Keagan Hawthorne is putting together six different poetry broadsides, 25 copies each, donated by various poets from the area, to raise money for the Tantramar Literary Society.
While the Tantramar Literary Society is more of an unofficial collective of poets and writers in the area, Hawthorne says it’s very much alive and looking to get more active in public now that New Brunswick is in the green phase.
The funds raised from broadside sales will be pooled to pay local poets to read their work in Sackville, and host poetry events.
The broadsides are being printed on Hawthorne’s micropress, a large and heavy mechanical device that uses a hand crank to roll paper across inked letters, which he affectionately refers to as “The Beast.” It’s a flatbed proofing press, made circa 1927, originally used for test prints of a newspaper to check for things such as layout glitches or spelling errors.
Now it sits in Hawthorne’s living room, surrounded by filing cabinets full of “sorts,” or lead-based metal letter type, and various broadsides pinned on the walls.
The poet visiting Hawthorne’s workshop is Amy Ward, who donated her poem “Echo” to the broadside fundraiser before moving from Sackville to Guelph for her Masters degree.
“I lived here [Sackville] for five years, and then when the border closed. I went home with all of my stuff, and it was very sad. I couldn’t really [say] goodbye to Sackville very much, and I have some friends here still,” says Ward.
“So I’ve been waiting for the border to open, and then it finally did, so I wrote this poem when I came back, and I was looking at the dikes and the windmills and just enjoying all of the scenery that I hadn’t seen for a while…and thinking about how I’ve lived here for five years and how being in this place has really shaped a lot of myself. So it’s kind of a little tribute to Sackville this special place in my heart.”
Other local poets who donated their work include Geordie Miller, Marilyn Lerch, Shoshana Wingate, Kayla Geitzler, and Keagan himself.
Hawthorne says that the old printing press is part of the poetic process, which is a service he is happy to provide.
“How you encounter something matters, and how you encounter a poem is going to be different if it’s printed on a really [bad] paper in a photocopier, or if it’s printed on really nice, beautiful handmade paper with the letterpress impression,” says Hawthorne. “My vision for the press is to be able to continue exploring that aesthetic with poetry written by people I know.”
“There’s this great this idea that when the rhapsodies who would sing Homer’s poems, the idea was that they actually were Homer. When they sang that poem, they were the embodiment of the poet. I kind of like to think of books in that same way where they are the sort of singing the poems to you, and so they sort of take the place of the author in that moment, the physical object takes the place of the author. And so it’s nice to honor that and make that presence as beautiful thing as possible.
The broadsides will be available soon, around late September or early October. To see what the Tantramar Literary Society is up to, check them out on Facebook.
