SLIPSHEETS: created and introduced by Andrew Steeves, with an afterword by Christopher Patton

I’m fascinated by the recent SLIPSHEETS (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), the full title of which seems to be (offering a bit more of a description to the project) AN INCIDENTAL PRINTING OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKIN’S “PIED BEAUTY” ON SLIPSHEETS, CREATED & INTRODUCED BY Andrew Steeves, WITH AN AFTERWORD BY Christopher Patton. As Gaspereau Press co-founder/publisher/printer Andrew Steeves writes in his introduction, “Reading the Sheets in the Printer’s Trash Bin,” this is a project that emerged out of printing an edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “Pied Beauty” in the spring of 2021, requiring extra sheets between printed sheets for the sake of reducing unintentional ink transfer during the printing process. As he writes:

In order to get the large type as black as possible, I printed the book on dampened mouldmade paper using frightening quantities of ink. This tactic worked fine when printing the front of each sheet, but printing the back side posed some challenges. When the back side of a dampened sheet of paper is printed (‘backed up’), some of the still-tacky ink from the front side—which is now flipped over and making direct contact with the press’s impression cylinder—inevitably transfers onto the impression cylinder wherever the type from both the front and the back sides overlap on the sheet. Over the length of a press run, the transferred ink (the ‘offset’) builds up on the cylinder’s drawsheet and causes problems; this offsetting must be either kept to a minimum or cleaned off. Rather than wiping the offset ink from the drawsheet after every impression, I decided to slip a clean sheet of cheap paper under each press sheet as I printed. These slipsheets received the offsetting ink and kept the cylinder clean.
            And so every stack of book sheets that I printed for my edition of “Pied Beauty” also produced a corresponding stack of soiled slipsheets carrying the bizarre rendering of the text that occurred wherever the pressure from the back side of the form overlapped with the wet ink from the front side. What interests me about these slipsheets is how the imagery they capture is an incidental expression of the poem, but not a random one. They are the inevitable outcome of a controlled and intentional technical process, a graphic expression of the poem refracted through the act of printing and recorded in the project’s waste.

There is something fascinating about how the play with printing machinery offers a meeting point between the work of someone such as Andrew Steeves, an experienced printer, critic, poet and editor, and the work of someone such as the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988), who also engaged with learning how to work the presses at Coach House, often composing pieces towards what could or shouldn’t be possible utilizing alternate printing methods. The result of Steeves’ play with SLIPSHEETS has the effect of being an echo, or even a blend, of visual poetry elements utilized by visual poets such as Nichol, David Aylward, Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu (among multiple others, even such as Christopher Patton, as well) and even the text-work of the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe (1936-1992), playing with block text in a large format, but allowing for the accident to see what else might be possible. It is always fascinating to see printers play with the equipment, allowing themselves these quirky side-projects of accident. And, whereas Steeves’ introduction offers an explanation of process, ie: how we got there from here, as well as an overleaf of the printer’s imposition scheme mapped “for those curious about this aspect of the process,” poet and critic Christopher Patton’s afterword, “Beauty of the Antiphon,” explores the result of these accidents, this project. As Patton writes: “I cannot shake the feeling Hopkins anticipated this setting of his poem. If not the man, his dauntless, ecstatic eye.” He echoes the same towards the end of his short piece: “I cannot shake the feeling Hopkins anticipated this setting of his poem. His love for play among semblances. The antiphonal form of his thinking.” How does accident, such “waste” (as the back cover calls it) become the focus of such an intriguing, playful translation of a poem? As Patton writes, mid-point through his piece:

            These sheets are a fortuitous translation, made for the typographical eye, of the test he called “Pied Beauty.” They meet letterforms as he met natural forms: attuned to their selving and their interfusion and the non-difference of the two. (Shitou Xiqian described it as “two arrows meeting in mid-air.”) That they are disjecta of a printing process bent on some other product lessens them not at all. As Hopkins wrote of his own self-being, his being-in-Christ, this “joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.” Note the two turns: one on the comma after “matchwood,” one on the virgule marking the moment the verse reverses.