Zumbar Press hopes to continually develop work with poets who have an ethereal, humanistic, and childlike sense of the aural, writing through the ear as the eye. What is the sound of structure? How might the structure of a letter, of letters becoming words, of words becoming lines all sound themselves? And, if the printed word originated from bodily gestures, what does this tell us about our relationship to words as letters or to language in general?
Therefore, the intent of this press is to print work that nourishes the roots which poetry has with orality-- work that is a continuous invitation to see outside traditional narrative structure-- work that endeavors to sound the unrecorded or the unvoiced.
To do this, Zumbar Press will stumble off the small press block a bit in the way that it handles publishing works of poetry in an effort to recapture the spirit of collaboration that ensues between a letterpress printer and a poet. For each broadside or chapbook that Zumbar plans to publish, details of the printing process will be continually recorded and updated on the zumming the bar page for this site.
This unique approach to publishing will enable Zumbar to unveil something that otherwise goes unrecorded during the process of publishing works of poetry, and it is something that very much needs to be explored and preserved by poets who are also printers.
Naturally, this means that Zumbar will take its time with each body of work that it intends to publish slowly. Compared to the world of high-speed, digital printing that we live in, the craft of letterpress printing is a slow art, and setting type demands new levels of patience and appreciation for the printed word. Zumbar celebrates this and looks forward to dialogues that will spiral forth between the poet-as-printer-the-printer-as-poet over time.
