Oceanographer of O

happy new year: books to go over with

2012-01-04T01:27:00.001Z

Thanks to nearest & dearest, the Oceanographer is equipped for 2012 with:

Simon Garfield, Just My Type: a Book about Fonts (paperback Profile, 2011; first pub. 2010). Journalistic & anecdotal (classified as 'Reference / Humour' ...) but informative; and great that this subject is now popular.

J.H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats, or, What There Is (Critical Documents, 2011). A prose, set in Song type, with a bibliography.

Jacques Rancière (trans. Steven Corcoran), Mallarmé: the Politics of the Siren (Continuum, 2011, first French pub. 1996). 'Mallarmé's problem is linked to the fact that the page is not only the material support of the poem, or the allegory of its obligation. It belongs to the very movement and texture of the poem. The surface of writing is the place of a taking-place.' p. 43).

Martin Rowson, Giving Offence (Seagull, 2009, 'Manifestos for the 21st Century' series). 'A cartoon that isn't knocking copy becomes merely propaganda' (p. 39). Rowson reveals how much hate you draw when you draw politics (Alastair Campbell's gratuitous foul-mouthery on merely seeing Rowson in the street is astonishing, p. 19). A beautifully made little volume by the Indian-based Seagull Books.

The first book actually read in 2012 is:

Susana Gardner, Herso: an Heirship in Waves (Black Radish Books, 2011), an innovative sequence full of wordplay and in a great range of registers and visual arrangements. Versions of parts of this exist in other forms including as an e-chapbook under Susana's wonderful Dusie project http://www.dusie.org/scrawlread.pdf I like especially the near-anagrammatic 'Minarets'.

Finally, here are some more or less visual or material books & publishers from 2011 that we just want to say Hoorah to. (All the terrible omissions may or may not be repaired later ... the one thing learned over the past -- good heavens -- 5 years of this sluggish blog is that only by accepting radical incompleteness is it possible to proceed at all ...). In no significant order:

1. Les Coleman, Afterthunks (Boekie Woekie, Amsterdam).

Looking at so many 'normal' cartoons has finally brought me to appreciate the refinement of the absurdist drawings and miniature poetic utterances of Les Coleman, associate of Glen Baxter, Patrick Hughes and their hero Anthony Earnshaw (as per previous post). This little collection has a foreword by N.F. Simpson, no less; is very simply but perfectly designed (by Colin Sackett).

2. Laurie Clark, 100 buttercups (WAX 366, Fife).

(This is a very bad photograph of) a chunky white book (actually published in 2010) with nothing in it front to back but reproduced colour portraits of one hundred buttercups, one per page, and a minimal colophon. This is not a piece of trivial prettiness, it is an emotionally moving and very robust acknowledgement of the demand to encounter, life and the other. Published by the brilliant David Bellingham. Where would you get it? Try the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, who have the 'special' ed (same, but with an original drawing) -- plus better images on their website.

3. David Miller, Black, Grey and White: a Book of Visual Sonnets (Veer, Birkbeck, London).

David Miller, visual sonnet, picture taken from the Veer website http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

One might wish higher production values for this very modest stapled pamphlet of beautiful brushed work, but Veer are doing more than any other British press at present for visual poetry. David Miller is a senior figure known predominantly for prose poetry and extended sequences (also writings on art, small press bibliography and other). This outbreak of visual sonnets is enormously consonant with his sensibility and yet very new, exciting.

4. Sean Bonney, The Commons (Openned, London).

More sonnets; all in words, in a perfectly commercially-viable little pocket format -- but done with the perceptiveness and style of everything undertaken by the Openned people. When did you last see a paperback in a hessian chemise -- with a badge! It is the coolest thing ever, and yet still somehow gritty, proper little press. Not to mention that Sean Bonney is now a poet of enormous maturity and depth as well as blistering energy and ideological venom (who has seen his Rimbaud versions issued too, this year, by the Association of Musical Marxists' new imprint Unkant, also in a surprisingly attractive style).

casual sunny november post (unfinished)

2012-01-01T23:22:00.092Z

'It is really very nice
to be in London on a sunny November day
and calling at Compendium to see Nick
who gives me nice new book by Fielding Dawson
....'
(Jim Burns, 'Casual poem')
At the Oxfam book & music shop in Marylebone High Street, sunny Saturday 19th November: Jim Burns's The Goldfish Speaks From Beyond the Grave (Salamander Imprint, 1976), a collection of poems with Frank O'Hara's influence all over it, by a poet who used to be published in Grosseteste Review, and it's illustrated with cartoons, by Gray Joliffe (later creator of Wicked Willie, arg). Part of the poet's determined Preston working-class credentials? (the main theme of the book is being drunk (& divorced ...)). Testament to 1970s broadmindedness anyway.

Poems by Jim Burns, cover design and ills. by Gray Jolliffe. Salamander, 1976.

Cartoons are everywhere, Oceanside, these last few months, because of Private Eye: the First 50 Years at the V&A. Are cartoons like poems? are they a verbo-visual genre of distinction, like emblems? Many cartoons are essentially illustrated jokes, though clearly 'the drawing should make the reader smile', ideally 'even before he laughs at the caption' (Willie Rushton on Giles). Many cartoons avoid the caption by putting the language in the image, or in a speech balloon. I am most attracted to the purist idea that 'the best jokes don't have any words' (Nicholas Whitmore, in a great interview). Some even when 'silent', are inspired by verbal gags -- puns, or 'Martian' literalisations. E.H. Gombrich, in his essay 'The Cartoonist's Armoury' allies this both to the archaic practice of personification and to Freudian psychology, where it comes close to the Surrealist absurd, flavour of a few cartoons in Private Eye, including some of Ed McLachlan's earlier images, and the work of two brilliant deceased artists, John Glashan and Kevin Woodcock. In August I picked up a lovely Glashan book from 1961 at the Capital Bookshop, Cardiff (27 Morgan Arcade CF10 1AF).

John Glashan, The Eye of the Needle (Dobson Books, 1961)

The 'imp of Surrealism' in England was Anthony Earnshaw (also, like Jim Burns jazz afficionado from the north of England -- in Leeds he taught Glen Baxter among others), of whose work there was a wonderful retrospective at Angela Flowers (Kingsland Road) during September. Original artwork for his cartoon strip series Wokker, made with Eric Thacker, was wonderful to see.

Anthony Earnshaw, from Seven Secret Alphabets

Simon Key, from Private Eye 1288 (May 2011, after the Alternative Vote referendum). See also the artist's website

culture

2011-08-15T21:34:00.002+01:00

BBC4: 'Great Thinkers in their own words'
Raymond Williams on Cambridge, Richard Hoggart's invention of cultural studies, and F.R. Leavis:

I'll say this for Sir Charles Percy Snow:
Wrote that 'Two Cultures' piece, years ago.
Of course Leavis was furious
Made remarks mosr injurious --
What exactly? You don't want to know.
(Not so much just 'Yes but ...' as just 'NO!')

G. Ingli James

DUMMY BOOKS: please do not touch

2011-05-14T23:47:00.001+01:00

Yesterday evening at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square: 'Watteau: A Critical Journey Through Publications, from Edmond de Goncourt to the Modern Day' given by Christoph Vogtherr, Curator of pre-1800 Paintings. Watteau was a rather mysterious artist whose elevation to the rank of Old Master owed much to the manner of his exposure through publications, starting with those of his patron Jean de Julienne, whose collection is the subject of a special exhibition currently at the Wallace, coinciding with a focussed display of their numerous paintings by Watteau. The lecture was informative and accessible, and the evening included not only a look at the Julienne exhibition but a hands-on display in the library of the books being discussed, and (not in the same room) a glass of wine.

Many spaces in the Wallace collection are charmingly decorated with unexpected items: dozens of elaborate, empty antique picture frames cluster on the walls of the lecture theatre, and in the seminar room eccentric collages of small labels, signs and notices (above).

verbi visi 2010 (selected)

2011-01-11T01:00:00.005Z

Alexandra Julyan & Bill Gilonis, Lost in translation (London: Lost & Found Publishing, 2009. ISBN 9780956287601). An original and thoughtful collaboration: drawings made in literal interpretation of non-explanatory descriptions of objects selected by chance in another country ...

Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (closed 10 January). Loved this; hadn't expected to.

Ed Ruscha (postcard)

The year-long residency of KALEID Editions at 23-25 Redchurch Street was an exciting feature in the London artists' books landscape, founded by the dynamic and clever Victoria Browne, herself a very interesting artist. We look forward to all her future activities.

Victoria Browne, Dark matter (2009), photo lifted from KALEID website

'Publication as practice: a short course on concepts of artists' publications', hosted at Donlon Books, Cambridge Heath Road (spring /summer 2010) by Eleanor Vonne Brown, another energetic and clever woman who makes interesting things happen (noticed in this blog last year).

Letterpress revival I: Crater Press poetry pamphlets:

Crater poetry pamphlets 3-5: Harry Gilonis, Acacia feelings: the collected poems of Pao Ling-hui (Dec. 2009); Amy De'Ath, Andromeda / The world works for me (Jan. 2010); Keston Sutherland, The stats on infinity (Mar. 2010).

Douglas Gordon text installation at Tate Britain (May). Fragmentary utterances in vinyl. Wish we had gone to Glasgow in the autumn to see the Robert Barry exhibition at The Common Guild. Can anyone out there compare, contrast, comment?

Sol LeWitt: artists' books Exhibition at SITE Gallery, Sheffield (May). Plus: Artists' publications and the legacy of Sol Lewitt: a conference at Sheffield Hallam University. Coordinated by RGAP (Research Group for Artists' Publications). We have a few snapshots on Flickr.

Sol LeWitt wall drawing #960 being executed at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 8 May 2010

John Furnival: somewhere between poetry and painting. Exhibition of prints and constructions at England & Co. (May)

Poetry Review vol. 65 no. 1 (1974); cover by John Furnival

Art of banking: Susan Johanknecht, baring antebellum (2010).
As one of the participants in an ongoing art project concerning the archives of Barings Bank, Susan Johanknecht published a book of poetry, or text art, based partly on the links she discovered in the archives between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Barings. this work is comparable to some of Susan Howe's books but has a particular beauty and how topical can you get? It is available for a mere £10: further information including contact address for the artist is in the indispensable Book Arts Newsletter no. 60, Oct. 2010, p. 23.

baring antebellum, cover, referencing marbled ledgers, but not quite ...

Susan Johanknecht, baring antebellum, text printed on paper resembling account book pages

Merlin James: frame paintings Exhibition at Mummery + Schnelle (June-July), including poetry reading in dialogue with the art, on 12 June, by John Freeman, Elizabeth James and Oliver Reynolds.

EJ reading 'poem (frames') with MJ frame paintings (Photo Michele Tocca)

Letterpress revival II: V&A Illustration Awards won by Sarah Carr for images created wholly from type elements, for How to drink by Victoria Moore (Granta, 2009). (The publisher's website makes no mention of the images; and the book itself is not printed letterpress of course ... )

Sarah Carr, illustration [espresso machine], from How to Drink

Mulfran Miniatures: sweet new series of small-format illustrated poetry pamphlets from Cardiff-based Mulfran Press:

Roy Morgans, The sychbant, with images by Marion KV Kenning (Mulfran, 2010)

And here's the biggest book of poetry I own:

J.H. Prynne, Sub songs (Barque, 2010)

Women's Innovative Poetry and Cross-genre Festival, University of Greenwich, 14-16 July. Susanna Gardner's review is in Openned Zine 3. We only managed to get to a few performances, but bought many items at the excellent student-staffed book table. To obtain the following books, try contacting West House books (even though they are not listed).

