Golf For The Fun Of It

Beginning Literary Criticism

Paris Poems

Macerata Poems

Guanajuato Poems

Poems via Romea

Italian Poems

28 Jazz Variations

Rogue Rock Box of Poems

NW Haiku Sequence

Madrone Press LLC, a small press established in 1999, is currently dedicated to the publication of hand-crafted books of illustrated travel poetry and collaged art. It's takes as its mission the continuation of the poet's, calligrapher's, book artist's, and book binder's skills, those that have endured for more than a thousand years. It prides itself in continuing the art of the book, and it treats its publications as works of art.

Our young staff member, along with author, Michael Holstein, presented the publications of Madrone Press during the 2009 Wordstock book festival in Portland, Oregon. Our dual themes for the festival were "We are book people" and "Books by Hand."

I was inspired to write Italian Poems during a four-month residence in Siena during the fall of 2006. Those who cannot sketch, draw, or paint as they pass through autumnal Italy, let them write poetry. For me, at least, I knew no better way to capture Tuscan works and days than with the net of poetry. Having finished the book, what I now most like is watching people open and explore it. Or so I thought. I gradually found, however, that I wanted more than words to say what I had to say. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," says Keats. I wanted a "thingness" to my poetry. I wanted extra dimensions to words, something tactile, something more than words, something with the look and feel of Italy, an artist's book. What I wanted first was illustrations for my poems. Dore's illustrations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have always enhanced that poem for me in the same way as Dickens' illustrators were for me reading his novels imaginatively more essential than incidental. I found the perfect illustrative medium in Sorrento in the workshops of intarsia craftsmen, those who work in inlaid wood design, and have inherited the craft from the Islamic craftsmen into Europe via Sicily and yes, Siena. Once they understood that I was a poet ("Io sono poeta") and I was intent on making my own books ("Faccio libri a mano"), they were generous with their interest and gifts of traditional designs. Those became the perfect source from which I could cull suggestive fragments and create collages. They became my marginalia, perfect visual interpretations and emphases for my lines. What immense satisfaction there is when the workman finds at hand exactly the right tool! My other ancillary art was the decorative Italian papers I found in stationer's and artists' shops, especially the hand-made paper in Siena and Florence. So much did they move me with their freight of traditional Italian design, I felt that they deserved their own signature. Thus, the middle of my book is a visual ode to Italian paper art and design. Having gone that far in visual enhancement, I decided to superintend the production of my book. I chose the fonts, laid out the pages, arranged the illustrative material, selected the paper, copied the pages, hand-colored many of the illustrations, assembled the decorative signature, cutting the paper with a bread knife, and bound the collection using an ice pick I bought in the open market and needle and thread I bought in a ribbon and button shop. Each book is slightly different, in its cover, in the selection of papers I use, in the materials I use to sew and bind it. True travel is mindful and reflective. My attention to subject matter, word choice, and always the peripheral details of our travel and stay in Italy deepened my attention to each day. Once I discovered that many of my favorite stopping places--restaurants, bars, fountains, museums--were in fact on the thousand-year old Francigena Road, the road pilgrims took from Paris (later, London) to Rome (later the Holy Land), I had the conceptual basis and subtitle for my volume. It would be a record of voices, ancient and modern, heard and imagined, from along the pilgrim's age-old route. Not prayer, but poetry would be the inner record of my pilgrimage.