Have you seen posters or flyers around your neighborhood or a city you’ve visited? Even with social media access growing by the day, posters and flyers are often still used to spread the news. Since the advent of movable type, people have used posters – also known as broadsides – to get information out quickly.
The Library of Congress has a large collection of broadsides. Some of these have been made available as part of Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera. The collection includes posters encouraging people to join the fight during the American Revolution and the Civil War. There are proclamations celebrating holidays or victories as well as advertisements for inventions such as the bicycle or the sewing machine.
But you can also find broadsides with poetry within this collection. A number of publishers printed broadsides as a way to highlight poets and their poetry. Some small presses such as the Unicorn Press and Laboratory Press of the Carnegie Institute of Technology used them as a way to share poetry outside of books. Sometimes the presses used elegant paper, beautiful lettering, and lovely artwork to highlight the poetry.
Look at the broadside for We Real Cool. What kind of mood does the broadside evoke? Does the broadside give an idea of where the poem might take place?
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Compare it with The Fall of Man. Would the art work used for We Real Cool work with this poem? Why or Why not?
Explore some of the poetry broadsides. What characteristics make a poem a good choice for a broadside?
Encourage your students to create broadsides of their favorite poems. Ask them why they choose specific imagery or lettering for the poems.
The essays from the Broadsides and Printed Ephemera collections provide additional information on the history of broadsides.
How can you incorporate poetry broadsides into your classroom activities?
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