyone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Digital Studio in the future! Thank you for your time.

In the morning I go out to the garden and water the plants. I pick up some of the guavas that have fallen from the tree. This is my routine when I visit my parents in the winter. The guavas are yellow and pink, the size of a lime. I bring one of them to my nose and fill my lungs. “Scatter the used coffee beans,” my mom says. “It’s good for the soil.” My mom bought the guava tree when I was a child, maybe twelve or thirteen. I remember when we planted it. The stalk was narrow and would bend with the wind. The highest branch reached the beginning of my sternum.

              Now the tree stands in the middle of the yard, its crown offering shade in the clear-sky winter day of Mexico City. Over the course of my life I have seen some of the trees on my street become giants. Others have become ill and had to be felled. Global warming, pollution and pests are creating too much stress for them. We humans are often too busy to pay attention to trees. We have our worries: making a living, success and recognition, finding a partner who will understand us. But the truth is that there is no such thing as humans and nature. There is no separation.

              In an interview in 2018, the novelist Richard Powers said to me:

              “There is no separate and exceptional thing called “humanity,” and no independent entity called “nature.” All things are reciprocally bound together

              There are more than 5.2 million street trees in New York City. How many people in the city realize that the quality of their air and water depends on these plants?”

              When I came to Iowa City in August of 2023, I was stunned by the size of some of the trees on campus. I wanted to know more about the species, how old they were and what kind of challenges they had circumvented to still be alive today.

              On my first walk near the Old Capitol building, I noticed young people lying on the grass, shirtless, others playing volleyball or throwing a frisbee. I saw a woman sitting under the shade of a towering tree reading a book. That tree, now I know, is a Black Walnut. And that knowledge was a gift from someone I met in the fall of last year. In October I found out that the sciences library at the university was hosting a talk about trees. It was by chance that I stumbled upon the info poster. That day I met the person who made possible the documentary I’ve been on working on this summer: the arborist Andrew Dahl.

              The Black Walnut standing a few feet away from the Old Capitol is a State Champion, which means it’s the biggest tree of its kind in Iowa. The Champion label refers to a system that ranks the biggest trees in each state. Thanks to Dahl I’ve learned that age and size are not necessarily related. “There are very old trees that are not necessarily that big,” he said. I’ve learned about the White Oak tree, which currently stands south of the nursing building. With an estimated age of 300 years, it will unfortunately be felled in the next months because it has died. Too much stress caused by pollution and long stretches of time without water. Climate change has exacerbated the conditions.

              One of the important aspects of this project has been to document how global warming is impacting the ecosystems, in particular the way trees adapt to change in the environment. Thought trees can be resilient, the older they get, the more fragile they become. The University has implemented measures to protect some of its trees. The Black Walnut, which was once struck by a lightning, has now a system with rods and wiring that reduces the risk of severe damage by lighting strike. An American Elm, former state champion, also standing on the Pentacrest, receives injections of a fungicide to reduce the risk of Dutch elm disease, a fungal infection that has caused the death of several millions of trees since its introduction in the US in the 1930s.

              I have also developed other skills, technical and non-technical. I have been able to get better acquainted with both Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition; I have used professional video and audio recorders. When an unexpected technical challenge arose, I realized how important it is to be connected to other people and departments on campus. Having a wide network of resources is as crucial – if not more – than having a good idea and the necessary skills set to bring it to fruition.

              This summer I spent a lot of time with Andy learning about trees, what they do for us, what we can do to protect them. With the camera I’ve kept a record of what I saw on those trips with him around campus. I hope this documentary serves as an archive for future generations. How trees looked in 2024.

“As a PhD candidate in Religious Studies, I am interested in Late Antique Christian warrior saints or military martyrs, how they emerged and how their cults spread throughout Mediterranean. In this summer project, I aimed to create a geo-spatial map based on ancient Christian sources. To prepare the map, I started by scanning primary sources and collecting data in the original languages. The sources include Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, to visualize the origins of the first martyrdom culture in Christianity, specifically military martyrs. While Christian martyrdom has been extensively studied, military martyrdom has not received significant academic attention. So, I believed that discovering this data from the early Christian sources, many of which remain untranslated into English, and visualizing it through mapping would significantly contribute to the field.

In this project, I wanted to underline that military martyrs should be separated from general martyrs and evaluated in a separate category. I aim to show its importance by reinforcing it visually. Basically, what I have done and will do is to determine the name of the martyr, in which source his name was first mentioned, where he was martyred, and where his cult belief spread later, and transfer all this information onto the map.