Christine Kennedy / David Annwn, Dadadollz (ISP Press, Wakefield, 2010 ISBN 0953389758)

Christine Kennedy gave a great performance at Greenwich of her Hobby Horse: a Puppet Play for Cabaret Voltaire, complete with cast -- Hannah Hoch, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber Arp and others -- as a clothes-line of articulated puppets, brilliantly ventriloquised with the Monty-Pythonesque expedient of wiggling two fingers through their mouth holes. Generically Kennedy's text is a performance script, mixing in 'looking glass' Alice (the Cabaret Voltaire having been appropriately located in Spiegelstrasse), first-world-war combat medicine and the Large Hadron collider at Cern (particle physics being of course the most dada of sciences), and including images (Christine is equally poet and artist). It is published in this book alongside a text by David Annwn also inspired by the DaDa mammas and their use of dolls and puppets.

Tilla Brading & Frances Presley, Stone Settings (Odyssey Books / Other Press ISBN 9781897654002)

Frances Presley and Tilla Brading launched the publication of their long-standing project on Exmoor's standing stones and archaeology at Greenwich with a slide presentation with animation to do full justice to the visual and intermedia contributions of both poets. I missed this, but a few weeks before heard Tilla do a part of it at the Hay-on-Wye Poetry Jamboree -- a low tech version, where the audience had to improvise the part of a rain stick. The field is wide open, including prose (the passage 'Triscome Stone' is one of my favourite bits), diagrams, music, abstract shapes, colour, breaths of subtle humour. Stone settings in print is presented as a completely integrated collaborative whole (like Frances's and my Neither the One Nor the Other (1999), and all the writing has a kind of tolerant co-existence, as well as a quiet but distinct energy. Every page or opening is different and striking in a justified (composed) mature way. I really like this book.

No-one is more innovative or cross-genre than the fabulous Jennifer Pike (Cobbing), who turned 90 years old in 2010, unbelievably. Veer Press are due great credit for bringing out books of her visual poetry, SCRUNCH, which went into a second edition this year:

Jennifer Pike Cobbing, SCRUNCH (Veer, 2009/10)

and the new Conglomization of Wot. Meanwhile on July 10th there was a birthday launch by Writers Forum of a new number of AND -- the magazine founded by Bob Cobbing in 1954, still now only on its 13th number -- essentially a festschrift for Jennifer, edited by Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer. I'm not sure how you can get a copy, but try contacting Adrian Clarke via Veer. Videos of readings from that day are on the Openned website (including our own).

Talking of Veer: all their books are worth buying, but here are the 2010 titles from two of our favourite poets:

Veer books: Harry Gilonis, Eye-blink, from North Hills, with cover painting by David Rees, ISBN 9781907088209; Jeff Hilson, In the Assarts, ISBN 9781907088186

In October Allen Fisher gave a series of 3 slide talks on 'The Complexity Manifold', weekly at 3 different locations in London. They were fascinating overlapping compilations of aspects of his long-time poetics. Notes from the talks (sans images) are linked from this page on Allen's website. Shortly thereafter he published a new book of work: Proposals: poem--image--commentary:

Allen Fisher, Proposals (Spanner, 2010 ISBN 9780856520891)

The cover image resembles a Blake title page; the 35 tri-partite 'proposals' are somewhat like emblems:

Proposals 11

The images are (reproduced from) diptychs of paint and collage, apparently made on the pages of an art history book from which captions are occasionally visible; this book does not seem to appear in the customary AF list of 'Resources' at the back, which runs from Badiou toWittgenstein, via Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, &c. To generalise vastly: the left-hand images concern fire & power, the right-hand ones more suggest imaginative transformations, 'the artist'. But this book deserves far better than disconnected observations, and yields much to a dedicated reading, of which I have only given it my first over the Christmas break. Allen Fisher is a truly exemplary artist, in his lifelong address to the, uh, key issues of living, thinking and making today. Read this book for 2011! Get it from Spanner website.

When he becomes clearly lacking in confidence in the work in the connection in any / efficacy he begins to understand the confluence of becoming that is being proposed (Proposals 29, commentary)

Shandy Hall is by now a top vortex for literature + art in England. The Perverse Library was a great exhibition organised by information as material of visual and material books and objects based on the personal library of the brilliant Craig Dworkin, anthologist and archivist par excellence of avant garde writing, with a closing vernissage on 30 October. Here we picked up (bought) a copy of a wonderful anthology of visual text: Louis Lüthi, On the self-reflexive page (Roma Publications, 2010 ISBN 97877459478): "a typology of self-reflexive pages: Black Pages, Blank Pages, Drawing Pages, Photography Pages, Text Pages, Number Pages, and Punctuation Pages" from over 60 texts, authors including: Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Douglas Coupland, Mark Danielewski, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alasdair Gray, Steven Hall, B.S. Johnson, Richard Kostelanetz, Reif Larsen, Harry Matthews, Vladimir Nabokov, Don Paterson (yes really), Raymond Roussel, W.G. Sebald ... i.e. authors by and large of significant mainstream/highbrow recognition ... and now we come to look at it, only 2 women: Christine Brooke-Rose and Madeline Gins.

The self-reflexive page, pp. 18-19: from Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud ... [etc] p. 284; Steven Hall, The raw shark texts, p. 421.

In November bookbinder and jeweller Romilly Saumarez Smith hosted an exhibition of remarkable photographs by Verdi Yahooda of bookbinding tools.

Verdi Yahooda: this image taken from a postcard: for best views see the artist's website

To the lay person such tools may be slightly enchanting, but here they become numinous objects, through various techniques and materials including the use of slide film and rag paper. Some of the photographs are now also published in an inexpensive book by Trace Editions.
Romilly's tools: an incomplete set (2010) ISBN 978-0-9550945-4-5

At Sophie Schneideman's book and print shop in Portobello Road, an exhibition in November-December of early books and prints by Ronald King's Circle Press, probably the foremost artist-press in England of its kind, that is to say, based on original printmaking and letterpress, marrying (usually) new poetry of a non-conservative kind with superb illustration, often technically innnovative. The Oceaographer here learned an expensive lesson: at the private view, we fell for and bought, for over £100, the following:

John Christie, Listen (Circle Press, 1975)

"a word and image sequence related to, and suggested by, lines [the artist, John Christie] particularly liked in Erik Satie's 'Sports et Divertissements' ... the complete text appears at the end of this book in an English translation by Simon Cutts". As I write, there is a copy of this book on Abe for £15 (and a couple in North America at under £50). Ouch!!

Tom Lubbock, best known as an inspiring and scrupulous critic of contemporary and historical art, is also a sometime artist himself. From 1999 to 2004 he was commissioned to produce a weekly collage for publication on the editorial page of the Saturday Independent newspaper, in the position that is typically given to a cartoon. A selection of these works has just been on show at the Victoria Miro gallery N1 7RW (December) and is viewable through January: on Saturdays 15th and 22nd, and otherwise by appointment: +44 (0)20 7336 8109.

Post script: sadly, sadly, Tom Lubbock died yesterday (9th Jan.), after 2 1/2 years fighting cancer. I owed him, and I liked him. He was a remarkable person, and so is his wife.

Letterpress revival III: Reverting to type exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, Coronet Street N1 6HD

(this is still on through January 2011)

Finally, something comic, though we do not usually make heh-heh: a close relative has invented a new verse-form, the 6-line literary limerick. His book is I'll say this ... : seventy-six (six-line) literary limericks, by "Ingli" [G. Ingli James] (Carn Ingli, 2010). Contact me via Comments below for info on how to obtain it. Here's one relevant to our interests in this blog (my own copy also boasts, in holograph, a great one on Marshall McLuhan) -- note that some of the poems also have footnotes ...:

I'll say this for Cummings, E.E.*

he has fun with the

gra

phy

and employs lower case

in an upper case place --

as if rooting for

moc

racy

(What on earth can one say but tee hee?)

*referred to by Edmund Wilson as 'hee hee cunnings'

short return (for ian w, peter f & alicia c)

2010-11-21T23:18:00.004Z

At the Small Publishers' Fair, London, 12-13 November 2010

seekers of lice, notes/ohms; books by Antoine Lefebvre; Maria White, alphabet week; Helen Douglas, A Venetian Brocade; Lindsay Adams, Fluviatile

Most interesting exhibitor
Antoine Lefebvre's La Bibliothèque Fantastique "une maison d'édition virtuelle des livres d'artistes, dont les livres sont gratuits" also constitutes the éditeur's PhD project on the Book, and appropriates / decimates most of his academic reading, in a series of simple black & white photocopied stapled pamphlets on ordinary typing paper, all of which are downloadable for free; but (like me) many people prefer to pay the £3 a go. Many titles are by other artists; one ongoing collaboration, with Jérémie Bennequin, performs the erasure of Mallarmé's 'Un coup de des ...', syllable by syllable, each next one selected by -- you guessed it. Each performance works right through the version partially erased by the last, and they will continue until there are only 5 syllables left (since the next throw of the dice risks being a six ...). Even this is being done in the most dematerialised manner, at a computer (though Bennequin's more habitual practice involves pages and rubber erasers -- he is working through Proust, as you might imagine. I love the French: "Quelle allure! Des intellectuels!")

Most "Are you actually a fine artist or a poet"?*
Seekers of lice publishes Japanese-style-bound pamphlets, often including semi-transparent pages, of what I would call 'innovative poetry' by its singular proprietor. The Oceanographer selected Notes / Ohms (2010), in which words and phrases from the first 3 pages are redistributed throughout the text which is divided into several sections by painted leaves.
(*SoL was asked this in a radio interview)

Favourite performance
Didier Mathieu (of the Centre des livres d'artiste at St-Yrieix-la-perche) and Nick Thurston (of Information as material reading together / simultaneously, selected passages from Beckett's Watt, rewritten, replacing all substantive words with the name of their part of speech; respectively in French and English (available as a set of 3 large prints in each language -- the English versions are published by IoM and were on display recently at the very wonderful Perverse Library exhibition they organised at Shandy Hall. cdla publish the French translation.

Plus of course (O declares an interest): Harry Gilonis reading from Eye-blink, his new book of 'faithless' (but genuine) translations of Tang Dynasty poems, published by the excellent poetry press Veer, with a painting by David Rees on the cover.

Most perfect book
1. Alphabet Week, by Maria White (Essence Press [Julie Johnstone, Edinburgh])
A little white job, 7 cm square, printed in blue with the names of the days of the week, one name per page, in alphabetical order.

2. Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, After Brancusi (Coracle)

(detail) "all furniture is sculpture ... all sculpture is furniture"

Two beautiful photo books
1. Helen Douglas's new book from Weproductions is A Venetian Brocade, which, by contrast with Queene and Belle (2008), returns to the lush page-filling and subtle syncopation of earlier books. It's a bold subject: colour photographs of Venice, digitally manipulated, could be a recipe for cliché but it is done superbly. It is tempting to flick, but the book needs and deserves proper 'reading', as the sequence is integral. It includes a short fiction by Marina Warner, the subject of which is the visit to Venice in the late 16th century of a pious young Japanese Jesuit, and his exposure there to visual pleasure and the erotic intimations of art. This is certainly relevant to Douglas's almost voluptuous opening of/to the city itself. Free of the novitiate's religious inhibitions, the artist's desire is however tempered by an aesthetic discipline which has sought, and hidden in these pages more, I think, than meets the casual eye.

2. Fluviatile, by the painter Lindsey Adams, reproduces almost 50 remarkable rich and ambiguous abstract images that are in fact unmanipulated photographs taken of (and in) a running stream, Hartshay Brook, near her home in Derbyshire. The book's design and sequencing are handled with care, the blank and text pages tinted in varying watery whites. There is a thoughtful introduction essay by Rebecca Fortnum but Adams like Douglas has also invited an imaginative contribution by a writer, Michelene Wandor (same initials! spooky ...), and since the images here are (mainly) printed as a discrete series on recto pages only, Wandor's poem can penetrate throughout them. The poem is given to Ophelia, and under its influence one begins to discern her cloudy figure in the water ...

Apples
A small jar of apple jelly given me by Ceri Buck, with a copy of What is Action? (2006), her poem based on the parts of an apple. A diary of apple labels, by Anne Rook.

dark afternoon (Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel)

2009-11-23T21:26:00.015Z

The challenge is to get through to the winter solstice without succumbing to depression.
*
To Whitechapel Art Gallery for ARLIS UK & Ireland (Art Libraries Society) 40th Anniversary Members' Day. Director Iwona Blazwick spoke with respect of the old public library, once alongside the gallery and a venerable meeting-place for artists, activists and local citizens, but long since transmogrified (by the borough, not the Gallery) into an 'Ideas Store' elsewhere. The old large reading room (unrecognisable) is now available for events such as ours, but it also contains a few ideas of its own, orchestrated currently by artist Goshka Macuga. Remembering that Picasso's 'Guernica' was exhibited at the Whitechapel in 1939, Macuga has (amazingly!) borrowed the life-size tapestry version of the painting that was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller and now normally hangs at the UN in New York, outside the Security Council, lest they forget. The same work that was covered by a blue curtain when Colin Powell stood in front of it to make the case for war on Iraq in early 2003. Together with a few other things including a film of young Vietnam veterans testifying regretfully to what they had got up to.

A large Sophie Calle exhibition fills 3 of the galleries, including the work I saw in Venice, 2007. I like it better here, in (I think??) a slightly less lofty space. The huge collaborative project, 'Prenez soin de vous ' (now largely turned into into English), in which Calle engaged over 100 women from various 'interpretative' professions to respond in multifarious ways to the 'break-up' email from her ex-partner, is lush, colourful, funny, rueful, really entertaining, acerbic and ultimately a rich celebration of scores of fabulous, talented, characterful women. It's also a fascinating display of 'readings', of one kind and another. It can even be seen as a sort of expansion of Raymond Queneau's notion in his Exercises du Style, where the same little narrative is rendered in many different versions.

theatre & all (Chris Goode)

2009-11-21T00:03:00.019Z

Somewhat off-topic again, but converging maybe. The Oceanographer has restored to its extremely selective blogroll Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, the organ of the very wonderful theatre maker, poet, performer and (yes) thinker Chris Goode. A thread of relevance to our concerns is his interest in visual poetry. At an evening of performance 2 weeks ago at Toynbee Studios, part of Chris's Lean Upstream season ongoing through November, he presented 'four panels' by the American poet Michael Basinsksi. Basinski's work typically consists of crammed-together drawing and hand writing -- here's a colourful example http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/deluxe/five/spm.html (with added 'creatures'). There's a video of Chris with the young actor Jonny Liron doing the four panels together a few months back; on this more recent occasion they were joined by poets Lawrence Upton and Keston Sutherland, two notable creatures (of rather different species) of our Ocean. It was brilliant and delightful: the four voices played wild dodgems in airspace, eight hands stabbing and grabbing towards the pages for the utterance.
*
Earlier this week, the series saw Chris give a talk at Camden's People's Theatre, entitled 'The Forest and the Field', about his views of/hopes for theatre. Now, the Oceanographer's enthusiasm for Goode's works arises partly from specific admiration for his poetry, partly from personal regard, and doubtless too partly harks back to a personal brief involvement with experimental theatre (early 1970s, Cardiff ...). But more to the point is that there seems to be something widely and importantly applicable about what he does, or perhaps, about the ways he does it, even though characterising himself as someone who simply "thinks about theatre all the time". (His blog gives somewhat of the lie to that mind you: he thinks a lot about almost every cultural manifestation de nos jours.) Inter much alia on this occasion he deprecated the theatre's tendency to imitate anxiously what it perceives as competitors for people's attention: nightclubs, Twitter, whatever. And called instead for it to be itself, do its own work; and to struggle as needful with the problem of what that work might be, if not content merely with remembering one's lines and moving gracefully around the furniture. A determination to find what is really important in the metier, basically. And this isn't easy but is the proper approach, to work and to life. (The Oceanographer observes a particular resonance with libraries, which have lost all conviction and have no ideas other than 'be more like Google and Amazon'.)
*
The talk was punctuated with 'illustrations' by Sebastien Lawson, another of CG's young actor associates, demonstrating -- doing -- the kind of things Chris gets them to do, to explore and develop work. Get your kit off; with some part of your body, write in the air ... A lovely dance.
*
There's a new biography of Sergey Diaghilev: in last Saturday's Guardian review Simon Callow quoted a friend of Diaghilev saying that he had "an individual gift for creating a romantic working climate, and with him all work had the charm of a risky escapade". This is what it seems to be like around Chris Goode.
*
[note added 4 December 2009: Malcolm Phillips has some great photos over on Flickr, such as this of the Ursonate in full swing.

(off-topic) besoin de vélo

2009-10-15T23:46:00.014+01:00

Paul Fournel at the Calder Bookshop this evening read from the English translation of his Besoin de Vélo. He read these short, autobiographical, light-philosophical pieces crisply, without comment but with expression. He elaborated with props -- moving little model cyclists around the table -- and eventually took off shirt & trousers to reveal the lycra beneath, and mounted his new Condor titanium bike which stood on a roller, pedalling gradually harder gears, climaxing with the much-quoted piece on Mont Ventoux:The Ventoux has no in-itself. ... It's yourself you're climbing. If you don't want to know, stay at the bottom. It was wonderful and I much cheered up. As he signed my books I blurted out my two (so far) non-attempts at the Ventoux: summer 1990, the planned (and indeed booked) trip abandoned when R & I split up; and March 2009 when, in no physical state to even attempt it, I was gratefully relieved of the challenge:

"You must go back", said M. Fournel. "Ride 28 x 28."

The audience seemed entirely composed of cyclists rather than literary types (apart from the venerable John Calder himself), and no sufficiently coherent question framed itself in my mind about the relation between the cycling writing and the Oulipo, of which Fournel is President (truly, the complete Frenchman!). Méli-Vélo is a dictionary text, but are there more elaborate constraints governing these books? Fournel himself has written: "When it comes to their personal work, the members of the Ouvroir have differing attitudes with regard to constraint. Their use of constraint varies, ranging from shows of virtuosity to the greatest of discretion. The debate “Should one reveal one’s constraints?” enlivened the Ouvroir for a considerable time during the 1970s and 1980s, and responses to this question have been and continue to be diverse and paradoxical. From absolute mystery to partial revelation to total transparency, all the gradations have been put into practice, all reasoning validated."

One question at least elicited the assertion that cycling & creativity are deeply connected: "When I ride I write.". In presenting a sublimely elegant defence of Bernard Hinault as, among the greats (Merckx, Anquetil) his ultimate favourite racer, Fournel said "I think he was a writer".

signs on transport ii (guest contribution)

2009-09-24T22:17:00.006+01:00

Bill Gilonis sends this picture, from a Swiss train. Click to enlarge.

"What Rhätische Bahn AG is trying to say is: Ha ha ha we're pissing on our country's tax laws, and at the same time (chuckle chuckle) Wilmington Trust Company (Delaware, USA) is pissing on the tax laws of their country. The guard confirmed that it was a mutual tax dodge but said that Clinton had put a stop to deals like this & that this particular deal would be dead when the current contract expired in a couple of years."

signs on transport

2009-08-23T21:20:00.009+01:00

This one for the layout & typography ...

... and this one for the subtractive intervention

pomes and gardens

2009-08-05T23:17:00.035+01:00

The splendid Two Rivers Press in Reading have just published Her Leafy Eye by Lesley Saunders: a collection of poems inspired by Rousham (a garden in Oxfordshire landscaped by Bridgeman and then William Kent), with illustrations by Geoff Carr, a present-day garden designer. The book launch was held at Rousham, where Geoff led an informal guided tour, and Lesley read some of the poems in situ -- for each is motivated by a particular feature, although (refreshingly) the motif generally does not constitute the subject. The poem for the 'Dying Gladiator', for instance, entitled 'Hero', apparently ignores the striking statue and instead evokes a Handel composition (1738, contemporaneous with the garden) sung, sublimely, by a castrato, 'sexless ... winged' ... And yet, it also offers a challenge to this figure of the all-male fighter, defeated by mortality, the head drooping. The singer by contrast is 'lifting his face', the voice soars 'ever-upwards' mixing into the branches of 'an oasis-tree' so that the 'clamber and whoop-calls' seem those of a daredevil boy. And on another level again, this 'angel' in the 'heavenly air' might after all offer comfort to the warrior contemplating death. (The Dormer brothers who owned Rousham and commissioned the gardens were both soldiers, and at its completion both had died.)

Great breadth and subtlety of thought and construction inform the whole collection, together with a huge sensuous energy: this is partly a matter of reference and image, stimulated no doubt by being in the fresh air with trees and water and artfully activated vistas, as well as the poet's evident acquaintance with early-mid-18th-century culture; but it also seems to spring through the language. 'The Genius Loci // would carry words like thicket and covert ...' as well as its other functions. The title of 'Acre' (an elegy for that unit of land measurement), tangles through the poem in a somewhat Muldoonian fashion: 'you can watch the earth curve' ... 'not scaring the longhorns' ... 'like the kora tuned to its own scale' and finally in the brilliant 'carpets of light'.

The illustrations, a notable feature of Two Rivers books, are very various, quite light, sometimes playful, and distinctly subordinated to the poems. One black and white image suggested a more restrained, perhaps conservative option for a more unified book, which I might have preferred; but which was evidently eschewed in favour of colour and variety, which is fine.

At Rousham, the 'sinuous rill' was a pleasing discovery, though a surprise that it's a sort of flooded tramline or mini-canal, not a Romantic stream.

A couple of weeks later, at Little Sparta:

This (badly photographed) straight channel surely harks back to the Rousham rill, acknowledging the charm of its 'sleeve of silk' (Lesley Saunders, 'Rill') while adding explicit reference to the transport canal. That succession of words, ending with the heavy glide of 'lade', is a whole moral philosophy. [Just looked it up in Chambers though, and 'lade' is a mill-stream in Scots... Either way though, it's about working water?]

