Field Notes From The Archive: Field Note No. 1

Can I Take This Home?

Kristine Guillaume | November 2023

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I’ve been redecorating my apartment lately — or rather, just decorating. Since moving to New Haven last year, I’ve learned that the process of setting up a space so that it feels something like home can take a long time. It’s been wonderful to have some time this summer to finally hang art on my walls and make my apartment feel more lived in. Perhaps because I’ve been in this mindset of looking for things — posters, prints, plants — that might accentuate my space, I’ve been thinking a lot about illustration, aesthetics, and presentation while engaging with the Broadside Press’ poetry published in the broadside format. Many times, I’ve found myself thinking about how I’d like to have a broadside framed and hung up on the wall, either in my own home or elsewhere.

A few years ago, my friend framed a printout of Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” and gifted it to me, and it’s one of my most treasured items in my room. Looking at the broadsides, I’ve often remembered how special it is for me to have that poem in my home, and I find myself having the intrusive thought:

“Can I take this home?”

(Of course, only kidding.)

I thought about what it might mean to have one of the broadsides hanging in my space when I came across the broadside edition of Gwendolyn Brooks’ famous poem “We Real Cool.”

James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. ^[1]

The aspect of broadsides being shared or placed in public view is particularly important because many of these broadsides were printed in limited quantities, oftentimes 300-500 copies. This made me think about a presentation that Amanda Awanjo, the BBP’s project manager, gave during our summer workshop, in which she spoke about how Brownies’ Books were shared amongst children who read them. There is a sociality that we can imagine being practiced through the communal use of these books, and I find that to be a really important element of how we think about Black print culture. This sociality calls to mind the work of artist and book publisher Tia Blassingame, whose printmaking work actively seeks to foster a dialogue about contemporary and historical racism in the United States, especially examining Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade.^[2] Blassingame, who argues that printed word carries an “authority,” uses the tactility of letter press text and printmaking to bring people into a conversation about this history. The material text, for Blassingame, provides an entry point, especially as she views people as “users” of her books.

I’m interested in the notion of “users” here. What does it mean to produce a text to be used? Blassingame’s books are tactile conversation starters in a way that might be analogous to the broadsides. The broadsides play with material text elements such as color, illustrations, and typeface to convey the poem. While some are big and bold like Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” others have illustrations such as the 1970 broadside edition of Etheridge Knight’s “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide” and others are quite plain. It is interesting to be engaging with the broadsides in the archives rather than to be seeing them in public space, but seeing so many different variations prompts a lot of questions for me about how people might be reading, experiencing, and discussing these works together. 

Works Cited:

^[1] Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool, 1966 Broadside edition (Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1966), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

^[2] Tia Blassingame: Combating Racism through Letter Press Printing (Design Indaba, 2015)

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