After driving through a March snowstorm, passing many pickup trucks and overturned semis on my way from Des Moines, I arrived at the Center for the Book on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City. As we stepped inside and were warmed by coffees, poet/printmaker/bookmaker Margaret Yapp and I started chatting about their newly published, inaugural book of poetry Green for Luck. As we discussed their book, Yapp moved between poised stillness and fluid motion — resting a dignified hand on top of the printing press as if for a presidential portrait, then tilting to roll paper through the press with cool confidence and grace. Green for Luck proved to be a generative jumping-off point to talk about their techniques, tools, and intentions that move them as an artist. They began by mixing ink.

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Margaret Yapp: Today we are going to be printing on a Vandercook SP15. These are letterpress printing machines from the 50s and 60s. That’s what I’m learning to print on here at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. And today we are printing one of my own poems.

I really struggle with mixing ink, ‘cause I’m really coming at this with an interest in the poetry. I think I am catching up with the book element. Mixing ink, I never get the color I want. But we’ll see what this looks like.

[The press is still in a way only a machine can be. The ink Margaret prepares smells almost empty, and has a suspended look like tar, of history and possibility. We both take sips of our coffees.]

Ian Carstens: I think of your work as written, not always with text but written somehow. So why this MFA in the Book Arts at the University here? And maybe, simply, why the book?

Margaret Yapp: Honestly, part of it is a funding thing. When I was in the poetry program at the University of Iowa, which is my main focus, I started taking classes. And there was a semester where, honestly, there weren’t any poetry seminars that were interesting to me. And I had visited a friend down here who printed one of my poems on letterpress and it was astonishing. I had never really thought about language as a material.

So, that shifted things. And of course, I wanted a book deal—like, don't we all? The reality is that my poems live in a book. It makes sense for me to consider the book as a vehicle, not something you can extract from the poetry.

[Margaret turns on the press and applies ink. It begins with a hiss like a rattlesnake with a bionic rattler, then what sounds like a shotgun kiss between a vacuum and a leaf blower. Once it starts to settle, there is a building metallic hum increasing in depth, like a Zamboni crunching over a tiny piñata.]

With this press, you always have to apply extra ink to the middle roller. This sounds so cheesy, but I mean it: they all have their own personalities. The press becomes in control of what you’re doing. That’s another thing I like about this. With poems, I feel so in control of what they are — I’m a control freak about some things, but with these machines, you can’t. But that feels off topic.

Ian Carstens: Maybe not. I immediately think of the homesteader movement in the US. You're making your own honey, your own peas, your own house. But you have to do so in community, which includes the machines you work with. And this has me curious about how recognizing personality and possibility for control in machines is a political statement — that interconnectedness runs deep and far. Perhaps similarly there is a degree of response to capitalism?

Margaret Yapp: Yeah, that DIY culture.

[Margaret sets a plate on the machine, then feeds a piece of paper into the press, rolling the ink onto it. There is a little anxiety, a held breath as each page is peeled away.]

Ian Carstens: And maybe taking us back is helpful. When I was studying art at Luther College, where we met, I really latched on to understanding art as existing theoretically or above certain realities. Art for art's sake. Which now to me seems limited and benefitting only some. What makes more sense to me now is focusing on people who have or could make art instead of being so concerned with classifying people as artists and artworks as artworks. I imagine some of your experiences with art and writing education might be similar? I’m curious how you’ve arrived here now? And to be blunt, what matters to you?