Obviously there is no end to what could and should be said about this amazing garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Can't possibly do justice right now. Actually the plants struck me this time too; the beautiful interplay of different leaves; and indeed lots of flowers, mostly wildflowers.

Remembering Little Sparta is a rather astonishing exhibition on in Edinburgh this month. Janet Boulton knows the garden intimately and has made many watercolour paintings of it. These are one might say subjective documentary records, presenting true views in a way unlike any photograph; and they are also really fine paintings. Not just set pieces, but behind-the-scenes storage areas. And Boulton also became a good friend of (and occasional artistic collaborator with) Finlay himself, and there are paintings too of the interior of his house; close-seeing, respectful, but in some cases quite numinous views, of his collections of model boats for instance. (My photograph -- with apologies to the artist for the poor image -- shows one of the suite of views of the interior of the Temple; and also the beautiful fitness of this exhibition being installed in the enormous Sculpture Court of the Edinburgh College of Art, with its plaster casts of classical statures and reliefs.) Nothing anecdotal or biographical; no people.

There are also works in paper relief, an unusual medium that Boulton has made her own, in which she meditates upon and responds to Finlay's work in a more like-for-like way, rather than by re-representing it. Likewise she has installed sculptures and inscriptions in her own small and lovely garden (there's an account in the magazine The English Garden, Sept. 2006), with references and homages from her distinct artistic lineage -- to the Cubists in particular, for instance. And then there is an actual group of Finlay's precious boats in the room, some letters and ephemera, and -- real treasures -- some of the little painted wooden toys he made in the 1960s. All in all, not to be missed; but even for those who can't get to Edinburgh there's an excellent catalogue, and images on the artist's website: click first link, above.

Finally, one for the gladiator:

3-year note on bookshops

2009-07-12T17:37:00.011+01:00

Three years ago to the Sunday, after visiting three bookshops within walking distance of the bathysphere, the Oceanographer started this blog. Today all three shops have closed. Most spectacularly, John Thornton, of Fulham Park Road, (allegedly) retired after making a fortune from an ignorant Church of England Diocescan library sell-off which included the break-up of a spectacular extra-illustrated Bible . The independent new-books Pan Bookshop in Fulham Road closed with some heartbreak at the end of 2007. However the travel booksellers Daunt Books have since opened in the same premises -- must get along there. Finally I just heard this week that the World's End bookshop has closed :-(

London artist-publishers old & new

2009-07-11T21:26:00.013+01:00

In the suitable venue of the Bridewell Hall at St Bride's Printing Library on Wednesday, there was a party to celebrate the 25th birthday of the magnificent Book Works, who commission and publish books by artists (as well as selling publishing-related services to others). Commitment, focus and acumen must all play a part in their success, as well as (by the accounts of the artists involved) being great to work with. Now they are launching a Friends scheme: for £35 p.a. you don't get any free books, but launch invitations, newsletter and the warm glow of being a patron, which increasingly substitutes, in this busy life at least, for the white heat of personal creativity ... My cheque's in the post.
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Among the hundreds of cool party guests I met the editors of London's newest artist-periodical, Stone Canyon Nocturne (a.k.a. apparently 9-09), who had their inaugural launch party (they called it a wayzgoose) a week before. Using an Adana proofing press and a weird and wonderful collection of old types, and citing Bob Cobbing among its forebears, this is a broadsheet series whose wholemeal materiality is rather different from the subtle adaptation of trade values that enables Book Works publications to 'pass' in bookshops. Nonetheless, the first SCN is a short, funny text made by Clive Phillpot, the great curator-librarian and champion of artists' books, who happens also to be Book Works' Chair of Trustees.

The 9-09 title references Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's '60s mimeo magazine 0-9, but 'Stone Canyon Nocturne' is the title of a poem by Charles Wright, which seems aesthetically at odds with everything else about the venture. A moment's web truffle however reveals (in an article by Marjorie Perloff, quoting this poem) that Wright & Acconci were exact contemporaries at the University of Iowa -- so there you go, it's ironic I suppose ... I love the SCN mission statement anyway: "to conflate the fractured vernacular and dissemination systems of the twenty first century with the production processes of the nineteenth". Go guys! That's another cheque in the post then.

"on the verge of poetry" at the ICA

2009-06-23T00:20:00.013+01:00

'Poor. Old. Tired. Horse', once a line in a poem by Robert Creeley, taken as the title for a magazine by Ian Hamilton Finlay, has been dragged out of retirement to name an exhibition at the ICA. The show is not all about concrete poetry, but aims to be "an exhibition of art that verges on poetry". It does have some fantastic concrete poetry, and allied (or resemblant) stuff from the 60s, which I think it seeks to establish as forerunner to contemporary artists' work with text, but the latter seems perhaps inevitably untogether in comparison with the poise and tightness, as well as surprisingness and exuberance of work in typewriter by Henri Chopin, the amazing dom sylvester houédard, the twitchy, obsessive Christopher Knowles; also Carl Andre, who substitutes a violence for the lightness often associated with this kind of thing ("everywhere they are shooting people"--Creeley), and (this work of his new to me) Vito Acconci. Plus there are huge libidinous word-discs by Ferdinand Kriwet (b. 1942, much younger than I assumed), and 3 of Lilian Lijn's great poem machines, spinning away.

This one room (& Kriwet in the corridor) makes a lovely, substantial little show. It's preceded by a room of IH Finlay: directly on the wall Sea Poppy I (boat numbers in a spiral), plus another, and then some smaller things in desk cases -- postcards, prints, copies of P.O.T.H. and one or two books. (It only occurs to me now, the extent to which this is not an exhibition of words in books.)

Upstairs, two more rooms that make rather different impressions. One stays with a similar period but is more about illustration, or the combining of image & (the artist's own) text: Philip Guston drawings around Clark Coolidge words, some pages of Alasdair Gray (including monumental frontispieces for Lanark showing his great bibliographical absorption), two Blake-ish / cartoony sheets of words & figures by Robert Smithson, and Hockney's illustrations for Cavafy, in which I suppose you could choose to see the etched marks of the men's body hair, patterns of bed and wall coverings or neckties etc., not to mention the shop signs, as partaking of the same calligraphic line that wrote the (absent) verse texts ... It all makes a not unreasonable juxtaposition of work, and purveys a visual messiness in contrast to the typwewriter virtuosity and/or minimalist cleanliness downstairs.

Finally, what it might all be leading towards is a room of contemporary, younger artists' work. Frances Stark is often genuinely about an engagement with books, and her large piece, which involves transcribed text with inlays, and drawing, is materially interesting as well as funny and smart. I recall being intrigued and interested a couple of years ago at Tate Mod, by the strange, spare typed papers of Sue Tompkins. Those here have the look (misleadingly??) of innovative poetry, on faded blue letter paper (though A4), with enigmatic codes and use of almost inkless ribbon and cramped spacing. Her practice involves performance, another theme of the show which does seem to me an idea slightly too far. So I gather does Karl Holmqvist's (of whom I haven't heard before), who has here produced an A4 photocopied book of rappy verses and found photographs, blow-ups from which also paper a large expanse of the wall. It seems to me trite and trashy. I could of course be wrong; I just felt that (e.g.) Stephen Willatts on the one hand (socio-political care) and on the other Bob Cobbing (copier book publishing taste & technique) put this stuff to shame. The other things -- all worthy of more than this bare mention -- are 2 circus-style posters of Janice Kerbel; three prints by Matthew Brannon, and a film by Anna Barham, of hands rearranging transparent shapes ('tangrams' actually) into forms resembling letters, which apparently add up to texts.

As with the previous ICA show -- another language theme, that time 'speech' -- one must respect & appreciate the effort that has gone into putting together useful and substantial supporting resources: the 'magazine' gallery guide that only costs £1 and is available as a free pdf; the images, texts and links on the web.

So the tired horse being flogged here, that won't die, is -- concrete poetry? or is it just poetry? The curator says, "artists are now turning towards poetry and expressive language ... [but contrarily too he says they] explore the potential of poetry to move beyond the constraints of linguistic and graphic systems, reflecting the true complexity of communication and creating meaning that cannot be pinned down". If it's a matter of getting over words, I'm not sure that you'd need to go by this route; neither do I think it shows 'artists now' as very interested in poetry. Still, there is an attempt to reach towards something here, and you certainly don't want to miss seeing the show.

Please buy a Salt book

2009-05-22T01:32:00.006+01:00

You know Salt of course -- a poetry press with an innovative approach to being 'small', i.e.: Burgeon! Salt has a shameless gusto for all the dirty bits of publishing i.e. marketing hype, e-commerce, ratings, bottom lines etc., alongside a genuine informed enthusiasm for experimental writing and determination to bring it to a wide audience. I have always had a few reservations about the enterprise, its scale and its commercial approach, but really huge admiration for both its mission and its apparent success. It has certainly published at least a couple of dozen books I love by superb poets. I wouldn't want to see it fold. However Salt is in need of support, due to the recession and the funding situation, and an appeal is being circulated widely to BUY A SALT BOOK NOW. http://www.saltpublishing.com/ Don't wait, they need to be able to show an upturn in sales pronto.

FWIW here are a few personal recommendations, most of which I own already:

Tim Atkins, Folklore (scary Malvern proses -- beautiful hardback)

Sean Bonney, Blade Pitch Control Unit (angry urban anarchist poems)

Andrea Brady, Vacation of a Lifetime (fierce political American difficult poems)

Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (omniscient, intelligent, infuriating critical / literary history)

Allen Fisher, Gravity, or, Leans (Fisher's is one of the really major oeuvres of our time)

Giles Goodland, Capital (impressive procedural collage of the last quarter of the 20th century)

Bill Griffiths, Mud Fort (enormously talented and learned writer, entirely without pretension or obscurity, towering over this reader's head ...)

Alan Halsey, Not Everything Remotely (possibly the fullest literary sensibility in the biz, extending the sense of 'literature' to the whole code of book; it comes out as some of the most original -- and, yes, obscure, work I know)

Peter Larkin, Terrain Seed Scarcity (profoundly philosophical, and beautiful, work, usually prose poems concerning trees ...)

Tony Lopez, False Memory (dunno, I only have other books of his but it'll be good value, trust me)

Geraldine Monk, Ghost and Other Sonnets (one of my favourite poets, and this is a beautiful white book ...)

Frances Presley, Paravane (Includes our collaboration 'Neither the One Nor the Other' ...)

Ron Silliman, Tjanting (Monolithic, absorbing prose)

The books I have tonight ordered are: Brian Kim Stefans's critical essays, and Robert Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues.

book from the sky

2009-03-17T22:15:00.010Z

To Bernard Quaritch's, the booksellers, this evening, for the launch of a book they have published about the artist Xu Bing, specifically his Book From the Sky), a 4-volume work written in 4,000 imaginary Chinese characters, printed using moveable type. There is acute (not to say obsessive) attention to the formal codes of book, whereas its content is, in a sense (sic) nonsense. One of the main authors of this new critical work, Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book, is John Cayley, who has considered Xu Bing's work often: here's a useful piece http://www.hanshan.com/specials/xubingts.html . There is an exhibition in the basement of Quaritch's, showing copies of the Book from the Sky, with earlier versions, printing blocks and sorts, and installation photographs of full-scale gallery installations, which seem very grand and theatrical. Some of these images are on Xu Bing's own website. The critical book has a notable materiality of its own, being bound in a flexible transparent cover through which its structure can be seen.

