This Page is an Occupied Territory

Poet Adeena Karasick sent me her poem “This Page is an Occupied Territory,” written in reaction to the war in Gaza and Israel, and asked if I’d like to collaborate again. I felt an urgency to work on it. The title alone called for a graphic treatment, so I began visualizing the text, which didn’t want to be contained within a standard book dimension. It grew in size like the expanding war and daily bombardment of devastating news. I had the idea of doing it as a tabloid-sized, newspaper-like publication.

After reading the poem, I envisioned what it might look like and that it would involve letterpress printing elements that could be used as blockades, barricades, and border crossings. I looked at aerial photographs of occupied territories and tried imagining myself being trapped inside in an urban war zone. I made sketches, then letterpress printed wood-type characters, punctuation, dingbats, metal rules, borders, ornaments, and wood “furniture” printed “type-high” on a letterpress (proofing press) at New York’s Center for Book Arts.

I made scans of the prints and visualized the poem in Adobe InDesign. The entire text—set in Knockout Middleweight—lives within in an around these inky, bordered environments. The poem begins open-aired, with room to wander around in. As the poem progresses, the text and occupied spaces become more and more boxed in, askew, and rubbled-to-pieces.

With “This Page,” I created a typographic landscape. The text and the image are one.

This work is inherently meta/self-referential. The writing and design speaks to occupied territories—not only throughout history and in Gaza today—but also to the occupied terrain of language itself, the words on the page, which are occupied by the writer, designer, reader, by typography, ink, edges, the turning, stopping and starting of pages.

In live presentations, this newspaper poem/zine/book functions as performance score/shaped-note hymnal for Adeena’s incantations. We project animated sequences, so audience members can read along as she performs. Primarily, the publication serves as a score for the reader, either to be read silently to themselves, or out loud.