Carrying on in Cuneiform: An Interview with Kyle Schlesinger

Carrying on in CuneiformAn Interview with Kyle Schlesinger Charles Alexander (bio) In previous columns I have explored some past practitioners of poetry and the printing and publishing arts, and wanted, now, to turn attention to some things happening at present, among printers, poets, and bookmakers, beginning with the profoundly thoughtful and innovative practice of the proprietor of Cuneiform Press, Kyle Schlesinger. Schlesinger has worked with poets and artists including Jim Dine, Gil Ott, Alistair Johnston, Trevor Winkfield, Ron Padgett, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Rogal, and many more. By "has worked with" I mean a range of practices, but mostly pushing toward, and often becoming, full collaborations. In his poetry, too, he has tended to collaborate with others, though his individual volumes, such as A New Kind of Country (Chax 2022), show his decidedly individual, independent, and bold practices in the arts of the word. His version/vision of the arts (and life) embodies uncertainty and poses questions. The last stanza of the title poem reads: Motion as a verbSound not a wordLike wild jasmineA long way hereWhich way is AmericaSound not a wordWhich way is America I posted a set of questions to Schlesinger about his work and about inhabiting the roles of poet, printer, and publisher. Or, in truth, I sent these questions to him and asked him to simply "hang out" in their spaces, and while doing so, write something in response. He did that, and more. Here are those questions and his responses. [End Page 158] 1. Metal, paper, ink—what do these elements have to do with your work, and with how you think about printing? Do they creep into your poetry, too? Metal, paper, and ink are the bedrock of civilization as we know it. Without the printing press, literacy would still be a privilege of the aristocracy alone. It is easy to forget that just a few hundred years ago a book was a rare, valuable, mysterious object. As a reader, writer, and printer, I am grateful to be a small part of that glorious tradition. Of course I've never been one to adhere to any particular purist lineage, nor am I interested in period pieces per se, but there is a reverence for words, materials, and their construction ingrained in me. As a poet I have an insatiable curiosity about the materials of writing, the embodiment of ideas. I'm interested in the tools poets used, artifacts and artifice. As a scholar, I need history to anchor literary theory, "no ideas but in things," like Williams said. The practice of typography taught me an economy of language in my poems, which I get from Creeley and Dickinson as well. When I read a poem, I want to know all about the poet, printer, papermaker, artist, typographer, publisher, et cetera, to see the book as a unique form of collaboration, a sum far greater than a disembodied text. 2. I think you are self-taught as a printer/bookmaker. Is that true? Can you talk about your beginnings? What sparked you? What did you have in mind? What surprised you? Yes and no. I've never had any formal instruction in bookmaking, but I have learned a lot from the community by sending books I've made off to people I admire such as yourself and attempting to glean any pointers I may. Early on, people like Johanna Drucker, Paul Romaine, Phil Gallo, Steve Clay, Terry Belanger, Walter Hamady, Clifton Meador, Kathy Walkup, et cetera would read and often send constructive criticism my way. Not that they had any sort of unified vision for the book as they all come from different schools of thought, but their encouragement and pointers, "lay off the impression" or "tighten up your colophon" or "try using lithographic ink" were extremely helpful and generous. I started printing in the nineties around the time that I got my first email address, so there was an interesting confluence in technology. The [End Page 159] personal computer (that morphed into tablets and smartphones) had an irreparable impact on literacy as we knew it, and some feared the demise of the book completely—no libraries, just...