Typeset by Ian Whittlesea

2009-03-07T09:48:00.015Z

Here's an extraordinary thing: a 1954 judo manual, translated into English and produced in a loving typographic facsimile which resembles as far as possible the visual and material properties of the original, with the same illustrations placed in the same position on the page and so forth, published by an artists' book press. The original book was by the artist Yves Klein, he who signed the sky, patented a colour, painted with women's bodies and 'leapt into the void'. Klein was also (I now learn) a serious and advanced judo practitioner, even prior to being an artist. But is this new edition a judo book or an art book? The translator is Ian Whittlesea, an artist of fascinatingly rigorous refinement noticed previously by the Oceanographer, the publisher is The Everyday Press, "founded by artist Arnaud Desjardin to publish the work of visual artists as printed matter". Whittlesea took up judo himself alongside the translation, has achieved a black belt ranking, and it now appears to be a lifetime commitment for him.
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The book's launch brought me for the first time to Donlon Books, a great new art & arty bookshop in Bethnal Green. It seems to stock the best stuff you'd find in the shops at the Serpentine, ICA or Tate Modern, but in an uncramped and somehow more personal environment that reminded me more of the wonderful bookartbookshop; and also to have an eye to rare and special books, the sort of thing you look to Marcus Campbell for.
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I came away with a copy of Tutu Muse, a recent (2007) book published by Fly By Night, of poetry by Marianne Morris. Marianne was just Donlon Books' writer-in-residence for a month! sorry I missed her. Can't report on a reading yet but Marianne's work is never less than exhilarating; materially-speaking this sturdily made substantial (47pp) pamphlet/paperback features a cover image by Marianne, and an index, of proper names, and key words mostly classified under concepts e.g. 'insects', 'food items' etc. 'love' is the most frequently occurring term (13), followed by 'death' (10). But there are numerous single instances in the 'animals', 'birds', 'fish' and 'food' groups, and quite a lot of 'colours' too (p. 19, 'terrific blue sky').
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Also associated with the establishment is Eleanor Vonne Brown's excellent project The Newpaper, "a newspaper about artists and writers who make work using the language, visuals or structure of newspapers", e.g. (in issue 2) Kenneth Goldsmith and his retyping of an entire New York Times, Michalis Pichler's Bild collages, Vonne Brown's own project '100 days', about the journalist Alan Johnston kidnapped in Gaza in 2007, and many more; as well as an article on John E. Allen, claimed as the first theorist of newspaper design. Issues are available for download from the website, but the thing itself, in tabloid format on proper newsprint is a pleasure to see and hold -- and the ink doesn't come off on your hands ...

the weather

2009-02-02T17:17:00.003Z

A book by Stuart Montgomery / Little presses display

2009-01-27T22:07:00.008Z

In Brighton for the Zukovsky A-24 seminar last Friday, H brought me back a present: Stuart Montgomery's Circe, Fulcrum, 1969, picked up for a tiny sum in very good condition (the dustjacket just cracking its surface at the spine, top edge sl. sticky). Lovely book, all brown & green; fabulous wrapper design, end-papers and title-page, image is an Etruscan bronze mirror with a superb incised depiction presumably of Odysseus and Circe.

The poetry's growing on me. A decent version of the Homeric story, verbally textured and slightly disjunctive, is interrupted towards the end by a series of shorter more detached pieces (that I like best), which include more immediate, self-reflexive elements (i.e. it mentions poetry ...).

Fulcrum is one of five presses featured in an exhibition on briefly now at the St Bride Library in London ('the world’s foremost printing, technical and graphic arts library'). The others are: Keepsake, Trigram, Writers Forum, and Gaberboccus. '"Short run": experimental book design and London's little presses' is curated by Rathna Ramanathan.

Here's a very brief account:

It is a nice, quite extensive display in three or four upright vitrines and a couple of lengthy desk cases, in the room that also houses St Bride's collection of printing presses. The displays include books of course, also some archival material such as artwork and photographs of people. The material is not all grouped by press, and the principle of arrangement wasn't entirely clear to me at the private view on Thursday [15th Jan.], but Rathna's talk gave some idea of the ways in which she has thought about the subject.

The show is based on Rathna's PhD, and the selection of presses one suspects was partly determined by what archives were found to be readily available, but it does make for instructive comparisons. She is also a practising designer, so it was interesting to hear her quite practical analysis of how each of these presses functioned, and the consequent stylistic and material aspects of their productions.

For instance, the Keepsake Press of Roy Lewis was the one most in the 'private press' tradition: letterpress-printed in-house by the proprietor, fairly conventional text layout (and poetic genre), illustrations commissioned from artists of note but not supposed to 'interfere' with the text; a system of signed limited editions, distributed to 'collectors'. At the other extreme, Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum of course, utterly anti-precious, using office printing technology; the production process constituted 'a performance of the text', unlimited editions, extremely open editorial policy (not based on the notion of 'quality'); linked to a whole milieu of performance, workshops, self-help and cooperation (the Association of Little Presses etc.) and general counter-cultural activity.

In between, Fulcrum and Trigram produced high quality books within somewhat more normal commercial parameters -- up to a point. Stuart Montgomery outsourced production to Villiers Publications Ltd., and the books looked conventional, but (aside from being an excellent list) they were distinguished by great cover designs by good contemporary artists. Also the paper is excellent and the printing looks pretty good to me. Additionally, Fulcrum produced 'special' editions of the same books, aimed at collectors. At Trigram by contrast the Benvenistes and Paul Vaughan were totally involved in the design and printing, and profoundly interested in incorporating image with text, and in the 'rhythm' of book construction.

But the centre of Rathna Ramanathan's research is Gaberbocchus, the press of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, for the range of texts they published, perhaps the wider European (rather than American) relationships, and for its continuous relationship with the Themersons' own creative work and very distinctive style. There are some nice examples of artwork, with text and illustrations being worked out through physical cut & paste.

That's an inadequate summary. The presses were noteworthy for literary reasons, several responsible for introducing important foreign writers to British readers; etc. etc. But most of that can be found out elsewhere. It's if you love the look of little press poetry books that the display is really worth a visit (free admission; somewhat restricted hours but open late on Wednesdays). LAST DAY 30th JANUARY.

interiors & apparitions

2009-01-24T21:19:00.021Z

'"What have you been reading, then?" I ask her,
Experimenting, experimenting.' (Roy Fisher, from this book)

First new old book through the door this year was Roy Fisher, ten interiors with various figures (Tarasque Press, 1966). Approx. 148 x 157 mm (width identical to Fisher's Bloodaxe Collected in fact -- which is a surprisingly nice book in a completely different way http://tinyurl.com/b4tqhy ). There are some very long lines in these poems, and it's interesting to compare this first complete publication (some had been in mags before) reproduced from typescript, with the later re-setting, to see different decisions about carry-over that are not wholly determined by the grid. Both form and content seem to point as much toward prose fiction (thinking e.g. of some work by Douglas Oliver, John Hall or David Miller) as much as to a poem sequence. A first-person consciousness interacts with another, in ambiguous, naturalistic scenarios.

But perhaps it is more usefully related to painting than to fiction -- as by Robert Sheppard, who discusses the sequence in his chapter on Fisher in The Poetry of Saying, which can be previewed thanks to Google Books (sorry Robert -- I will certainly purchase a copy at some point ...). He reveals that Fisher actually used pictures as models for these poems. The cover image is (presumably) by Stuart Mills, the publisher: printed (screenprinted??) in white on the stiff black cover, I can't really fathom it though the gestalt seems clearly facial. Some kind of hybrid derived from anglepoise lamps and umbrellas? a pair of spectacles emitting, rather than receiving, light ...?

Another recently-acquired piece of print to be filed today is the programme from the T.S. Eliot Prize readings a fortnight ago. These readings are always an enjoyable conspectus of 10 of the year's best mainstream collections, and the booklet constitutes a mini-anthology. Happening today to read Mary Doty's inclusion, an 'Apparition' (this seems to be a generic term used in his latest book). Scenically it too is an interior with figures: the poet hears a boy reciting a favourite poem -- Shelley's 'Ozymandias' -- in a bookstore. It's enviably articulate, artfully constructed, charming and serious. In organising the poet's emotional apprehensions into polished syntax it takes the reader on the same journey, providing everything you need -- and requiring nothing back. It's complete; and that seems its lack. In Fisher's place, the other person isn't framed away, the first person isn't assured, things aren't finished up.

Doty's poem can be found online (try googling e.g. "loping East Texas vowels"); Fisher's Interiors are only quoted here and there.

can you hear the colours of autumn?

2008-09-13T23:43:00.014+01:00

Fresh Fruit + Tables is a book of -- what d'you call'em: thought constructions maybe, or language drawings -- by the artist David Bellingham (who was recently featured in the V&A display Certain Trees). Bellingham is a kind of micro explorer of language, non-verbal signs and marks, his short trips yield specimens and anecdotes often witty, but rarely slick or slight.

Consider the 2-page spread (where the obliques are line or page breaks):
INTERIOR / an absence of most things // EXTERIOR / a presence of most things.

Or a little thing where the words MORNING and EVENING are handwritten to the same physical length, one above the other, two line-spaces apart. On the intervening lines, the letter O, between the first instance of letter N in each word, thus reading NOON vertically (I can't make the html here hold it). You can see these, and indeed download the whole book: http://www.freshfruitandtables.com/ Lots of the pieces are about how apparent opposites are not unlike in the same way. Quite a few are about mensuration (a long-time DB theme), especially, in this case, of time. They use type, drawing or writing (sometimes a mixture), and it would be interesting in each case to decide why. The combination of means, and tenor of the ideas, are enormously original I think.

Fresh Fruit & Tables was launched today Saturday 13 Sept. at The Changing Room, Stirling (Scotland) on the triple occasions of the Stirling Book Festival, the celebrations of 500 years of printing in Scotland, and an exhibition by David Bellingham. The book is being distributed free to selected libraries in the UK, a few of whom have been supplied with many copies so that individual readers can take away a copy for themselves. The only ones outside Scotland are in London: the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre. Come to the NAL during the month of September, and hopefully there will be a copy left for you.

The society of the poem

2008-08-25T13:55:00.008+01:00

It's got to stop! more than 20 books have come into my library this month, about half acquired during a short stay in Hay on Wye last week. Among them: Jonathan Raban, The Society of the Poem (Harrap, 1971) (£3.50 in the Cinema). This is a really enjoyable and interesting read: Raban was clearly deeply engaged in all the poetry of the moment and provides a selective, organised, appreciative but always sharply critical survey of all aspects. The range of his attention is remarkable by today's standards: he is able to understand 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'The North Atlantic Turbine' as epochal works (as well as to see their self-exhausting limits).

