Mary Ellen Solt (1920–2007) was an avant-garde poet from Gilmore City, Iowa. She worked in the concrete style: many of her poems are shaped as flowers or plants. For Solt, though, the flower was not just a thing of beauty: writing amid the cultural upheaval of the sixties and seventies, she found in the flower a complex symbol of political and social struggle, a metaphor for change, and an emblem of hope.

Unfortunately Solt’s poems have largely been forgotten, and today there are no editions of her work in print. The reasons for this are complex. Her legacy has no doubt been shaped by literary historical processes that are systemically misogynistic. But presenting Solt’s work is also a serious creative and technical challenge: many of her poems exist in multiple versions, some hand-drawn by the poet herself and others typeset by a collaborator. An anthology of her poems therefore runs the risk of becoming a hodgepodge, an assortment of scans and photographs rather than a coherent body of work.

This summer I will be working to re-typeset a selection of Solt’s poems, which will be realised as a letterpressed portfolio of prints later in the year. These new versions will not be definitive, however. Rather, they will represent one possible vision of Solt’s work. In her letters and essays, Solt makes it clear that she sees the typographer as a creative collaborator who “performs” her poems, much as a pianist performs the work of a composer. My performances of Solt, played on a keyboard rather than a piano, will bring the poems back together under one roof, but also open the door for others to perform them differently in the future.

I will also be researching Solt’s life and work in two local archives—the University of Iowa’s own Sackner Archive, and the Solt papers at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Drawing on the poet’s letters, essays, and notes, as well as on my experience of attempting to perform her work anew, I’ll be writing an essay that introduces Solt’s poems and draws attention to the overlooked collaborative relationship between poet and typographer more generally. This essay will be realised as a hand-printed booklet accompanying the poem-prints.