Grow No Moss: Process, Prints, & a Shop!

I recently posted on Printeresting about my time in the Ox-Bow print shop, and there are lots more photos from Ox-Bow on Flickr here. I thought I'd share some of the process behind making the lithograph that was printed as the cover of Grow No Moss. 

Some shots of the book being printed at Spudnik Press are below as well. Everything is being trimmed and bound at Salsedo Press today! 

And! BREAKING NEWS! You can place actual online book orders (pre-sale until August 25th) and check out more prints for purchase on the snazzy new Grow No Moss website.

Original lithograph in black ink on Kitakata paper that serves as the cover artwork for the book.

Lithographic stone (pre-etching) at Ox-Bow. Lots of tusche. Playing around with stamping, painting, and dripping with moss. (Yes, actual moss. Little bits of dirt and moss and sand on the surface of the stone there).

Lithograph on two small sheets of Kitakata paper, about 5" x 7" each, featuring poems from the book. More moss-tusche action on the left.

Lithographic stone (pre-etching) with poetry written backwards, playing around with cover options. This stone was big enough that I was able to print multiple sheets of paper for one roll-up and vary the size of the print.

This is the printed state #2 for one of my original cover ideas. A lithograph in black ink on grey Stonehenge paper. Tusche, moss stamping, pencil. Lots of experimentation in the margins.

State #1 on the stone (pre-etched) of the print shown above.

 State #2 on the stone (pre-second-etch) of the print shown above. The tusche is still drying on the stone.

Offset press-master Aaron Smith at Spudnik Press in the middle of printing my book!

Sheets just offset-printed drying on the rack.

The ethereal offset plate, ready for registration and ink.

It's real! GROW NO MOSS release and reading August 25th.

On Thursday, August 25th, please gather for the GROW NO MOSS book release and reading at Andrew Rafacz Gallery. 

Doors at 6:30, reading begins at 7:00pm. 

Joining the metaphysical poetic-prosaic dance floor will be new work read by the excellent, dashing, and fabulous: 

MAIREAD CASE (Proximity Magazine, Dil Pickle Club)

ZACH DODSON (Featherproof Books)

DENISE DOOLEY (The Next Objectivists)

GABRIEL WALLACE (The Great Sheboygan Panty Raid of 18977)

Books, zines, and prints will be available for sale. 

Excerpts: "An Elemental Thing" (2007) by Eliot Weinberger

38 - 39: Liu Hseih wrote The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, the first extended book of Chinese literary criticism.

"'Look toward the present and create the unusual; consult the ancients to establish the laws.'"

"'The perfect combination or balance of wind and bone, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.'"

42: "A Kaluli lives in two worlds: the visible world of people and the world of their reflections, where people live as wild pigs or cassowaries on the slopes of Mr. Bosavi. When a person dies his reflection also disappears, and turns into a bird in the invisible world. Birds see each other as people, and their calls are people talking to one another. The passage of life is from infant to bird."

116: "Against Descartes' Cogito, [Ezra] Pound's letterhead read: J'AYME DONC JE SUIS, I love therefore I am."

150: "In the British Library there is a box of fragments and dust from a birch bark scroll buried two thousand years ago on the Jalalabad Plain, west of the Khyber Pass. It is the oldest known Buddhist text, written in the Gandharan language. Some of the chips contain only a single letter, but the scholars have pierced them together to reconstruct a sutra:

'Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros.'

[...]

'Fire does not return to what it has burnt, wander alone like a rhinoceros.'

[...]

'At home anywhere, wander alone like a rhinoceros.'"

Film: "La Notte" dir. Antonioni (1961)

Monica Vitti and Marcello Mastroianni.

"Grow No Moss" Pre-Release Review

My dear friend Charlie recently wrote a thoughtful, considered pre-release review of my upcoming book of poetry, Grow No Moss, and on community and collaboration in art-making. You can take a look at what he wrote here. An excerpt, below:

The sheer magnitude of effort required to keep oneself from dissolving and the sheer magnitude of effort required to make oneself a little known to anyone else—these surface on every page of Grow No Moss. Not only in the poems, but in the paper, the glue, the ink, and the ally-trafficked rooms of its creation.

Working on inviting some other Chicago writers to read with me at the book release at Andrew Rafacz Gallery on August 25th-- more details on the awesome line-up to come soon! Also will be reading at the Forest Park Public Library some time in September.

I just returned from Ox-Bow where I worked hard, slept very little, and made seven lithographs in six days, one of which will be the cover for the book. The image above is a shot from the Ox-Bow website; I'm inking up a stone in the print shop. Ox-Bow is a marvelous, deliriously beautiful, magical place. I can't wait to go back, hopefully next summer, and work even harder.

Working on a Printeresting post about the class, with loads of photographs to come. Keep an eye out.