Ploughshares Announces A New Letterpress

Over at the Ploughshares blog, Patricia Caspers talks to Katherine Case, who recently founded the Meridian Press in Reno, Nevada. In the interview, Case considers the virtues of blending poetry and printmaking:

There is no better way to get to know another person’s poem than to set it in type and print it by hand. The other great thing that drew me to printmaking and letterpress printing is the medium’s combination of the industrial and the artistic— the hum and click of a Vandercook press, the greasy, inky smell of metal type and that lovely, decisive feeling one gets gouging a linoleum block.

… I think of my poetry as something that exists in my head. Writing is a method for me to process and understand the world, so the more I write the more calm and balanced I feel. Printmaking, on the other hand, is a craft, and it exists in my body. The process of observing nature and then creating a linoleum cut or a typographical composition is a physical process, and the more I do it the more I feel present in this moment and this place.

Case has also written, designed, and printed her own book entitled "Doppelganger: A Bestiary," for sale at the Meridian Press website, a collection of poems about animals and their parallel existences to our own.

Find the full interview--and the title poem-- here.