Event Type
Through a combination of print formats historically labeled ephemera, from newsprint to letterpress broadsides, this panel will explore how print formats beyond the book can restore control of the art-making process to writers and publications, thereby enabling them to engage with the page in new and experimental ways that traditional nine-by-five book formats might obfuscate or prevent. This panel will explore movements such as Fluxus and mail art, discussing how practices like these can continue to push the boundaries of print media. The value of this panel is twofold. The first is to celebrate print media traditions and explore how older forms of letterpress and newsprint publications open the field of the page and offer an expansive poetics to their readers. The second is to offer several strategies for bolstering egalitarianism in a literary landscape too often stratified by access: access to education and academic spaces, access to wealth that makes or breaks the possibility of entry to such spaces, and finally, access to literary journals compelled to gatekeep contemporary literature in order to survive in an increasingly demanding economy. Ultimately, this panel will provide a number of distinct but compatible approaches to resisting the commodification of art, with the aim of encouraging more publications to engage in more equitable publishing and distribution practices. The panel will also explore how thinking beyond the book can expand reading practices and create an experimental zone for a poetics that engages with its own making in both form and presentation. This panel comprises presenters from Fine Print Press, Prompt Press, Send Me Press, Tilted House, and The Wax Paper.