Margaret Yapp: Poetry started as an oral form. As one of my teachers, Tracie Morris says, “poetry was the source of language.” From poetry comes the written language. Poems on a page are a fairly new invention. It’s the medium I’m interested in because a book accomplishes a similar thing to a live performance. It’s based in time, with the turning of the pages in codex form. A book inherently mimics time passing. So, what matters to me is the poem first and foremost because I’m interested in people reading my poems. I’m not writing in solitude. I want to think really critically about how they’re presented. Our current publishing reality is such that a poetry book will probably be an 8x5 inch or 6x9 inch paperback codex book. I know that and I'm interested in having as much control over that as possible, using the realities of that form to influence the poems in some capacity. What matters to me is to be true to the poem. I think that we have some control over what poems become, but they also have their own desires and I try to listen to what they are and then try to have them fit within the vehicle that I'm given. I would love to get a book deal or be able to publish a book where each page is 12 inches wide, so that the lines can be as long as they need to, but that’s probably just not going to happen unless I make my own book by hand or get extremely famous! I do think online publishing gives us a lot of opportunities to play with form, but I'm somewhat committed to a physical book. I like the intimacy of a physical book; I want something people can hold and have a physical relationship with. I don't know, it's an ego thing too, of course — like, I want that 8x5 inch paperback published.

[The room now has a faint metallic smell, intermixed with the bitterness of our coffees, like how I imagine an assembly-line factory-floor smells.]

Ian Carstens: I think that confinement or set of creative constraints reminds me of a story an artist friend, Bonnie Tarses, told me. At a school in Montana, kids would play right up alongside the school building when their playground had no fence, but when the fence was added, they ran around all over the grounds. I’m thinking about freedom and independence in relation to how you make your work and also how a reader might approach it. For instance, while reading Green for Luck, I was struck by how I started watching myself read. The decorum of reading and the performance of reading. Should I turn my head? Should I turn the book? What is the right thing to do? What is acceptable?

Margaret Yapp: Thank you for saying that because that is really what I was hoping to accomplish – specifically, the play with typography and book design. I have this other series of poems, “Glacial Erratics,” that are all 90° angles, and they also cut across the gutter, or the middle of the book. I wanted readers to wonder what they should do with their head and what they should do with their hands. I wanted it to feel a little disorienting. Those poems are about glacial erratics, which are rocks that are left behind after glaciers pass over - like a huge boulder in the middle of a field that doesn't match what's around. The content of those poems is a lot of quotes, things people were saying around me, jokes and etymology stuff, but they were meant to be broken across the eight poems so there's not any sort of narrative consistency. The form was an extension of that content very directly and also an attempt to, like you were saying, play with book form. And this isn't a new thing. People have been doing this for a long time. When we think of a classic poem, we might think of left aligned, short lines. That's not all poetry and hasn't ever been.

Reading is a physical experience and language is a physical experience.

Ian Carstens: Your work feels so confident in not being concerned about the “commodifiable new.” This is a certain type of gift you’re giving: to not give or maybe even require anything new. Green for Luck does this without an edge of showmanship or pretension. You're working with historical things, like these letterpresses and type and books, but it feels so approachable and grounded. Could you speak more about that?

[Margaret pauses. Levers are moved and clicks result. Snowmelt drips on the window behind them. The river, farther back in the distance, moves slowly, almost frozen.]

Margaret Yapp: I listened to an interview with poet Fred Moten, and he said: “I'm proud to say I've never had an original idea” and that always stuck with me. It's like, “yeah, me neither.” I think writing can feel like a very solitary thing. You're sitting alone, writing with a pen or typing on a computer, but it's so collaborative, inherently. I've mentioned a few times now: language as the material. All poetry is found poetry because we're using a material that we've been taught, that we didn't create ourselves, and we're using phrasing and grammar that we didn't create. So we're taking from what's around us, what we hear, what we read, and that gets filtered through the colander of our brains and comes out on a page, and none of it was original. And then printing, this type of work, is also collaborative. I am usually printing other people's poems at this point, and there's the collaboration with the poem, the poet, and then also the physical material (the press, the paper, the ink, the type). All the type we use was made by somebody and designed by somebody else. I can't ignore that.

Ian Carstens: Do you have a concern about your work getting too insular or “insider baseball”? I’m thinking about how elitism can form so easily in academic settings. I mean, I accidentally parked in front of what I think is the Writers’ Workshop house, which truthfully, I really only know about from Girls.

