What is a poetry broadside?

September 17, 2024

Written by Myrna Keliher

September 17, 2024

Written by Myrna Keliher

A poetry broadside is a single-sided printed sheet that shows a whole poem or an excerpt of one, often poster sized. Expedition Press broadsides are letterpress printed from handset type on old presses, by permission and often in partnership with poets, publishers, and small presses. In letterpress, you’ll often see poetry broadsides available as limited editions, perhaps paired with an illustration. Our broadsides differ in that type is our main design element and we almost always do open editions. This helps keep our original artwork at a more accessible price point.

When you connect with a poem, it brings your insides alive. Our poetry broadside prints hold space for that experience in your daily life and are a bridge to share that feeling with others. It honors the poem and makes it a public experience. From close family to unsuspecting passersby, people are stopped. Heart caught. Opened up.

A Quick History of Poetry Broadsides

There is a long history of both the word “broadside” and the literary tradition of making them, by letterpress other techniques. In technical terms, the word “broadside,” also known as a “broadsheet,” simply refers to a single sheet that is printed on one side only (i.e. not double sided like you would find in a book). Back when books were less common / more valuable / harder to get ahold of, the first edition broadsides were something that could be posted publicly, much like gig posters are stapled to telephone polls in dense urban areas today.

When the coin was termed, broadsides were likely associated more with proclamations and public notices than with poetry. But poetry broadsides make sense to me as a contemporary artist focused on poetry and type. A poem is a thing that can be pulled and presented outside of its book much more readily than a swath of prose, which often falters out of context.

Poetry is doing something that prose is not, on a fundamental basis: poetry is trying to say the unsayable (thank you, Donald Hall) in as few words as possible. Even the most loquacious poets are still trying to get at what’s beyond the words, and they use space — specifically line breaks, and sometimes caesura (those obvious gappy spots in a poem between parts of a single line) — to do that. Because space, on a page, is where words aren’t. Right?

Designing a Poetry Broadside

In my letterpress design process, I think about space just as much, if not more, than the marks the letters make. That’s why I love working in black and white — it leaves nothing to distract from the form, the there and not there aspects of the visual object the poem makes. Working with handset metal and wood letterpress type lends itself well to this, since you also have to set every piece of spacing by hand, as well as each letter. The words go together letter by letter, upside down and backwards. Then a space gets slipped in, then another set of letters that make a word, then another space, adjusted to look just right to your eye and the poem’s intention.

I work in units of half-points when considering space between letters and words. Then, of course, there are the margins. The titling. Between the body of the poem and the author’s name. The relationship between the title and the body of the poem — all considerations of space. I think one of the reasons I like working with poets so much is that I know they are considering what’s unsayable just as much as I am thinking about what’s unseeable. It’s a beautiful collaboration that way, whether we get to talk directly or not.

One thing that’s different about Expedition Press poetry broadsides is that typically there is no illustration, and very little decoration. Our style is sparse, and striking. It prioritizes the poem through the constraint of the typeforms. All our design work begins and ends with deep reading, and the medium we’re using to make the artwork is deeply constrained by the type we have at hand in our not-too-grand library of antique metal and wood letterpress type. The occasional linocut and photopolymer plate do make their way into our print, but they’re typically centered around the letters (carving a big letter or part of one that we don’t have, reproducing an author’s handwriting).

So, what is a poetry broadside?

Simply put, a poetry broadside is a poster of a poem. It doesn’t have to be letterpress — many digital ones are made these days (for example, check out Broadsided Press) — and it doesn’t have to be poetry, but letterpress poetry broadsides are probably the most common ones made today. They are usually framed and hung as artwork, whether limited edition or not, by folks who love the words and want the accessibility of showcasing them in their home, workplace, or community space. I think of it as a way to remember something that those words help us feel, know, and live toward.

In the end, that may be what really distinguishes a poetry broadside from other kinds of visual artwork — the poem may be more or less prioritized in the design, but people who buy them and display them are doing so in large part because of what it says, not just because of how it looks. And when the visual form deeply supports what it says, and invites reading easily and re-reading regularly, and offers multiple readings from afar and up close, and holds an overall feeling one only needs to glance at to remember — well that’s a lot for one piece of paper and some ink to do, but that’s what we aim for here at Expedition Press.

A Note on Size

When talking about letterpress poetry broadsides, I often say “poster” because that denotes a certain size and accessibility in your mind. Strictly speaking, a broadside could be pocket-sized, and people often refer to our letterpress poetry notecards as mini-broadsides. This isn’t wrong, but also doesn’t feel as useful. Expedition’s poetry broadsides have a sheet size of 6x9 inches or bigger. Our notecards are 4x6 inches or smaller, and are packaged with envelopes, hence we feel the word notecard more accurately describes the physical object in the world. But people do frame them often. Perhaps a more generous modern definition of a poetry broadside is any piece of paper with a poem or part of a poem on it that’s being displayed publicly.

Explore more poetry broadsides

For more on the history of poetry broadsides, here’s a great article from Biblio with a links to look at lots of older broadsides, also check out this collection of historical poetry broadsides from the Library of Congress.

Finally, have a look at Expedition Press' poetry broadside collection, and then check out friends of ours who also print broadsides: