COLLECTED
To have got out from underneath it,
The shadow of all I had written –
Ahead of me each eager hill.
So it is to depart from the page,
As if, getting up from my chair
I stood up in it, breathing the moment
Such was the weight of that silence, lifting
The pile of printed pages –
‘I am taken possession of, in a different voice’
As if ‘I’ lifts
An awkward monument to self –
& what was once all breathing
might quit the air?
This was in my Shearsman collection Its Halting Measure. Tony had brought out my Collected Poems four years previously and looking back I think, well who else would have done it so very handsomely, as well as being always so helpful and accommodating in his dealings?
It was back in the early 1970s that changes in print technology – offset litho, a thing called the IBM Composer, which was a glorified electric typewriter, and arising from this the possibility of doing your own paste-ups, even your own printing – changed the shape of poetry publishing.
What Tony has done now is take fresh advances, in print-on-demand and digital printing technology, and absolutely make the most of it, producing an amazing range of often very complex texts with exemplary speed and efficiency. It is a remarkable achievement.
To have got out from underneath it,
The shadow of all I had written –
Ahead of me each eager hill.
So it is to depart from the page,
As if, getting up from my chair
I stood up in it, breathing the moment
Such was the weight of that silence, lifting
The pile of printed pages –
‘I am taken possession of, in a different voice’
As if ‘I’ lifts
An awkward monument to self –
& what was once all breathing
might quit the air?
This was in my Shearsman collection Its Halting Measure. Tony had brought out my Collected Poems four years previously and looking back I think, well who else would have done it so very handsomely, as well as being always so helpful and accommodating in his dealings?
It was back in the early 1970s that changes in print technology – offset litho, a thing called the IBM Composer, which was a glorified electric typewriter, and arising from this the possibility of doing your own paste-ups, even your own printing – changed the shape of poetry publishing.
What Tony has done now is take fresh advances, in print-on-demand and digital printing technology, and absolutely make the most of it, producing an amazing range of often very complex texts with exemplary speed and efficiency. It is a remarkable achievement.
