how to make a print
some printing tips
some helpful printmaking tips
Clean, the lines, and clean, your fingers, too, or else you peel the thick page from where it’s lying and it gets marked up. This can mar the design, obviously, like when a snubbed lover throws scalding water over a beautiful young man’s face, so that no one else will want what he does not have.
Wash your hands. With the right equipment, you can make 200 prints in an hour. You never know how the type in the old machines might have been used before… a campaign cartoon against FDR’s third term, for example, his nose shown bigger than it really was: a crook and a joker with a mannish wife. Or other uses.
When you meet someone, only on very certain occasions is it acceptable to ask how sick they are, such as when you’re about to have sex. Even then very often the only thing you can do is trust they were telling the truth.
Things come back. Even the stories scrubbed out of history leave small traces you can assemble if you are good at piecing together the most oblique fragments in medical records, prison sentences, the writings of parish priests on a small island somewhere no one looks.
Imagine a youth sleeping with a great lord’s wife. Their bodies are found dozing afterwards in the late afternoon light. Imagine that their bodies, then, after the lord slaughters them for their transgression, are buried in the same grave, the woman’s body on top because she was of noble blood. This kind of catastrophe can be avoided. When printing, be clean!
Remember that in a printmaking workshop, there is an abundance of light, and big windows, and broad tables, broad like the shoulders of farmers. Things feel cleaner when they are bright, and have the space to spread out. Mountains are clean when you look at them from far away and cannot see the many deaths of songbirds there, and the small girl screaming inside a wooden house.
Wash your hands before you come up against the stately metal of the presses. Manipulate the letters and the plates, there, to show a picture on an empty page the way a baby’s blank mouth is filled with teeth. No blemishes on the paper. No ink from other jobs on your hands. A print is clean when the lines avoid any reduplication or blurring – things show up only once.
If the ink your finger smudged was on the edge of the paper, far away from the design, there is a solution. Take sandpaper and scourge the page until it flakes tiny dry flecks, like skin. Gradually shave off the top layer where the ink primly sits. All that’s left will be a slight roughness barely discernable except until you take a finger and rub it across the page, feel the sensitive tip shiver.
Apollo Chastain (he/they/she) is either crying in the club or crying in the archive. Apollo’s work has been supported by Tin House and the Smithsonian Institution and appears or is forthcoming in journals including poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Meridian, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Foglifter, among others. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize, nominee for a Pushcart Prize, and an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Visit them at apollopoet.wordpress.com, or on Instagram @apollo.chastain.
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