Squeegee
Ames
1985
Mark Strand and I watched an art student pull a silk screen broadside of one of his poems. The letters were the last thing to be printed. The fine paper being used had already been randomly stained with horizontal blobs of pastel colors in such a way that no two were alike. The student asked Strand if he would like to try. He pulled the squeegee expertly, the black ink thinning out over the silk. I pulled one too. This was the easy part, I thought, the squeak the squeegee made going slowly over the silk, the words appearing magically below as you pull the ink along. Later, when we went back, the sheets had been hung up to dry like laundry. Strand signed and numbered each one over the number of the whole run. There were artist’s proofs as well that had interesting mistakes. He took home one of those. Some of the numbered sheets were given away at the reading. The rest were sold to raise money for Poet & Critic, the journal I edited. There was something so satisfying, he said, about writing with a squeegee.