Margaret Yapp: In front of Dey House? Did you know the Writers’ Workshop was CIA-funded in the 50s? Did you know that? At the same time the CIA was investigating James Baldwin, they were funding the Writer's Workshop.

[Margaret stops to show me the ridges of the plate. They move their fingers over it, sounding like pulling on a prosthetic. They continue adjusting and printing.]

Ian Carstens: Woah, that's like the CIA using Abstract Expressionism as a tool of US propaganda. So, thinking about that context and program. But also in general, how important is being at the table, being in the know, knowing the handshake, getting the joke, or being in on it?

Margaret Yapp: I have a lot of thoughts on this. I came into the poetry program here feeling like I didn't know anything. I was not in the know. I had been writing and I studied poetry at Luther, but I didn't have a sense of what this MFA world was. But I’m definitely more in the know now. I have an understanding of poetry as a form and its history and I have met a lot of people in this program, but I am not personally interested in creating art that is exclusionary or working within poetry for poetry's sake. It doesn't feel interesting to me and it's not what I like to read. People talk about a poet's poet, and I hope I'm not writing stuff that's like that. I want my poems to be entertaining and sort of funny sometimes and not mysterious or tough to access even though I know they're sometimes abstract and don’t use conventional grammar or full sentences. I hope that there's enough of an easygoing voice throughout them that they don’t freak people out.

[The press wines to a sudden stop, as Margaret flips a switch. The subtle smell of ink wafts, and we talk with only the sound of the room's HVAC moving heat around. It feels like an airplane landing and the engines changing pitch—you can feel the absence of noise.]

Ian Carstens: I see modes of communication that are really familiar in Green for Luck. Some poems reminded me of texting, which has this weird absence of tone, but then I'll find myself laughing at something like a friend sent it to me. And then you use the script format in the middle of Green for Luck. It seems like two voices, and the text goes back and forth across the gutter.

Margaret Yapp: Yes, the long poem “C” is definitely meant to be a script - the two voices are separated by the gutter, so the reader has to zig-zag across the page spread.

Ian Carstens: And you don't have explicit instructions for us, which reminds me of conceptual art. Why not?

Margaret Yapp: I wondered a lot if I should have more clear language or direction to instruct the reader that “C” is two voices. I ultimately landed on including some gestures toward this, but trusting the reader to figure it out, or trusting that the poem holds up even if the reader doesn’t read it how it’s intended. For example, on the first two pages of “C”, there are a lot of “should”s to instruct the reader what to do. I never want to over-explain, because poems have a life of their own and shouldn’t come with instructions. I think instructions take away some fun, and can even be disrespectful to the reader.  I think a poem can be open enough that there are other stories that fit the language, fit the structure, that aren’t what the poet meant. That’s what I would hope for anything I write.

Ian Carstens: That sounds to me like the audience is both in question and not in question when you're making or writing. Which speaks to the intentionality that you just described of stepping off a little bit, leaving some space. Like your collage practice too, which has a great deal of designed space. So, how much do other people matter when you consider what you’re making or writing? How much does what you want matter in what you make?

Margaret Yapp: As a kid I was always making little books, and so I think I have interests that are writing-related, performance-related, and making-related. And a book feels like the perfect vehicle for all three of those things. Making a book is very physical, the printing is very physical, and I like that involvement with the physical body. Also, I am very interested in reading stuff out loud. Not all of these poems lend themselves to oral performance, but the newer ones in Green For Luck are very much about reading it out loud. For example, the written version of “C” doesn’t feel like the real piece. The oral version would be, and the written text is a record of that. I feel like I’m getting to your earlier question of where does this project sit? Is it primarily poetry or is it something else? I think poetry feels like the closest thing, but some parts I’d call a play, or maybe poet’s theater. Although, poet’s theater, I think, is intended to be not recorded on a page, so I'm not sure.

