Product Description

This broadside titled Use, is designed and printed by Joseph Green of Peasandcues Press in Longview, Washington. Poem by Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. Hand-set metal type (Goudy Italian Old Style text, Quill Script title) on burlap texture background with solarplate illustrations.

Use

A bird’s beak. Recurved,
decurved, serrate, hooked.
Each to its purpose.
Dark, pale, honeyed, dun,
of use. Stabbing, probing, it keeps
its size, its shape, by balancing
constant growth and constant use.
A small and honed proof.

Onward it grows, fed by a heart’s
swift little engine that’s fed by
what the beak can dislodge.
Outward—against grit or bark—
it wears away as much of itself
as it adds. The use of use: to keep
a beak as beak, exactly.
Worn to perfection.

—Paulann Petersen

The Bellingham Review, Spring 2010
The Voluptuary, Lost Horse Press, 2010

Additional Information

Additional Information

Artist's Bio

Joseph Green is a poet and letterpress printer in Longview, Washington, where he taught composition and creative writing for twenty-five years at Lower Columbia College. He designs and prints limited-edition letterpress broadsides for Northwest poets, often incorporating graphic elements by Marquita Green. His philosophy in presenting poetry is that the page is always in service to the text.

Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate, Paulann Petersen has five full-length books of poetry: The Wild Awake, Blood-Silk, A Bride of Narrow Escape, Kindle, and The Voluptuary, published by Lost Horse Press in 2010. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. A current Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute, she serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the January Stafford Birthday Events.