He responds to Olson's 'typographical imagination ... always visually subtle and satisfying' (p. 77); and in the chapter 'Words Alone' (pp. 95-111) he discusses concrete poetry, locating its rationale and force in a reaction – alongside other poetic modes of minimalism, parataxis and cut-up/collage – against socio-linguistic alienation. He finds it at times both childish (in good and bad ways) and Puritanical, and views its strategies as a type of realism, often seeming merely to resemble the fragmentary messages it wants freedom from. He proposes that 'it operates most satisfactorily as a wing of literary criticism' (p. 109).

Other themes around which chapters are loosely organised are language; form; 'the politics of poetic structure', with a rather penetrating aperçu (I thought) that 'just as the centre has congealed in Anglo-American culture, so the right and the left have moved farther apart, defining themselves not against each other but against the consensus in the middle' (p. 74); tradition; 'voice' and dramatic monologue; place. A penultimate chapter considers three recently published collections -- Crow, Lowell's Notebook, and one by Charles Tomlinson. Raban finds the Lowell to be the nearest thing to a 'masterpiece' published in the previous few decades. (He went on not only to edit a Lowell Selected (1974) – which H., with his usual amazing nose, spotted for me a couple of days ago in the secondhand bookshop at Putney Bridge – but also, according to Wikipedia, to become Lowell's lodger.)

Despite some clear hints earlier ('The house of poetry has been split up into flats', p. 61) – Raban's grasp of the field made it seem as though a happier and more vigorous poetic plurality pertained in 1970 than does today. However his final chapter describes 'an atmosphere thick in plots and delusions' (p. 173), and though there are some significant differences (too complex for me to regale now) it's clear that some new dissociation of sensibility had already happened – this long before the so-called 'Poetry Wars'. Or do we just always require a golden-age pre-Babel fantasy as dialectical motivation?

In the end the restless Raban settles slightly disappointingly on a conservative analysis:
'what we need now, much more than the most daring experiment in anti-language and post-poetry, is a vocabulary for discriminating seriously between some poems and others; a language of preference and value' (p. 183). Anyway what is great about this book is not this conclusion but the vivid reminder of what was going on in poetry in Britan 40 years ago; how much that is still important, and how some basic issues still pertain.

Certain Trees: LAST CHANCE TO SEE

2008-08-06T23:49:00.008+01:00

'Certain Trees: the Constructed Book, Poem & Object', V&A, London, Apr.-Aug. 2008.

Certain Trees: the Constructed Book, Poem and Object is on at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, just until Sunday 17 August. (In Gallery 74, 20th Century, Level 3. Free admission.) It is a beautiful small display of poet- and artist-publications and objects curated by Simon Cutts of Coracle Press (& faciliated in the museum by me) which implicitly shows how Coracle (based in London as a press and gallery from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s; now still publishing, from Ireland) was a nexus for an extraordinary company of people and work. This show lasted 8 weeks in the Independent's'Five best London exhibitions' listing.

Objects, publications by Martin Fidler, Simon Cutts (with reflections).

It makes you think about format and idea, handwork, modesty of means, collaboration, reading and looking, ways to receive text, poetics of the image, creative influence of social formations ...

Case with work by Thomas A. & Laurie Clark, Robert Lax; print by I. H. Finlay.

Thanks to Ian Whittlesea for the pictures.

out+about

2008-06-08T20:19:00.015+01:00

Yesterday morning at Emma Hill's Eagle Gallery in Farringdon, an exhibition of artists' books, BOOK THINGS AND WORD WORKS. My favourite thing was Victoria Bean's 'Helvetica Poems', pairs of punctuation marks presented with 'lenticular lenses', enabling (or enforcing) the view to flip between them, e.g. a pair of angle brackets; square and round brackets (as Adam and Eve); a twinkling asterisk-star. Etc.

These reminded me of Stuart Mills's 'Poems for My Shorthand Typist', currently on show at the V&A in Certain Trees, consisting of single punctuation marks:
the sea-horse's poem: ?
the canal's poem =
etc.

Emma Hill publishes artists' books too, the latest being a book of poems by Jonathan Ward with single-colour, loosely-geometrical lino-cuts by Andrew Carter. The images are attractive, with a loose minimal geometricism. The poet gave a reading. The work seemed decent and relatively unpretentious apperceptions of family life and landscapes. Gave rise to reflections on the potential virtue of plainness, restricting linguistic effects to those found in ordinary speech of some middling sort, thus going straight for 'sulphur yellow' (heron), 'electric blue' (kingfisher), narrative of one's own sensations ('I close my eyes' -- rarely a good idea) etc. etc. I liked an extempore and unwitting move into Gomringerian concrete, uttered between poems:
those people
those people and those places
those people and those places and memory

Thence to the Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia. Focussed on non-London, and preferably non-British exhibitors, spending the longest time with Solstices, from Lille: modernist and surrealist artists' books, art exhibition catalogues. To die for: Hans Arp & Sophie Tauber's Muscheln und Schirme, their first collaboration: his poems, her drawings; typeset by Jan Tschischold. Sort of prefigured Gomringer's Constellations in Futura, with minimal drawings by Max Bill. Way out of my price range.

But I did fall for something else: Le Mirivis des Naturgies, poems and texts in a kind of French zaum by André Martel, written out in capitals, with lots of exclamation marks; and full-page abstract textural illustrations by Jean Dubuffet. Published by the College de Pataphysique in 1963 it is a photographic reproduction of a de luxe version with coloured lithographs, but this small black & white version is absolutely beautiful.

Henry Sotheran's antiquarian booksellers are nearly 100 years old. Their latest catalogue is a William Blake collection, much of which is on display on the walls of their downstairs room till the end of June.

how spring comes

2008-05-08T18:53:00.007+01:00

All of a sudden it seems, London trees are in full, bright leaf and candle, it's too hot, and I have a cold: aching, stuffed head, sore eyes ...

On Tuesday a strong brown package of unusually long thin proportions appeared in my work in-tray from the Harvest Book Company, Fort Washington, PA, a couple of weeks after the placing of my order on Abebooks. How Spring Comes, by Alice Notley (West Branch, Iowa: Toothpaste Press, March 1981) measures 27.6 x 16 cm. It is beautifully designed and produced, letterpress-printed on creamy, watermarked wove paper, in blue wrappers (upper and spine faded, and rather susceptible to new finger-marks and moisture spots) with a great title-page illustration by George Schneeman -- two stockings neatly draped on a coathanger -- in a second colour, pink, also used for a flower on the cover title. The anachronistic, private-press style is supported by a lengthy colophon (containing two errata, as noted on the t.p. verso, paratext upon paratext ...).

Reading this book, last night after attending a housing meeting, and this morning bunged-up and slightly feverish in bed, has at last sprung a huge pleasure in Alice Notley's work. On Saturday a group of people convened by Carol Watts at Birkbeck will spend the day reading and discussing her poems (with Alice herself present). Greatly looking forward to this, yet the preparation has felt to date a little like homework. But here I love the tight strung sparkle of the personal domestic quotidian; the energy of thought; the surprise as every poem embarks quite differently from the previous.

--bum & zoom. leaving & yet never this awful old
this dark ocean life that hardly sees comes &
flashes on the sofa sits as Ms. Missa Brevis--
to go to try to find the rail between names.
('September's Book', opening lines)

Great talent is in the ear for speech, juxtaposing different registers, pasting on idiomatic elements, running to experiments in male impersonation ("I am man who dazzles ... in the park / with glasses" ('September's Book'), 'Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice'); this also tends to position away dramatically the 'real' first person, freeing the young poet-wife-and-mother to exhibit the facts and concerns of her life in a way that doesn't seem solipsistic (where the leisured absorption in her own mind of longer, later works have initially struck me that way -- my own deficient attention likely most to blame ...).

These aspects of voice and drama relate to the Frank O'Hara influence Notley often acknowledges (e.g. here, 'A True Acount of Talking to Judy Holiday, October 13'). But many other techniques come into play: the dynamic necklace of names from fiction in 'A California Girlhood'; the litany of reversed life-narrative in 'Jack Would Speak ...'; the proverbial saws piled up in 'The Prophet', and throughout the book, a virtuosity with different types of line, from the taut and rather monumental-for-its-size 'For Willa Cather', through the very long lines of 'The Prophet', via the long-and-short work of the 6th section of 'September's Book'; this poem is on its own a whole primer of different approaches. Exhilarating, menthol.

2007, some books (6)

2008-03-02T19:30:00.007Z

J.H. Prynne, Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and Others. (Cambridge, available from Barque.) This book (of which due to other pressures my reading is currently suspended half-way through) looks like a scholarly periodical issue or (e.g.) an on-demand dissertation: plain dark blue paper wrappers with nothing printed except the title on the spine (albeit that in silver); the text inside photographically reduced directly from authorial copy. It lacks the common articulations of most either standard or academic books: contents page, chapters, even footnotes (let alone an index). Its 134 pages contain in fact 54 numbered sections (of very variable lengths) in 3 Parts, of which the first is the point by point 'Commentary' on Wordsworth's poem, preceded by contextual notes; the second is a series of commented quotations from a range of sources including historic documentary and modern criticism that can be brought to bear on the poem; and the third expands by way of analogue a rural encounter in W.H. Hudson. It is surprisingly difficult to establish these contents: this is not a book one can get any sense out of by just flicking through. Fruit of a massive immersion in all the associations and implications focussed by its subject, the study resists consumption by any less diligent appetite. It brings to bear a huge amount of reference on agricultural life and practices, folksong, acoustics, and much else. The critical reading of the poem is imbricated in all of this, rather than merely supported by it: there's no 'Conclusion'. Thematically it speaks slightly to the Oceanographer of oral-aural / literal-visual boundaries of language and intelligibility, but the thoughts on work, and on the potentialities of listening to music returned me to thoughts of my poem for Roger Smith's & Adam Bohman's CD last year; while the question of obscurity and receptive meaningfulness ("will no-one tells me what she sings?" etc) have been related (e.g. in Seamus Perry's review, TLS, 25 Jan.) to issues of poetics around Prynne's own poetry. For the scanning eye however there are two illustrations, of reaping scenes in wood-engraved vignettes (enlarged). In that on the title page, the reaper is indeed 'solitary', close-up amid wheat stalks nearly as tall as he, but the tail-piece shows two -- again male -- working together, and a view of their village beyond the field. The other plain thing is the fold-out text of 'The Solitary Reaper', which can thus be kept in view simultaneously with any other page.

For those of us who have not had the privilege of being taught by Prynne, this absorbing book might suggest why his influence seems so strong on those who have. It makes reading a poem an investigation of real life.

2007, some books (5) ('you want marks')

2008-01-14T23:07:00.001Z

Frances Kruk, dig oubliette. Hackney: yt communication, 2006 (OK, out of time, that's in the spirit of this tardy blog).
Frances is a virtuoso of dreck, working with an Elite-face typewriter (12 characters to the inch), fingers and other inkable objects, bits of torn paper and/or other flat media that can overlap or stop-out. Moving everything around so the 'writing' is rarely merely perpendicular to the page-edge, scratting, splurging and defacing texts that are themselves full of uncontrolled organic matter, squirting, rotting, staining, oozing, encrusting, filth ... One series is called 'Spillages', another consists of 8 purely visual (finger painted?) pages. Rather in the spirit of Bob Cobbing's work with Xerox, but (in this book anyway) the copying process is I think transparent to the autographic page (I culd be wrong about two or three pages near the beginning). Pierre Garnier does 'dirty' typewriting like this sometimes. The covers (thick texured orange paper) are I think individually hand-decorated, with black ink streaks and splashes. And yet 'smudge fest' is not the whole of it. There is actually a very 'clean' sense of design, so each page blooms a constellation. Some text is mirrored (using acetates then?). The 3-page sequence 'pretty:' is a classically Concrete minimal pair reiterated ('blood' 'flood'), but staged toward illegibility through overlay, and also dynamically impinged with splodged and then flowing (or tentacular?) graphic matter. It would be a mistake to underestimate this work just because it seems visually and thematically readily recognisable. Actually I think it is distinctively and valuably poised in an unusual space between poetry and drawing; and I'm coming to appreciate these pages -- like 'Spillage 3' and 'plunge ... PLUG for your LIFE' -- more every time I look at them.

