The Subtlest Garden in the World

Description: Original Broadside: Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadsides Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries
Letterpress. Edition of 10.This broadside is from the collection of a historic suite of hand-printed literary broadsides which are a part of the Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here broadside project at the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries.
While hand-inking & printing each of these translucent gold-yellow layers, my corollary thinking was of the earliest literate culture (evolving between the Tigris & the Euphrates), the Sumerians, from whom we receive the first written depiction of the garden: an orchard with its jewel tree where Gilgamesh rests after emerging from his harrowing journey through the earth; the garden as an expression of the eternal human desire to carve out & cultivate a piece of the natural world; the garden as a layered, subtle experience to be read/ deciphered not in the usual fast-food sound-bite manner of our modern world, but slowly savored, the eyes taking in the dappled light through the canopy of leaves & nose inhaling the perfume of earth & herb. The garden as metaphor for the sacred calm place we long for: the place where we find our deepest sense of connection with the cosmos; how the book is this: a garden, a collection of words, a garland of flowers, cultivating layers of language, containing the compost of the past, & giving rise to the next season’s seeds. And that all: a book, a garden, a human life, are inherently subtle in their beauty.
Origin: 2007
Created By: Randall, Karen
Contributor(s): Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher: Propolis Press (Northampton, Massachusetts)
Source: http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/113
Collection: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright: In Copyright
Subjects: broadsides
letterpress printing
art

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