Ian Carstens: I didn't expect to see a Table of Contents page. Could you tell me about including that?

Margaret Yapp: I intended for it to be kind of a poem in itself. And if you look at the titles on the TOC page, they don’t necessarily include the name of the poem, so it is sort of again getting at playing with the act of reading and what that is and how a book is organized.

Ian Carstens: That has me super curious about how you see this work existing in a digital form. I’m thinking about how you set up this book formally and I’m imagining an internet bot trying to crawl this text. In a way, you’re breaking or moving around the grid in really intentional ways. And it has me thinking about what you said earlier about listening to a poem.

Margaret Yapp: There's silence around all these lines and there's breath around all these lines. So I think, in a formal sense, what's unsaid or the white space left on a page can serve to add airiness or openness or flexibility to the poem. Or it can also serve, if there's a lack of white space, to add a sense of claustrophobia. I think leaving out a certain grammatical sense can change the reader's relationship with the piece. And then socially and sort of politically, I think that there are a lot of things that I write about for myself that I do not put out publicly. There's stuff with my family that I would never put in a book. I hear writers say sometimes, “Well, if it's your life then you have the right to write about it,” and I don't necessarily agree with that. It becomes a matter of economy, too. How can you say the most with the least amount of words? Do I need that line or not? I ask that about every single word in these poems. There are a lot of reasons you might need it, but if you can't find a reason, you better cut it.

The poems kind of just come to me now. So that doesn't really feel like I make the choice to write them down. It feels reflexive at this point. And just sort of like a part of my day. I don't write every day, but it feels like a part of how my brain works. But the sharing of it—publishing is weird because this isn't a money grab for me by any means, you know? If you write a hit novel, like, that can change your life. This isn't going to do that for me. But it is about wanting to be part of the poetry conversation, wanting to be read, wanting to read. I struggle with knowing where is that? What is that?

Ian Carstens: Why do you put stuff out? What do you see the artist's role in society to be and what should it be? Being so aware of reading and interacting with your book on so many levels reminded me of how art is an applied concept, particularly how art has been a part of projects of power. I’m thinking here of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s writing on Imperialism and archives. So, how do you see yourself and your work as a player in all of this?

Margaret Yapp: The artist’s role in society is a really humongous question with probably infinite answers. Humanity’s ability to enjoy art, to be entertained by art, and our drive to make art has immense power – art can cause emotion, and emotion can create real change in mindset, can drive us to take action, can form community. This can have a real-world impact in long-lasting ways. The powers that be know this. I mean, that’s what the CIA stuff was all about. To be clear, I don’t think that my poems are of any social or political importance related to any of the ongoing crises, multiple genocides, and other continuing emergencies in our world. There are a lot of poetry books that are, a lot of writers and artists that are making important and urgent work that has the capacity to create real change toward justice – but I wouldn’t include myself in that list in any means. Here are a few poets I would recommend: Layli Long Soldier, Mosab Abu Toha, Tracie Morris. But my poems and why I want to publish them? Well, I need a book to get a good teaching job. I want to publish because I have an ego on me, I like to entertain. I want to make people laugh, maybe make them grimace, or at least enjoy the sounds of a poem. I love writing poems, and if people want to publish them and read them and listen to me read every once in a while – I’m going to ride that wave as long as I can.

Ian Carstens: I can say I’m one person who is glad you do. I do feel that your work is political at times. I’m thinking about your poster for The Swine Republic, and your project of taking photos of tampons you saw outside. Those are political works to me. Yes, very internet funny, irreverent, but with a strong political essence. And whimsy and political statements feel like they’re good friends. There are really important artists and artworks that put those two in conversation, including your work.

But on a slightly different note, you have a poem that mentions both brown sugar and the mall in the same phrase, and when I read it I said out loud (too loud): “of course.” It took me back to being a pimply teenager lurking around with nothing to do at the Kennedy Mall in Dubuque, Iowa. Green for Luck feels so of this place, this region, so Midwestern if you will.