2007, some books (1-4)

2008-01-01T23:39:00.001Z

So, this is a slow blog. (And I haven't even finished reading most of these.)

Emily Critchley, When I say I believe women ... (London: Bad Press). (2nd corr. ed.)
The title piece might seem like a 'personal poem', anachronistic outcry, but dressed as an essay, neat side- and footnotes (albeit neurotic scratchouts). But I think it is the converse, an experiment in thinking, through a pain object of indignation that should damn right have currency. Print can be in conflict and have manners and style. The poem sequence also should be read. (I might talk about the tilde-dash and parentheses.) Very nice production by Bad Press, striking cover by Marianne Morris.

Simon Cutts, as if it is at all. (New York: Granary Books & Coracle [Ballybeg], UK distr. Cornerhouse.) 'Some poems 1995-2006'. Working in a long tradition that grew out of and against Concrete, minimalism is more apparent than attention-seeking layout, with analogues in the continuing practice of Thomas A Clark and Eugen Gomringer. Many pieces are I think 'found' -- isn't that a reductive misnomer for the processes of sensibility and transformation involved? -- perhaps one might rather say 'encountered'. Here the process seems especially to reduce and concentrate, a culinary analogy. The Coracle website quotes Jamie Oliver, something like, 'This isn't cordon bleu, this is din-dins'. But it entirely depends what you think is chemically and nutritionally fundamental; in this case it's pretty refined. (In a good way.) There is some deep discovered thinking in things like: what looks like a contents page in fact indexes the words of the book's title through the poems. The blurb is an apologia for the 'selected' nature of the contents, 'whose format, type and space may present an ideal unification for the new accumulation'. Few poets would scruple so. An absolutely happy book to have & hold.

John Hall, Couldn't you? poems for pages. (Exeter: Shearsman). Another poet and artist scrupulous of the relation between word and support. Some poems here too had previous instantiations in other media but they land lightly on the page and arrange themselves, as a flock of dancers runs onstage and accurately scatters. 'Here and There' for instance is a short prose sequence designed for the precise width of this published page (so each ends with a full line, giving the impression of a possibly random cylinder of text extracted from a continuous sequence, but not actually so). The design and production processes that enable Shearsman to put substantial and materially very decent books by under-read writers into the world, though they can accommodate extended techniques including images and non-typeset elements sometimes -- e.g. in Frances Presley's wonderful Myne (2006) -- can leave them (the books) a bit kind of affectless, to my mind. Still, mustn't grumble.

Lynsey Hanley, Estates: an intimate history. (London: Granta.)
A history-with-autobiography of post-war social housing in Britain is totally out of scope here, but the Oceanographer inhabits an 8th-floor flat in a council estate block ... The author's particular interest however is the huge green-field developments mainly of houses such as she grew up in, and the relation to modernist architectural aspirations isn't really analysed. It is a pessimistic view, with little hope that public housing estates as such can be redeemed from the stigmas and problems associated with them. But to live in a quiet, off-road, treed environment in London transport zone 1/2 feels like a privilege (and living up high can powerfully counter depression, though associated with the reverse).

More to follow, tomorrow maybe.

'Slowly in October / Rain the transient structures the'

2007-10-29T23:59:00.002Z

At the Small Press Fair this year (12/13 Oct.), from Reality Street clearance stock / backlist: John Seed, Interior in the Open Air, with images by Bronwyn Borrow (1993, when the imprint was Reality Studios). Designed bespoke as ever by Ken Edwards (presumably), the book is unusually wide (200 x 153 mm.) to allow that Seed's work 'at times utilises the shape of abstract structure' as Ralph Hawkins remarks in the blurb, as well as for Borrow's soft fluttery things -- birds? fish? 'Snow Flurries'? litter scraps ('Rust edges // Already flaking' or 'Torn into new forms // England's derelict / Archive 1990') in the 'Chaos small' of an urban wind vortex, 'Almost in spirals the blown dust'? -- swirling from far to near, or dancing with their reflections, light or shadow.

In this book Seed starts each new line with a capital letter, which looks very odd in modern free verse. Is it (for instance) a debunking of that 'free', poetry being subject as everything else to habitual regulation? Contrary to floaty parataxis it fragments harshly: 'Between stones in an empty square the // Connectedness of things'. Or a manifest continuity with history of/in English poetry? I was at a study day last week at which (among much else) I learned that it was Hazlitt (1818) who first made the polemical (and perhaps not entirely accurate) connection between political and typographical 'levelling', in respect specifically of capitalisation within sentences (other than for proper names) (it having been established by canonical typographer Moxon in 1683 that capitals 'lend dignity'). The speaker (Gavin Edwards, U. of Glamorgan) proposes that Edmund Burke did not give the French Revolution its capital 'R'.

Adorno, from whom Seed takes his epigraph (and I think at least one other allusion) is fantastic on the writer's 'predicament' of punctuation and orthography:

The writer cannot trust in the rules which are often rigid and crude; nor can he ignore them without indulging in a kind of eccentricity ... But if, on the other hand, he is serious, he may not sacrifice any part of his aim to a universal, for no writer today can completely identify with anything universal; he does so only at the price of affecting the archaic. The conflict must be endured each time, and one needs either a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity not to lose heart.

Seed does allow some play within the line, away from the margin, which looks then like a protected aesthetic 'interior', but then it too can be invaded by the dominant order:

    Approaching the dreamless the
    Actual
    Roots                  reach down

          against the whiteness the mirror the
                  smouldering ground

                     unrealities of human speech

                                what is it?
    Unwrites these places     Words
    Blown away like mist

-- and there's yet another image to which Bronwen Borrow's delicate decorations respond. (I falsify though: this passage is interrupted by a page turn. Also it's not in fixed font. See snap.) Amid scattering, toppling, blur, drifting, flickering, 'Fading and shifting', one stands, potentially, 'Sharp, clear-edged'.

Learn (not) To Read (the handout)

2007-09-09T18:07:00.001+01:00

Four original 'Typings' by Christopher Knowles were on the wall at Tate Modern (London) in 'Learn to Read', an exhibition of work by 'artists who play with text and erasure'. Knowles, a prodigy best known as theatre director Robert Wilson's teenage collaborator in 'Einstein on the Beach' and other stage pieces, only came into my ken last year through wonderful performance readings by Chris Goode. They are copious and highly patterned rotes and transcriptions of conversation, radio patter, song titles and lyric fragments, couples' names, a family slide show, verbs with their gerunds ('so to do is as the e and the ing thing to do of the words'); very dynamic and rhythmic, and somehow, despite (or due to?) a apparently complete absence of acquired sophistication, delightful to New York school-influenced sensibilities. I hadn't fully appreciated that on paper they are also immaculately designed typestracts, making full use of coloured ribbons etc. (Can't find any images on the web.)
*
Nothing else in the show seemed really exciting; one or two were (imo) conceptually feeble, daft, or badly executed; most were at least slightly intriguing. NB someone with more knowledge of the fine art field would doubtless have found far more to admire. There was evidently a lot of allusion and citation to earlier conceptual art. The interpretative text in the handout seemed generic and banal -- is it me?? -- and may have jaundiced my view of the work. (I know it's not easy to write about this kind of art.) Those I liked most, generally due to their material aesthetic (often on paper directly tacked on the wall), were as follows:
By Sue Tompkins, sheets of newsprint with one or two very brief, almost unassociable, textual fragments typed on. With irregular and partial folds, presumably due to the process.
By Vittorio Santoro, phrases of ambiguous but perhaps vaguely ethical import, in pencil in childlike handwriting and odd spacing (reminiscent of Cy Twombly), e.g.
VISIO
NARIES
AND
VOYEURS
with the same words in a single line and cancelled, beneath, so the whole sheet was a kind of minimal landscape.
Lia Perjovschi's mind-maps as wall drawings. At one level I think these are really 'not art', but I do quite like the way they look, variable disks constituted by handwriting.
Anne-Lise Coste: apparently enlarged doodles, airbrushed.
The non-linguistic aspects of Simon Evans's collages on paper were pleasant: one included a circular relief in pencil-sharpenings, the other a constellation of cigarette burns. The words were autobiographical indices ('weaker friends want their sympathy back'; 'It's winter now and the trees are pretending to be dead').
Jonathan Monk sent a sentence in English to a translation service, sent the result to another, and so on and so on, ending with a transformed version back in English. One or more poets (especially Harry Gilonis) have been playing the same Chinese whispers with free online translators for quite some time now. Monk's output was the series of versions, on the letterheads of the various firms. There were unresolved things about this work: the set of languages was that found along the Edgeware Road, yet the selected text had nothing to do with that location but was a macho aphorism about the art impulse by Carl Andre, that had its own problems. Still, it was all quite nice ...
Two little collages by the Scottish artist Kevin Hutcheson used torn-off bits of magazine print, including text ('islands of ... aspects of' ...), like very minimal Schwitterses. These were potentially the most interestingly poetic, least resolvable pieces I saw. Or else just the emptiest ...
In other media:
Peter Coffin's big white neon scribble, especially as placed to create a whole reflection in the front window of the Level 2 gallery, was charmingly spectacular.
A little animation by Mario Garcia Torres (possibly a re-make of someone else's work??): in small handwritten capitals, jiggling about, a bit hard to read, "until it makes sense". Ah. Walk away now, stop looking/thinking. Very true.
I quite liked Shannon Ebner's photographs, despite being completely unconvinced by her scenarios as significant engagements with language.
Key work: Bethan Huws used a black signboard system with white moveable letters, reminiscent of those found in greasy spoon cafes, to mount a couple of texts, especially:
WHAT'S THE POINT OF CREATING* MORE
ARTWORKS WHEN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND
THE ONES YOU'VE GOT

*substitute 'exhibiting'.

