Book du jour - pocket folder

The "split sonnets" needed to be collected together somehow; I adapted Alisa Golden's instructions for the pocket folder so that it would accommodate four items -

 Two pieces of A4 paper (printed with journey lines, rubbed with graphite, and inked over) were available. I joined them with a a notched strip of the same paper, mimicking the fold-over used on the outside edges. The magic item in this design is the half-circle cut out just where the fold-up ends, to hold it in place and allow the booklet to be slipped in -

The pocket-folder idea looks to be very useful for what might otherwise be loose bits of paper - add a flap and tie (like this one) and  things get very tidy indeed.

To serif or not to serif?

The tiny skirmish with the delights of letterpress and typography has whetted my appetite to do more - but left me none the wiser about what font is suitable for what text. In my working life, fonts were already decided as a matter of house style, but for making individual books, the choice of font can cause all sorts of problems ... for instance, for the book of sonnets that I  rewrote as part of memorising them. Here are two possibilities - "modern" versus "ancient" -

Someone who looks at this rather incomprehensible book is owed an explanation of what's going on. The title page seems to be a good place for that - and given the sonnet's popularity "long ago", a title page that reflects the title pages of that era seems appropriate - hence the old-fashioned looking type. And yet - two of the ten poems were written in the 20th century, and my book was written in the 21st, so why not use a sans-serif font, which I understand is the modern way of doing titles ("display matter") even if text is in a serif font.

As it turns out the serif font I blindly chose from the drop-down list is Perpetua, which I now discover was designed in 1925. It's classified as a transitional type (it has high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs) so might be entirely approriate. But I'm still thinking about it....

Book du jour

Continuing with the project on memorisation of sonnets, I've printed out a six-page alphabetical list of the lines in the ten chosen sonnets, and carefully torn them into 140 strips. Or rather - four of the six pages were available for tearing up. My previous great idea for using the alphabetical list of lines didn't pan out, so I used a couple of the pages for doing some doodling one lazy day.

The current great idea involves a flat-bottomed colander with large holes. My parents either bought it in Quebec in the early 1950s, or may even have brought it to Canada from Germany. Now it's in England, doing unimaginable things.

The lines are stuck through the holes, starting with A in the middle and going outward as far as they can go. I haven't counted all the holes, but the outer ring has about 64 and there are 8 rings - so the 140 strips won't entirely fill it.

Long ago, when the British Library was still in the British Museum, one item on display was labelled as a "chronological scourge". It looked like a sort of whisk, with strips of vellum on which words were written. I've never been able to find out more about it, but it has stuck in my mind, and may lie behind the strips of paper with words printed on them. But the ends, instead of being bound onto a handle, are dangling through the holes of the colander -

The next stage in this project is to fill the glass with tinted water (ink? dye?) so that the liquid wicks up the strips. I'm interested to see (a) whether it works and (b) how long it takes. Some time-lapse photography would be interesting...

Further possible developments are to make the lower part of the strip longer, perhaps use paper that's more absorbent, and to replace the colander with a simple plate that has holes in it.

It seems to me that  the way the memorised lines are mixed up is a visual analogy for the way lines of poetry interweave in memory - and the darkness of the ink/dye, eradicating the words, shows how they disappear...

Fun with sonnets

About a month ago I started filling a notebook with "over-written" sonnets, spending an hour every day or two writing the 16 lines, starting the process of lodging the poem in my memory. They were taken from Poems on the Underground and so should be fairly well known: Donne, Michael Drayton, Keats, Edna St Vincent Millay, Milton, Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare (2), Wordsworth (2).

The notebook is now full - if ten poems can "fill" a book! - and the project has taken on new dimensions.

These strange pages may well look off-putting, unappealing, incomprehensible -- they need some explanation. Yet ... they should speak for themselves...

Looking at the punctuation (always a troublesome aspect in memorising poems) led to the "stitched sonnets", using a four-sided stitch for each syllable and a vertical line for a punctuation mark -

Stamping in the actual punctuation mark simply didn't work. To add interest to the collection, I'm using a different thread (from my wide-ranging thread collection) for each sonnet. Drayton, on the left, is variegated perle, Owen in the centre is variegated rayon, Millay on the right is also cotton. Currently I'm doing a bit of Milton in linen. They take about 3 hours each to stitch; though I've pulled them out to work on when travelling on bus and tube, it's best to be sat at my table (the one with under-table heating), listening to Radio 4, looking up occasionally to see birds in the tree outside.

Here's the Milton - that's the last line being stitched: "They also ..." What's missing from this "before and after" pic is the important intermediate step - the printout of the poem that I follow carefully -

Next step is to scan in the stitched version and print it out with the (typed) words on the back. These two attempts show that lines and words have to be carefully aligned both vertically and horizontally -

The one on the left was printed on typing paper and waxed; the one on the left, on onionskin and not waxed.  Once more are ready, they can be put together into a concertina book.

