| "Évora a Doce" is a poem which chronicles a food epiphany in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. It is a prototype poem for BroadsideOnline, an internet site where visitors are invited to have a literary experience in the tradition of the letterpress broadside. A broadside, by Twentieth Century definition, is a limited edition print with literary content. It's a poster with a poem on it, and usually, an image. This definition changes, however, depending on which century you visit. The original definition was naval, and military: firing all of a ship's cannons simultaneously from one side directly at another ship, a most devastating blow. During the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, it became a form of informal news: a single sheet of paper (the size of a printer's “broadside” sheet), posted on village walls, a venue for subjective opinion and uncensored cultural reports. The American Revolution was propelled by political broadsides, which carried on the fighting spirit of the original genre. By the early Twentieth Century, with the increase in communication technology and the fading of the use of handset lead type, the broadside had become a source of first edition printing of poetry and art. One of the most famous examples of this is the collaboration between poet Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delauney in 1913, "La Prose du Transsibérian et de la Petite Jehanne de France." They referred to it as "the first simultaneous book." The thoughtfulness, collaboration, and humor which they brought to this project is typical of broadside work, as is the passion to present poetry in a form so related to the illustration that it becomes a new genre, something which one can live with, and collect, like a painting. BroadsideOnline takes broadside beyond the limited definition and into the Twenty-first century. |