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Muted Hawks
Alastair Johnston
1997
vertical accordion, letterpress text and illustrations
letterpress printing
accordion binding
9 3/4 x 6 1/2 in
edition of 40
text by Tom Raworth
After losing money on fifteen or so poetry books over the years, I stopped publishing poetry, and also drifted out of the local poetry scene. As I had published three books by English poet Tom Raworth, I went to hear him read at New College of California in 1994. As usual Tom gave a brilliant reading demonstrating his razor-sharp wit and his keen social satire. After the reading I told him that while listening to him I thought of a visual parallel in terms of urban collage, torn posters, fragments of graffiti, and old signs decontructed by weather and neglect. I told him I'd like to try to create a visual narrative to accompany his long poem "Muted Hawks" and he agreed.// Inspired by the 'hot printing' of Hendrik Werkman, I began by printing the normal things one finds in a print shop: wood type, furniture, and so on. Thanks to the adjustable bed on my Vandercook Universal I was able to make subtle changes in impression and (with appropriate packing and makeready) create some unusual effects. Each page evolved a layer at a time until there was enough (or in some cases too much) going on. I also used frisketing and stencil to get ink on the paper, and tried recreating some of Werkman's brayer techniques, using mottled ink and the edge of the roller. The process took about six months longer than I had anticipated, but Raworth was happy with the result, and I feel it is one of my most successful works.
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