Mary Ellen Solt (1920\u20132007) 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.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately Solt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This summer I will be working to re-typeset a selection of Solt\u2019s 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\u2019s work. In her letters and essays, Solt makes it clear that she sees the typographer as a creative collaborator who \u201cperforms\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
I will also be researching Solt\u2019s life and work in two local archives\u2014the University of Iowa\u2019s own Sackner Archive, and the Solt papers at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Drawing on the poet\u2019s letters, essays, and notes, as well as on my experience of attempting to perform her work anew, I\u2019ll be writing an essay that introduces Solt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mary Ellen Solt (1920\u20132007) 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 flowerContinue reading “Flowers in Concrete”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":7363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"syndication":[21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7410,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409\/revisions\/7410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7409"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=7409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}