Making Verse – The Typography of Poems

This is a book about typography and poetry, the typography of poetry. Which is to say, it is about the ways that poets have thought about and deployed the visual properties of language. It begins from the premise that the smallest details of typographic arrangement can make legible the relationship between what a poem says and does – its sounds, meanings, unmeanings – and the physical and social processes that bear upon it. The book brings together letters, manuscripts, proofs, and other archival documents that illuminate the shadow labour of textual production (editing, typesetting, printing) in experimental and small-press poetry. It prioritizes documentary sources and the words of poets and their collaborators over theoretical argument, though there is some of that too.

Making Verse was edited, designed, and printed in sixteen-page signatures over two and a half years, and bound in the autumn of 2026. It contains commentary on and archival material relating to Kamau Brathwaite, Karen Brodine, Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan, Friedrich Hölderlin, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne, John Wieners, and others. With contributions by Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Susan Howe, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Samuel Solomon, and Keston Sutherland.

The longest entries in its index are “labour,” “line (poetic),” and “spacing (typographic).”