A broadside is merely a piece of paper with a message on it. A poetry broadside is so much more. Poets and Artists (sometimes one in the same) come together to create letterpress prints of poems and accompany them with visual imagery.
My poet husband was my first step into printing broadsides for poets. I printed the cover art of one of his chapbooks "Cadence." Years later, my first actual broadside was for a page from his manuscript "Nouveaux Contes de Fées (New Fairy Tales)." As members of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, it was just naturally the next step. We donate our time and materials to create an edition for each guest poet. It has been such a wonderful experience to translate a poet's words into a visual to accompany it.
Note: We dream of having a letterpress machine some day to do the poems letter by letter. For now, though, we get our letterpress plates from Boxcar Press in Syracuse, NY. (We love them!)