Margaret Yapp: It is. I can't take out place from these poems. My friend Steven Duong, who blurbed the book, wrote that “Margaret's poems are about the vague notion of giving a blowjob to the Midwest.” I think in all of these poems there's some reference to where I was when I was writing them, and I've lived in Iowa, and I've lived in Minnesota, and I'm back in my hometown. After being gone for ten years and spending all my time writing, this was a really emotionally nostalgic, sentimental, sort of psychological task. I'm so sentimental, sort of inherently, so it was this crazy overload of images from my childhood, memories from my childhood. Plant life comes in here a lot, too. In quite a few of the poems, I'm mentioning plants that grow around here or talking about what doesn't grow around here. The work I've done about pig farming is not in this book, but I was working on it at the same time and so there are a lot of mentions of the ecological devastation of Iowa. We’re so agriculturally heavy, and we're the state that's been changed the most of any state in the country. We're in a really weird part of the country that's been changed really, really fast, and there's everything that comes with being settled by colonizers – a lot of violence and bloodshed, all of which was really recent. So, that's all in this book because I live here. I would say it's a Midwestern book. It's funny, the book is on the Walmart website, and they must have used AI to write the blurb because it calls me a “poet from the American Midwest,” which is so goofy, but I guess that's true. And I'm very proud of being a “towny” back in Iowa City, so that's here in the book, too. And then getting at what you were talking about earlier, about tampons and such… I definitely don’t set out to write about gender, but of course the world still hates women, so that enters my life and therefore enters my poems. And I’m really happy I have the ability to be crass and write about tampons and body hair and sex. Not too long ago, I wouldn’t have been allowed to publish something like that.

Ian Carstens: And even access to these tools, like printing presses, is a recent thing too. I’m curious how you are thinking about what will happen when you don't have access to this specific machine? Or more broadly, do you think about having a contingency plan for when your access or accessibility might change for some reason?

Margaret Yapp: Yeah, I'm planning ahead. Yes, this is just a gift and I'm so scared for when I won't have access to this studio anymore.  I want one of these guys, a Vandercook SP15, so bad but they're like $10,000. Public Space One has a press co-op, so if I'm still in Iowa City, which is feeling more and more like the plan, I can print there, but they don't have as much type or equipment as we do here at the U of Iowa Center for the Book, of course. And if I end up moving back to Minneapolis, there's a press co-op there. So there are community options. I would love my own just because I love working from home. So I’ll save up money, maybe try to get a grant. My friend has one that's in a storage unit in Des Moines right now, actually, so I could borrow that because she's currently in grad school not in the US. So, we'll see, but it might mean I don't hand print for a while and just do digital stuff and have to rethink my medium because of cost. Also, I have feelers out with old Iowa printers. Basically, what people say is you wait for someone to die and then their family sells it for really cheap. Because these aren't being made anymore, you just have to be on the lookout.

My job on campus is to oil them, clean them, and do minor stuff. I wouldn't be able to do anything too complicated. There's one guy who owns the patents for all of the little parts that might break so you have to call him for those. He lives in Colorado; I think his name's Fritz or something. There's not a ton of people with these machines, so there's a couple other guys who travel the country and do big repairs for people.

Ian Carstens: So, what do you see yourself doing when you're older?

[Margaret moves back into a position to print. They turn the machine on, now with its familiar whirs and airs. With the press still “warmed up,” it now sounds like the big desktop computer of my childhood, complete with the chipping and pixelated bubbling of a dial-up modem. Margaret begins to print again.]

Margaret Yapp: I don't even know. I have felt really attached to my identity as a poet and that being my primary thing, and I think I'm getting comfortable with that not being what I do always and feeling more free to learn other stuff. But poetry is a good form because you can do it from wherever. I think about that a lot too because I pinched a nerve the other day distributing type and had to take a break. Printing is a physical thing that I might not be able to do forever, but hopefully poetry is something that I can do no matter what happens to my body.

