Strings

Description:	Antoon, Sinan (author)Walkup, Kathleen (printer) Letterpress. Edition of 24. This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalitions focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. I first heard Sinan Antoon in an interview on the Pacifica radio program Democracy Now. His thoughtful voice and clear political stance caught my attention. Over several weeks I heard him on the radio repeatedly; sometimes it seemed as if every time I turned on the radio he was there, speaking eloquently, passionately, about his birth country, Iraq, and what America was doing to his homeland. When Beau suggested that I gather some printers to print broadsides about Al-Mutanabbi Street I immediately thought of Sinan. I emailed him and he responded from London with a choice of two poems for my broadside. I chose the four stanzas of Strings. While Sinan simply gave me permission to print the poem, I wondered about its roots, and about Sinan’s other writing. I sent for his book of poems, and when I opened it I found three surprises: First, the four stanzas were excerpts from a much longer poem; second, they were not contiguous; and third, the poem in the book was called String, not Strings. If what I thought was a poem was in fact four discrete stanzas, I would have to start from scratch with my broadside design. If it were called String, I would need to reconfigure the title and in fact re-think the entire concept. Again I emailed Sinan, and again he responded that, while I could do what I liked with the text, he would prefer that the stanzas be treated as separate. And, he said that the editor of his book had (mysteriously?) chosen to change the title Strings to the singular String. So: back to the drawing board. The biggest struggle was in setting Sinan’s name in type. I wanted his name to be writ large, but I did not want it to overshadow the text. In the end, I did write his name large, but removed the ink from the letters, as a way of echoing the idea of both permanence (an ancient manuscript, a rare bird) and its erasure by war.
Origin:	2007
Created By:	Antoon, Sinan; Walkup, Kathleen
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	New Broom Press (Palo Alto, California)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/211
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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