Handmade/Homemade

I met Lori Anderson Moseman in 2007, when I was finishing my doctorate. Because I met Lori, I met Matthew Klane. As a consequence of meeting Matthew, I met Jessica Smith and Kate Schapira. Meeting these writers marks the beginning of my deep admiration of DIY publishing, prolific bookmaking, and the gift economy of handmade books and book objects.

Before this entanglement with book arts, I was already predisposed to making things. During most of my almost ten years in the Pacific Northwest, my friends and I sent postcards to one another: exquisite corpse writing, art creations, repurposed antique cards.

By the time I was hired at Pace University, Westchester, in the fall of 2008, I was fascinated with the handmade creations of artists and writers around the country. The idea came to me late fall semester to start an annual mini-exhibition the following spring. I read Lorine Niedecker’s Homemade/Handmade poems around that time and am fairly sure that impacted the curatorial project’s name I chose—Handmade/Homemade Exhibit. During the last four years, the exhibit has introduced viewers, and me, to an overwhelming number of artists and writers around the world doing amazing work in this space.

The idea of hosting an online handmade/homemade exhibit came to me about a year ago, near the close of my tenure as fiction editor with Drunken Boat. We put out the call, and what you see in this folio is the overwhelming response from around the world.

Handmade, homemade, and letterpress chapbooks, one-of-a-kind editions, broadsides, homemade sound experiments, intersections of text and video constellate.

 

listen
over all the earth
to all the pages turning
floating in air

an endless rustle
& flutter
of leaves[1]

 

Deborah Poe

Curator of the Handmade/Homemade Folio, March 2012

[1] Loney, Alan. the books to come. Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2010.

Deborah Poe
Deborah Poe – photo by Elizabeth Bryant.

Deborah Poe is author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010), Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008), and “the last will be stone, too,” as well as a novella in verse, “Hélène” (Furniture Press 2012). She has several chapbooks, including a four-part-edition as part of the Dusie Kollektiv (5). Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in 1913, Shampoo, Denver Quarterly, The Dictionary Project, Mantis and Bone Bouquet. Her visual work—including video and handmade book objects—will appear or has appeared in University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Poetry Off the Page (Tucson 2012), the Handmade/Homemade Sister Exhibit at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia 2012), and ONN/OF “a light festival” (Seattle 2012). Online exhibits of her visual and text work include Yew Journal, PEEP/SHOW, Elective Affinities, and Trickhouse. For more information, please visit www.deborahpoe.com.