Another possibility for the over-writing (and help with memorisation) is line-by-line, using the words in each line. Since each line of a sonnet has 10 syllables [though some don't!], five can go each side of the gutter. I have some larger sheets of graph paper with faint squares, and aligned the type to fit the other side of the pages, aiming to make a series of two-sheet sections, each with the largely-illegible sonnet in the middle and a nicely legible version before and after it -

The size comes to 9.5cm wide and 21 cm tall. The mock-up shows a problem with the grain of the graph paper - the way it curls inward shows that it needs to run the other way -

This means rethinking the height of the page to fit the printed poem the other way round. Either the title or the author's name will have to go ... which could be a problem, or could be an opportunity ...

Questions I ask myself - how do sonnets fit in with my theme of everyday journeys? is this project interesting in any way to anyone else, or am I simply having an indulgent time, enjoying writing, memorising, and stitching (and problem solving)? is this worth continuing with, and if so, where's it going? how did I get started on this in the first place?

The starting point, or what I remember of it, is my concern with failing memory. The erasure of forgetting, and the unfelt absence of what has been forgotten; as well, the horrible realisation that a chunk of memory had disappeared for a while and the unwelcome thought that other chunks may have disappeared without trace. As we get older these memory-experiences are very real, yet even while we are younger, remembering and forgetting are things that happen to us every day - they are signposts on our everyday journeys. How better to exercise the memory-muscles than by learning a poem or two? (Even people with mild Alzheimer's are able to memorise poetry, I've been told ... and in trying to check this, have found there's an Alzheimer's poetry project. To be investigated...) Also I'm intrigued by how the process of memorisation works, on the practical and the psychological level.

The over-writing represents the jumble of possibilities as we try to reconstruct the memorised poem. In repeatedly writing a line, you become the poet, in a sense, as you become more familiar with the words. In trying to write the line from memory - and making a mistake - you become aware of why the poet chose the words that finally make up the poem. The length of the re-writing process, and the slowness of handwriting, give you time to consider these things.

Now I have 10 poems half-memorised. Trying to keep track of them as they accumulated day after day was confusing, but each time I revisit them they become more embedded and feel more like "friends". Stitching the poems without any distraction (talk on the radio) is most helpful - I wonder whether music would be a  distraction or helpful in some way.

Things to do to continue or finish this project:
1. add title page and  Index of First Lines to the book of overwritten sonnets; scan pages in, print out with typed version of poems on the back, make into concertina book
2. stitch enough sonnets to make a concertina book; scan them in, print out on appropriate, make into book (possibly by stitching pages together rather than gluing)
3. revisit the punctuation (somehow)
4. can the stitching be done in a different way - on cloth? with a different stitch?
5. think about why, or how, stitching fits with sonnet (or poetry in general)
6. if any of this is going to be waxed, find the right paper; if it's not going to be waxed, find the right paper
7. reconsider fonts for the (computer) printed version
8. write out the line-by-line version along with the printed version; make into a book (consider paper, cover, etc)
9. think/write about how memory "works" as an everyday journey

Desired outcome: several books that complement each other. (What will they be "about"? How can they be "read"? What would make someone want to look at, figure out, know more about them?)

Aspects of the sonnet

The sixth of the ten sonnets I'm writing/rewriting/memorising is Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen - in the book I'm using for the source of the sonnets, Poems on the Underground, there's a facsimile of the manuscript of the sonnet -

My method of memorising is to start with the last line and add one line after another, which means that the final line moves down the page, and is the only legible line. As a result the (better-remembered) ends of the poems are the bits that are slushing round in my brain, the rhythm of the lines giving them a sort of music.

One of the things that's hard to remember is the punctuation - the breathing in the poem - so I cut some punctuation marks out of erasers and used them to replicate that aspects of several of the sonnets -

The lines of the poem seem very short, written this way - how to make them more like the poem itself? This led to thinking about the rhythm of the poem - da dum, da dum etc (iambic pentameter) and how the words might have contributed to that - but when you look at the words, most are just one syllable, very plain!, rather than what you might expect of a "poetic" word... As the punctuation falls in the spaces between the words, I decided to indicate the words and spaces to show the role of punctuation in the lines.

After some hours of embroidery onto squared paper, here is "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part"  - beside it is the scanned version of the stitched page, which is intended to have printed on the reverse not the "wrong side" of the stitching, but the words of the poem -

Here is the reverse of the stitching - after a bit of practice, four-sided stitch settles into a regular rhythm of its own -

However I don't like the look of the punctuation marks on the stitched page, and will think about what to do next....

Book du jour - sonnet

The first in what is intended to be a book of well-known sonnets is "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part",written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631). It was published in 1619 and is reckoned to be the only great sonnet among the 150 that Drayton wrote. (But I didn't know that before rewriting it....)

The format of my page manifests a method of memorising poetry - start at the end and work forward. So I wrote the last line, then over it the penultimate and on the line below the last, then the last three... which makes the top line very dense, because it consists of the entire poem, layered so that the first line is on top (not that you'd notice!). I'm quite familiar with the end of the poem by now, but cannot confidently recite the entire thing.

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,

Nay I have done, you get no more of me,

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,

That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,

When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And innocence is closing up his eyes,

  Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,

  From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.