Movable Type: Birds, Thoughts, Print

Type Flight is a hand-typeset and hand-bound limited edition poetic artist’s book that disassembles and reassembles a simple three-line poem to experiment with questions of metaphor and its layering, the type letter as a thing in itself, and relationships between human and nonhuman in the making of material poetries. This article explores the correlations between Type Flight and the work and thinking of other poets concerned with typography, including Charles Olson and ‘Projective Verse’ and the pamphlets of Moschatel Press. It proposes the page as ‘woodland’ and examines the historical meanings of this term, as well as reflecting on the interplay between fixedness and fluidity in print poetics.