#copper canyon press

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday! 

Today we’re taking a deep dive into Songs for Gaia, a slim edition of poetry by Gary Snyder (b. 1930). This understated, beautifully-crafted letterpress volume was printed in 1979 for Kah Tai Alliance at Copper Canyon in Port Townsend, WA, a fine press dedicated solely to poetry since its founding in 1972, and was handbound by poet and bookbinder Samuel Green. It features woodblock illustrations by poet and printmaker Michael Corr (b. 1940), who learned his craft while living in Kyoto from block printer and illustrator Takeji Asano (1900-1999). Asano was a notable figure in Japan’s Sōsaku-hanga woodblock printing movement. The book is quarter bound in cloth with a cover marbled in a finely executed combed feather pattern, a touch that lends a hint of psychedelia to its otherwise traditional aesthetics. It was released in a limited edition of 300 copies.   

Snyder, who is popularly known for his time amongst and spiritualist influence on the Beat poets and the counterculture of their generation (along with Kerouac’s portrayal of him as Japhy Ryder in the 1958 novel The Dharma Bums) spent 13 years in Japan (1956-1968) studying Zen Buddhism, forestry, and ecology. A scholar of Asian languages versed in cultural anthropology, he also studied calligraphy with accomplished calligrapher and seal carver Charles Leong during his time at Reed College. Snyder’s calligraphic signature graces the half-title page of this edition.  

This modest yet potent edition of Songs for Gaia is a fitting form for the work of a poet whom writer Bob Steuding once characterized as cultivating an “accessible” style and “a new kind of poetry that is direct, concrete, non-Romantic and ecological.” As Snyder wrote of his own work in A Controversy of Poets, “I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”  

View more Fine Press Friday posts

View more woodblock illustration posts

View more marbling posts (shout out to Alice, our resident marbling expert!)

-Ana, Special Collections Graduate Fieldworker

#Fine Press Friday #fine press fridays #marbling #Gary Snyder #poetry #Copper Canyon Press #Songs for Gaia #Samuel Green #Michael Corr #woodblock illustration #woodblock #letterpress #fine press #feather pattern marbling #UWM Special Collections #handbound book #hand binding #Ana

[ange-fou]

Richard Siken (via Instagram), July 10th 2023.

#poetry #Richard Siken #poets #bookblr #books #bookstagram #I Do Know Some Things #Copper Canyon Press

[headlightsforever]

And my mother's final gasp as well- as if just then she had to witness it again: her only daughter on her way to the back door, bearing a bouquet made of all the flowers in the neighbor's garden. And how her final breath sounded just like that screen door, opening fast.

Laura Kasischke, “The Breath” from What Now? New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2017

#laura kasischke #poetry #poem #literature #lit #writing #poet #quote #quotes #poets #poems #death #copper canyon press

[agirlnamedbone]

—Jim Harrison (In Search of Small Gods, 2010)

#jim harrison #poetry #poem #op #copper canyon press #literature

[lost-andfound]

coming back on this account to say i met Richard Siken last night and i was incredibly awkward but he was very nice about it <3 i love him and his work so much and I'm so glad he's back on the writing scene (he has a new book coming out in the future with copper canyon!!)

#Richard Siken #i don't usually cry but i did get choked up #and he signed my books! #never thought I'd get this opportunity it was lovely #awp23 #copper canyon press

[redshift-13]

Forthcoming October 2023 Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is home to fifty-seven author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their “personal best.” The anthology offers a provocative and surprising range of responses in which readers will find poetic context for the life of a poem and revelatory insight into the unique, personal experiences that shape the writing process itself. Including works from a wide variety of voices both new and well-established, Personal Best is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today. The anthology gives readers—both longtime fans of poetry and those just discovering its possibilities—an intimate view of the heart and spirit that make poetry one of our most quintessentially human forms of expression.

#copper canyon press #poetry #forthcoming books

[poetsandwriters]

Olena Kalytiak Davis, author of Late Summer Ode (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), in Ten Questions.

#Olena Kalytiak Davis #Late Summer Ode #Writing #Poetry #Fiction #Inspiration #Quote #Writer's Block #Writer's Life #Copper Canyon Press

[sunfish-swimming]

Victoria Chang

#poetry #victoria chang #the trees witness everything #copper canyon press

[idiosyncreant]

Border Boy by Alberto Rios

I grew up on the border and though I left I have brought it with me wherever I've gone. Its line guides me, this long, winding thread of memory. The border wasn't as big as they say— It fit neatly behind my eyes and between my ears— It guides me still, I know, but it is not a compass. It is not a place out there but a place in here. I catch on its barbed wire in both places. It is a line I step over and a ledge I duck under. I have looked underneath its skirts, and it has caught me— Many times. We're old friends and we play the game well. When someone says border, now, or frontera, or the line. La línea, or the fence, or whatever else We name the edge and the end of things— I hear something missing in the words, The what it all used to be. Its name does not include its childhood. I grew up liking the border and its great scar, Its drama always good for a story the way scars always are. A scar is the place where the hurting used to be. A scar the heroic signature of the healed. The border is not a scar. Instead, it is something we keep picking at, Something that has no name. The border I knew was something with a history. But this thing now, it is a stranger even to itself.

Alberto Rios, "Border Boy" from Not go away is my name.  Copyright © 2020 by Alberto Rios.  Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Not go away is my name (2020)

#poetry #Border Boy #Alberto Rios #No go away is my name #poem #Copper Canyon Press

[tracydimond]

From IMAGINARY VESSELS by Paisley Rekdal

#copper canyon press #poetry #paisley rekdal

[garadinervi]

Mahmoud Darwish (محمود درويش), To Our Land [from 'Don’t Apologize for What You've Done' (2003)], in The Butterfly's Burden, Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2007, p. 203

To Our Land To our land, and it is the one near the word of god, a ceiling of clouds To our land, and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns, the map of absence To our land, and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed, a heavenly horizon … and a hidden chasm To our land, and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings, holy books … and an identity wound To our land, and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, the ambush of a new past To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it … As for us, inside, we suffocate more!

#graphic design #poetry #book #mahmud darwish #mahmoud darwish #fady joudah #copper canyon press #1990s #2000s

[peonybookblog]

happy fifty birthday to copper canyon press!!

#poetry #copper canyon press #small press

[joanbpoet]

"She has no words for how it feels to lose her mother, and yet, here are all the careful words in this book." I reflect on Victoria Chang's obituary poem for "Affection."

#poem #poetry #blog #reflection #victoria chang #OBIT #Copper Canyon Press #joan biddle

[manwalksintobar]

Father  // Ted Kooser

Today you would be ninety-seven if you had lived, and we would all be miserable, you and your children, driving from clinic to clinic, an ancient fearful hypochondriac and his fretful son and daughter, asking directions, trying to read the complicated, fading map of cures. But with your dignity intact you have been gone for twenty years, and I am glad for all of us, although I miss you every day—the heartbeat under your necktie, the hand cupped on the back of my neck, Old Spice in the air, your voice delighted with stories. On this day each year you loved to relate that the moment of your birth your mother glanced out the window and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today lilacs are blooming in side yards all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

#poetry #Ted Kooser #fathers & sons #grief #mourning #lilacs #elegy #birthdays #Copper Canyon Press #Iowa

[agirlnamedbone]

—Jim Harrison (The Shape of the Journey, 2000)

#poetry #poem #op #jim harrison #copper canyon press #quote #literature

[unsubconscious]

'To Be Alive' by Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).