Of course, I encountered many challenges while collecting the data in Google Spreadsheet. Scanning the literature and finding the data I wanted, takes a lot of time. This is understandable. Because I am scanning thru manuscripts and in their original languages. But the more interesting point is that since I was examining the regions in the ancient world, I had a hard time finding the current equivalents of some locations. As can be seen, I was unable to determine the current locations corresponding to the names mentioned in the texts. Sometimes, since there were multiple different locations with the same name, I had difficulty figuring out which specific location the text was referring to, or the name of the region, city or town has changed constantly throughout history, and we do not have sufficient records.

The map to which Studio has contributed more is based the database in this spreadsheet. I would like to mention that, in addition to visualizing the data thru map, I also established the technical and engineering foundation for this project over the summer. This map, to which I will make more additions, can now show all locations together and at the same time present the user with details about each location and name by selecting them one by one.

It is a big step for me to bring this map, which I will still enrich with many additions, to this stage in a short time. I would like to thank Graduate College, Studio team, and classmates who made this possible.”

To whom does history belong: to those who live it or to those who record it?

For too long, we have accepted that history is told from hegemonic academic institutions, dominated by wealthy Caucasian individuals, who say  who has access to historical knowledge.

As the popular saying goes, “History is written by the victors,” or rather, the oppressors.

But what happens with the voices that are not heard? For example, the stories of the artisans who keep alive a rich cultural tradition with their hands and creativity.

 “Herencia means Heritage” is a project that uses community engaged research and creative storytelling to highlight the crucial role of the artisans of traditional Talavera pottery in Mexico.

This project does not focus on materials, institutions or technical regulations that, although they seem to protect the cultural legacy, have served as tools of monopolization.

These regulations exclude the main characters: the artisans, preventing them from creating their own workshops, since the certification of origin is reserved for those who can pay it.

“Herencia means Heritage” aims to break down these barriers and return the spotlight to those who deserve it. Through creative research, I am seeking to bring light to the experiences, challenges and triumphs of Talavera artisans, recognizing the priceless value of their work.

At the end of the day, history should belong to those who live it. Today, we want to rewrite that history together, giving voice to the artisans who keep the tradition of Talavera ceramics alive. It’s time to listen, learn and value the stories that really matter.

(In Farsi:) برای یک زندگی معمولی. For an ordinary life.

In September 2022, when Iranians started a series of street demonstrations, everyone knew that a new social movement was taking shape. Many asked what this movement was all about; and many truly answered: abolishing a system of male-dominant gender relations. However, social movements not only criticize the status quo but also create and are moved by an image of society and life. So, I asked myself: What is the collective imagination that this movement aspires to and is being fueled by?

Looking for the answer to this question, I listened to almost every piece of music and watched almost every video that would come out over the course of the movement. “For” (or “Baraye” in Farsi) was a song that was released shortly after the start of the movement and soon drew special attention both domestically and internationally. Its lyrics were a selection of all the tweets in which users had used the hashtag “for” to say what the movement was for. The song begins with these phrases: “For dancing in the alley; for the fear at the time of kissing; for my sisters, yours, ours; for changing the rotten minds; for the shame of pennilessness; for the longing for an ordinary life…” The idea of “ordinary life” was so powerful that it immediately drew my attention to it. Was it the collective imagination behind the movement that I was looking for? And even before that, what is an ordinary life in the first place? How do people think about it? And maybe more importantly, do they think about it the same way?

I knew that to find good answers to these questions, there was nothing better to analyze other than the content people naturally create on social media. I started looking at tweets containing the phrase ordinary life, but this would make a huge body of tweets. I believe a deep engagement with the data comes from spending a lot of time reading through the texts and taking notes over and over again, but I also became interested in computational text analysis methods that let the machine find patterns in the data. These patterns might be occasionally insightful and can make the researcher think of patterns they would not have thought of otherwise. I knew that I especially needed to learn about the logic of these methods as a solely technical understanding of them would lead to not strongly supported conclusions or at best confusion.

During my time in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio Summer Fellowship, I tried to learn about computational text analysis methods, more specifically, a method called topic modeling, and acquire some of the coding skills necessary for this kind of analysis. Topic modeling is an example of unsupervised analysis that goes over a series of documents (in my case, the interviews or the tweets) and outputs a series of word lists (i.e. topics) determining how much of each topic, each document contains. So far, I have read different articles about the topic modeling approach to understand its logic and process and have finished an introductory course in Python. I will also continue my project and start coding a topic modeling program to analyze my interview transcriptions, after this fellowship.

Topic modeling can be extremely insightful as it can show us what the notion of “ordinary life” is associated with, and more importantly, how convergent or divergent the perceptions about it are. This is extremely crucial as it provides empirical evidence for the debate about whether the movement is being driven by a unified collective imagination or follows only some of the middle-class aspirations.