The poet Jacqueline Saphra invited me to take part in Accident & Emergence, a project that teams writers with visual artists. I am working with the printmaker Alan Cox. Yesterday we got together to talk about the collaboration.

Litho inks.

Alan lives and works in an old cabinet maker’s workshop in the heart of Hoxton. The studio is full of print machinery and paper.

All the ink, rollers and proofs reminded me of my first job as an editorial assistant at a reference publisher on Pentonville Road. I used to sign off camera-ready copy and occasionally visit printers who showed you hot metal presses. The publisher had a design studio where people cut and pasted up pages with hot wax onto gridded pages from great long galley proofs.

Upstairs in his kitchen Alan and I talked about how the project might take shape. Having read Open Notebooks Alan suggested I write out poems by hand.

I was worried that my handwriting might not be ‘good’ enough, but actually, I just remembered that ‘being good at English and having nice, legible handwriting’ was how I got that first job in publishing. That and knowing the marketing director…(some things never change).

Rather than do something where poem + picture = print I think I want to do a series of illustrated prints that explore one poem in depth. So each print might represent a verse, or a couple of lines and then use this method to reinterpret the form. Key phrases or ideas might surface. Each limited edition print will have the text then a line drawing overlaid, and Alan will hand colour each print at the end. So they’ll all be unique. I’m keen on the single poem book, but binding costs might be prohibitive. This way there’s a sense of continuation and perhaps it’s something that could be bound later…

I’ll be blogging the process and pasting up our work in progress. Stay tuned.

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