Dunya Mikhail poem "Pronouns"

March 4, 2023

Printed : March 3, 2023
Edition : 50
Paper : French Paper 100# Kraft Speckletone
Production : printed from photopolymer & rope
Runs : 4 (poetry text, leaves, rope, copyright / credit text)

Amid recent politically charged discussions of pronouns, this was a great idea for a broadside.

The broadsides were printed for Casey Smith in support of the 2023 Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. to be given out as an attendee gift at a talk related to Dunya Mikhail’s poetry at a reading at the Pyramid Arts Center on Saturday, March 4.

The printing timing was pretty tight, given that we had trouble getting the printing plates and had to reorder and have them resent. The first set of prints was lost in transit by UPS. Then after an offer from Boxcar Press to remake and resend the plates, both sets arrived the day before the talk. As a result, we had only one day to print the job.

A couple of experimenting & printing moments in the project are worth mentioning.

• The leaves were taken from a poster we had done for the Winterthur Museum & Library for one of their Terrific Tuesday sessions. These sessions are for kids aged 3 to 10; this was Fantastic Flora. We brought Beech leaves that the kids printed. We kept a couple of samples and scanned one to create the photopolymer leaf.

• The intention was to start printing the leaves as a single, flat color. Jill suggested we hand roll them to give a sense of degradation. That resulted in much more visually interesting leaves.

• We initially bought rope from Home Depot that was too soft. When printed, it flattened out too much and didn’t give the idea of rope almost at all. We returned to Home Depot and bought the same rope we had used for a piece we had done while taking sailing classes for Delaware’s tall ship, the Kalmar Nickel.

• The hardest part of the project was trying to match the vertical spacing for the English and Arabic lines. We received the Arabic as a .pdf file. One problem with the file was that the black was a CMYK black and needed to be 100% black. It took a couple of hours to figure out how to change the color in Illustrator, even though we had done that hundreds of times. Adjusting the line spacing so the two poems would match exactly was a second problem.

• The fact that Arabic reads right-to-left, and English reads left-to-right. allowed us to gently weave the two blocks of type together, which was fun to position logically.