I think I'm still figuring out letterpress printing. It helped me think about the poem as physical. I'm not printing my own poems as much, but when I do print my poems, the printing feels very much an extension of the writing process, and in some sense that's true even if I'm printing someone else's words. There's a long history of poets printing because poetry is a visual form, in addition to being literary. So, the attention to the visual feels natural and gives me even more control over the words and how they appear physically.

Ian Carstens: When I think of printmaking, I think of repetition or versions. Are you making the same work over and over again, but variations of it? Or how do you think about your works in relation to each other?

Margaret Yapp: I feel that very much with poetry that I'm writing the same poem over and over. I became really obsessed a few years ago with palimpsests. When we were writing on parchment or animal skin, it was so expensive and hard to make that people would scrape off the old ink and reuse it. It’d be scraped physically with a knife or removed chemically, but people weren't always very good at removing the ink all the way, so there would be leftover remnants of whatever the first printed or first written things were. I became very interested in that conceptually as what's left over from the past poem onto what you're currently writing. I feel that way about my writing. Whereas, especially with letterpress, if you're using metal type, you're probably distributing the poem pretty quickly after, so the edition is the edition. It's never going to be the exact same thing again. So it feels very much like a unified process. A poem feels ever going. I also think that all the projects are related. What I learned from one will apply to the next one.

Ian Carstens: That's interesting. The objects are parts of the process. The various tools we have to make a book would impact how we think about what a book is. And yet the book has its own life.

Margaret Yapp:  It took me a long time to send in my last edits of Green for Luck. I felt like I was letting go of this thing, and now I no longer have control over it, which is just simply true. Keith Pilapil Lesmeister of EastOver Press was so supportive and had to badger me to send in drafts. And now that I've sent in my final edits, I'm not looking at these poems anymore until I have to. They feel done and I'll take what I learned from them and try to write new stuff. Also, since being done with the Poetry program at Iowa, I think I've kind of returned to some of the stuff I was doing before that, which is also exciting.

Ian Carstens: Which is bringing me back to how this printing press is such an involved piece of technology. It had a big impact, obviously, when it was first introduced, but there are other ways of making books. The press is such a stationary, solid machine, but it can help you to make things that are fluid and light and agile. Green For Luck and talking with you now has shown me how much there is to each step of a book's life cycle. All of the particulars have such meaning, such potency. And it feels like I’m watching alchemy.

[Margaret runs a final piece of paper through the press and shuts down the machine. The studio feels like a kitchen after a four-course meal has been prepared – the smells all belong here; the sounds still echo in every piece of furniture and surface.]

Margaret Yapp: I use this polymer stuff for a lot of line work images and it's really easy, hardly no fussing. If I had type on there, it would have taken me maybe 45 minutes to get it where I wanted just because you're adjusting pieces of metal instead of a sticker. Right now, I feel like a lot of what I'm printing I could do digitally: type setting, line art, things like that. But since I have access to these machines right now, I'm trying to use them as much as I can. I'll hand print when I'm using elements like handmade paper because you can't run a lot of handmade paper through a digital printer. It would break because of the fibers. Also, anything with a different sort of shape or dimension that doesn't fit into a digital printer I'd have to use this press too. And then also there's the impression. There are digital ways you could do that now too with embossment, but the impression on a broadside is so lovely and special to me. And as silly as it sounds, this MFA was a professional move for me to be like, “I'm trying to do this, to figure out how I can become a publisher in the way that I want to be.” I'm here to work and to learn and experiment but not to play around like I was in the Poetry program, if that makes sense? I'm trying to just print as much as possible so that I know how.

Ian Carstens: Wait, is that Crisco?

Margaret Yapp: You put baking Crisco on the rollers at the end. Isn't that funny? And it loosens everything up. It's used in baking, yes, but it has cleaning properties. It's kind of disgusting, but it really helps cause if I hadn't used it, this would not be coming off like this.