The Poetry Salon Broadside Series is an ekphrastic partnership between Samiya Bashir, poet and Reed College professor, and Daniela del Mar, letterpress printer and designer that ran from from 2013 to 2020. Bashir and del Mar find in each other a common vision, complementary aesthetic language, and unmatchable passion to build and sustain an interactive gift economy using language, text + image with lead, wood + cast iron—the ephemeral and the material—to communicate the spirit and sustenance of poetry.
Letterpress printing is a tactile, traditional technique which uses a combination of hand cut imagery, wood and lead type to print one color at a time, each sheet fed by hand. The process of making in this way is neither fast nor easy, but rather for both Bashir + del Mar, is engaged as a deliberate rejection of capitalism as the rubric of an object's value. The process itself informs the outcome.
Bashir and del Mar find in each other a common vision, complementary aesthetic language, and unmatchable passion to build and sustain an ekphrastic conversation between language, text + image with lead, wood + cast iron—the ephemeral and the material—to communicate the spirit and sustenance of poetry.
Never to be sold for money, each print run is gifted to the college, to the wider community, and to the poets themselves, who receive one third of the edition. Supported by Reed College, The Poetry Salon’s broadsides are not offered as payment for the writer’s work nor for the community’s engagement, instead, Bashir and del Mar make and share this work in a genuine spirit of craft, conversation, and gratitude.
Images taken at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, Illinois for the exhibition “The Lushness of Print”, February 2019.