Revolutionary Letters

“Like many other innocents growing up, I began to wonder if the whole complex of libertarian ideas and promises I was told to live by and to defend with my life was not a pious fraud. (…) If I accepted the disparity in the human condition existing all around me, I knew I was committing the greatest of sins: that of hypocrisy, which blinds you to your own failings and gives you a false idea of your own position and purpose in the world. Pressing forward for some answer to the accursed questions confronting every practicing citizen, I finally began to understand that a ‘revolutionary morality’ is extricably woven into the expanding network of the world’s advance”
– ‘On Creating Revolutionary Art and Going Out of Print’, Truman Nelson (Revolutionary Literature, #99xx)

On New Year’s Eve 1968, poet Diane di Prima wrote to fellow poet Audre Lorde about her latest poems enclosing ‘Revolutionary Letters’ in a separate envelope. By 1971 the first batch was published, with more letters added in 1974. Later followed a fourth and fifth edition and di Prima would continue to add to the sequence right up until har passing in 2020. Her last wish for the final edition to be published in 2021, was a plea to change the typeface, claiming it ‘too fancy’ . “If we changed the font at that point”, her editor writes, “we would’ve had to start all over, because, in order to fit everything into the Pocket Poets trim size, we’d had to cheat the grid at every turn, encroaching on margins and gutters, tweaking the kerning, the whole nine, and different fonts never line up exactly, even in the same point-size. The poems are set in Garamond, which is about the most ordinary font you could set a book of poems in; it wasn’t fancy at all!”  After some discussion, it emerged that what di Prima really hated about Garamond was the ampersand. “It looked”, she said “like a fat man pushing a lawnmower”. This was too specific not to comply, so the designer offered alternatives, eventually resulting in possibly the only book set in Garamond with Miller ampersands. 

By way of di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letters’, we will investigate the typographical participation to transmitting a revolutionary morality, drawing benefit from the duo meaning of a ‘letter’, as in ‘message’, and ‘letter’ as in ‘symbol’. 

The seminar will include guest teaching by British graphic designer and publisher (At Last Books) Philip Baber, who is interested in the ways in which experimental poets of the post-war period reimagined the format of the page. Baber will discuss how nonconformist poets and publishers of the later twentieth century appropriate or resist capitalist literary technologies. Swiss graphic designer and publisher (Die Schönsten Schwulen Bücher) Sabo Day will also guest lecture, presenting his experience working on artist books with Bea Schlingelhoff, Sands Murray-Wassink and Nora Turato. Artists who integrate bespoke lettering and typedesign as a direct pushback on mainstream history.

Participants of the seminar will produce a full set of letters, and have the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of type history while testing methodologies for creating and using font families, possibly in direct alignment with progressive content or goals specifically aimed on alternatives to artificial intelligence. We will discuss the antagonist tensions of unconventional typesetting, reproduction, legibility, command of language and distribution of critical thinking. As poet Barbara Guest wrote some time after the invention of the personal computer: “I am of the blasphemous opinion that the word processing program, no matter how necessary, can also be a memory falsifier.” 

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #49
Machinery: extended hands of man
doing man’s work. Diverted rivers
washing my clothes, diverted fire
dancing in wires, making light;
and heat. To see it thus is to see it, even
diverted rivers must resume their course, and fire
consume, whatever name you call it.
– ‘Revolutionary Letters’, Diane di Prima (City Light Books, 1971, 1974, 1979, 2021)

The seminar with thus be 1) a study of how to participate to a revolution (each student must think about what a revolution is, and bring an example to class), we will also look at current revolutions or thoughts on what it will look like, and how to engage or not. we will read diane de prima’s letters as example. 2) write/make letters for the revolution, reach out to specific people? 3) use this research to make a typeface. Think about how the type could help bring the topic across.

– the revolution of typeface making, how is alters writing and thinking: the history of writing.
– we could read “Schopenhauer as educator” and debate the fight against the revolution of Ai, and watch the lecture of J. Dakota Brown. Is small publishers the best tool against Ai?