A Broadside of Rose McLarney’s “Old Road

After each issue lands in readers’ hands, we encourage our contributors to say a little bit on our blog about their work. For issue 15.2, our first such post comes from poet Rose McLarney, who worked with artist Gary Hawkins on a broadside of her poem “Old Road” from our pages, as described below:

Rose McLarney: This broadside was designed and printed by Gary Hawkins of Croquet Press at Asheville BookWorks for Vandercooked Poetry Nights. For several years, Asheville BookWorks invited poets to read, and had artists design and print broadsides of the writers’ poems on a rare Vandercooked Press. The reading in which I participated—along with poets Nickole Brown and Anna Lena Phillips Bell—was the finale for this series.

However, like my poem, the evening resisted the idea of ending. The invitation to the reading had given me a chance to return to the mountains of North Carolina, where I am from. My parents and old friends were in the audience. And Gary, who was my supervisor when I first began to teach as a fellow at Warren Wilson College—and who taught me much about pedagogy—was working with me in another way. Now, he was coaching me in turning a few of the broadsides slowly through the press to receive their last application of ink. (Each color on the prints requires a separate, carefully aligned run.)

I appreciate poetry broadsides as visual artists’ responses to literary arts, a move that reverses the usual ekphrastic order of things (poets praising other forms), and I appreciate this piece in particular for the design that suggests a map but is not so literal and limited as to point to only one destination for the viewer’s thoughts. Returning, reversing, circling—all those words seemed to gain substance when I saw this new interpretation of my poem curling off that old press.