2007-08-12T23:52:00.001+01:00

'On 28 July [1967] Allen [Ginsberg] drove to Wales with publisher Tom Maschler to spend the weekend at his country cottage in the Llanthony Valley in the Black Mountains. They stopped en route at the magnificent ruins of Tintern Abbey, the inspiration for Wordsworth's ode. That afternoon, feeling relaxed in the tranquil setting, Allen took an acid trip. While on LSD he wrote 'Wales Visitation', a nature poem ...' (Barry Miles, Ginsberg: a biography. Rev. ed. London: Virgin, 2000, pp. 393-94).
*
The ode (dated actually '1967 July 29 Saturday') was published in 1968, in a not-for-sale edition as 'an offering for a peaceful summer from Allen Ginsberg and Cape Goliard'. It is a small landscape-format pamphlet (12.5 x 17 cm.) with title page and colophon printed in blue, sewn with white cord, with a dust-jacket of handmade brown (Japanese?) paper with 'bits' embedded in it, and title and publisher device printed in red. Today I saw it on dealer Bob Date's stall at the PBFA book fair at the Holiday Inn, Coram Street, London. I'm not all that keen on Ginsberg but this is a nice poem, full of real Romantic rhapsody, undoubtedly but subtly responding to Wordsworth as well as alluding to Blake (possibly even Dylan Thomas ('the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' ...?), and the text beautifully printed and designed to the width of the longest lines (eleven lines per page). It was £35, expensive, especially in the context of a fair full of knock-down bargains, but in the end I had to have it.
*
On Friday 27 July 2007, I drove to Wales with poet Hugh Epstein to spend the weekend with a group of other poets (old friends) at Leona Medlin's home in Cardiff Bay. We considered diverting up into the Black Mountains, where I spent childhood holidays (in the Olchon valley, the one east of Llanthony, but the other side of Offa's Dyke, i.e. in England), but stopped instead more sensibly at Tintern Abbey, and walked the wooded hill above the steep Wye valley there.

Two from Sheffield (transatlantic)

2007-07-16T21:25:00.001+01:00

In Nineteen Nights in San Francisco Christine Kennedy takes a series of guidebook asessments of hotels (or rather, bed-and-breakfast places -- the caste of facility doubtless subtly determining the resultant linguistic register) and transforms them, by extraction and typographic embellishment, into, what? models, or portraits, anyway verbo-typo-visual pieces which bring these addresses to life in the imaginary. Reconstituted out of banal, uncommitted prose, they become suffused with human presence and quiddity, intentional art experiences distributable like poetry (rather than, for instance, merely 'documented' as installation -- though Kennedy does too sometimes derive and re-inscribe her work in situ). Alongside these is a set of pictorial images derived from one relevant symbolic object, a hotel desk bell, somewhat Warholian but rendered through several different techniques. Another analogue and possible influence might be Ed Ruscha's serial photobooks (Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, etc), but the artist proposed by Christine as the chief inspiration for this book is Joseph Cornell, many of whose assemblages evoke European hotels. Some of her pieces propose objects that could be incorporated in such a collage, and often there is a breath of the surreal in her refractions:
While you sip / your complimentary evening wine / fills the rooms ...
But she has thoroughly transmuted what she derives from forerunners. Christine is one of relatively few real artist-poets active in Britain today (as far as I'm aware), and I greatly admire her rather original syntheses. As well as part of what I see as her ongoing project in -- what to call it? intermedia poetics (pace Dick Higgins)?, Nineteen Nights is also an enjoyable and amusing book. Here's a picture.
*
The Salt Campanion to Geraldine Monk is out!! at least it will be within the next couple of weeks. I have an essay in it on various kinds of visuality in Geraldine's poetry, and am gratified to find that her latest book, Raccoon is all about seeing and not seeing things, on a real trip in North America (not, like Des Esseintes and Christine Kennedy, a travel in a book). In the 'Ode to a Nightingale', Keats's sense of 'what flowers are at my feet' and 'what soft incense hangs upon the bough' is achingly redoubled precisely when, in the dark, he 'cannot see' them. When Monk fails to see whales, raccoons, elks and even mountains, sometimes she responds sardonically ('O you're so big / invisible mountain'; 'I looked everywhere ... Nada'); sometimes she defiantly delights instead in things that present themselves unlooked-for: a humming bird, 'the old moon / in the new moon's arms / in Idaho' (cf Coleridge's epigraph to the 'Dejection' ode), even a non-native faunal specimen: a giraffe in the shape of a brooch. But in 'Never Seeing Raccoon (I eat its words)' the poet undertakes a ritual invocation of the evasive beast in language, including native-American words ('magic one with painted face ... weekah tegalega / gahado-goka-gogosa'). Monk has been sparing of this kind of thing before: I can only remember it in 'Beacon Hill' in Long Wake, the very beginning of her acknowledged oeuvre. I look forward to a performance. It seems to be in some way efficacious, as the sequence ends with some dubious sightings or sensings: 'shadow-beasts' in the dark; 'another scent ... a zip of bones and ginger'. And all that is only the half of this book.
*
Christine Kennedy, Nineteen Nights in San Francisco. Sheffield: West House Books & The Cherry on the Top Press (from SPD in U.S.), 2007. ISBN 978-1-904052-22-7.
Geraldine Monk, Raccoon. Free Poetry, vol. 2, no. 2, March 2007. For distribution contact mcsmith(at)boisestate.edu.

painting reading versioning ...

2007-06-25T00:06:00.001+01:00

Dmitry Gutov is a Russian artist, making his second Venice Biennale showing, in the second half of Robert Storr's keynote exhibition, in the Corderie (rope-shed?) of the Arsenale. (I hadn't heard of nearly any of the names here, whereas the first half of Storr's show, in the Padaglione Italia in the Giardini with the other national pavilions, features many better-known artists). Two weeks later my memory of the work is shamefully vague, but it was a set of paintings of, as I recall, texts and front covers of books by Marx & Hegel. I thought images would be easily come by, but I can only find this, which shows perhaps more sketchy versions of similar work. The labels explained that in his Moscow studio Gutov hosts a reading group, the 'Karl Marx School of the English Language', which has the double purpose of developing the members' English and studying canonical Marxist texts, a minority interest, to say the least, in today's Russia. The English 'instructor' in the group describes it here.
*
An over-riding impression from the whole of Storr's assembly was that much of today's art consists of documentation, sometimes of personal crises (cf in their very different ways, Tracey Emin and France's Sophie Calle) but more especially of political ones. Gutov's engagement seemed both less sensationalist and more complex and intellectual, than the visual narratives in war-torn cities, etc.
*
Sophie Calle's main installation is a huge collection of responses and versionings, by over 100 different people (women) of an email apparently received by Calle from a boyfriend, breaking off their relationship. It was hugely enjoyable to go round, but not (imo) massively profound art. An obvious precursor -- though limited to the page -- would be Raymond Queneau's Oulippian Exercises du Style (1947), which tells the same small narrative in dozens of different ways.
*
Funnily enough I was in John Calder's bookshop in Waterloo (London) this afternoon, at a discussion on Stefan Themerson, and there are still a couple of copies of Barbara Wright's translation of the Queneau, published by the Themersons' Gaberbocchus Press, with Stefan's illustrative initials, in 1958! Tempting at £30, and Barbara Wright was actually present ... but I do have a copy of the pbk reprint by Calder ...

manuscripts

2007-06-24T23:59:00.001+01:00

The Mechitarist monastery on San Lazzaro is viewable by guided tour. This is a bit taxing on a very hot day with a very large group, but worth it. It contains a miscellaneous collection of art and objects, of which, aside from the religious artefacts, the most important are the collection of 4,000 Armenian manuscripts, stored and displayed now in a new rotunda room.
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There are also Armenian gospel manuscripts, among many others, in a fantastic exhibition currently on at the British Library. 'Sacred' (not a record by Madonna) is an extensive comparative display of beautiful and curious religious texts and other artefacts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The diplomacy required to bring this off at this time is hard to imagine, likewise the cost: a considerable amount of material is loaned, there are art commissions, plenty of IT, and a high level of design and a a free gallery guide, and yet there is no charge for entrance. Great website too, with 'turning the pages' access for 16 items.

neon, etc.

2007-06-17T22:31:00.001+01:00

Aldus Manutius, Rio Terrà Secondo, San Polo 2311, Venezia.
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The letter Z has a high frequency in the Venetian dialect. So, you catch a vaporetto no. 20 from the eastern-most of the stops at San Zaccaria, and chug across the Lagoon to the tiny walled monastery island of San Lazzaro to the south-east, and as the boat approaches you notice a yellow fuzz along the whole length of the sea wall, and over the sides of two visible square buildings, and perhaps in a narrow band too on the bell tower, and this is a beautiful neon installation by Joseph Kosuth, one of many events is association with this year's art Biennale. The texts are in Armenian (it is an Armenian monastery), Italian and English (the latter in an italic style), and seem to consist of, or be based on, dictionary definitions relating to water, and then stages of association away from them. Ideally, you would have your own boat, or hire one, and be able to sail slowly along the sea wall, the only way you could read it all. But the texts on the buildings are legible from the island itself. There is an image and some information here A catalogue will be published later in the year. Here is a not-very-good closer-up picture

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Tracey Emin is in the British pavilion of the Biennale proper this year, as everyone knows. (It's on till November.) She has some neons too, including a nice wordy one in pink. The associations of the medium with tawdry adverts, emergency directions, cheap cafe shopfronts glow around the fixation of these cris de coeur in her inconsistent handwriting and spelling. The one I thought strongest is 'I KNOW I KNOW [erased], I KNOW', with the erasure in blue. Here's a picture of it, thanks to one Beat_Nik.
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A couple of months ago there was an exhibition of neons by Ian Hamilton Finlay, at Victoria Miro's gallery in London. They were attractive, in different colours and scripts. The calligrapher who executed the designs from Finlay's ideas, Julie Farthing, said that she adapted her hand intuitively by meditating on the texts. Sometimes Finlay indicated a preference. Many are versions of works done also in other media, and might be considered glamourisations; however the very glossy catalogue has an essay by Stephen Bann, arguing the centrality of the neons in Finlay'e oeuvre. A few specifically allude to aspects of light: the twinkly orange 'Diamond-studded fish-nets', and the more obscure white 'parheliacal marble', the subject of a fine interpretative essay by Harry Gilonis, in Angelaki magazine, vol. 5, April 2000 (which seems to be available online to institutions with a subscription). Some text and images are here. Many of them were displayed in a dark room, which seemed too obvious: neon in daylight is a / great pleasure, at the hub of a city, or across green water on a hot June afternoon.

typography matters

2007-05-28T23:29:00.001+01:00

Spent part of this holiday weekend making up a little pamphlet insert of my five poems in the latest Angel Exhaust magazine. This issue came out a few months ago (dated Autumn 2006), and I am delighted to have work in it for the first time; however, along with one or two other errors, my layouts were somewhat mashed in the typesetting. Some people might consider this merely cosmetic, or even a weakness if it matters that much. I could imagine that at least one of the AE editors might well hold such a view. Not for the first time, 'Pierre Le Saboteur' is acknowledged as 'typographical consultant'. But the issue includes plenty of poems with more or less distinctive layouts (i.e. more than simple vertical divisions between groups of lines) by other contributors including Adrian Clarke, Jesse Glass, Giles Goodland, Marianne Morris, Kevin Nolan, Peter Philpott. (Though I understand that some of these too have been less than perfectly rendered.) Sent a grumpy message to the editors, and received a very nice card back from Charles Bainbridge, apologising and agreeing to distribute my corrections. Pressure of work means it's taken ages to prepare the inserts; however they will be sent off tomorrow, so if anyone owning AE 19 cares to see my poems as they were meant, in a format that fits neatly inside your copy, please apply to Charles (or to me).
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(Just at the end of making up 100 copies, I noticed that I have myself introduced a new minor spacing error ...)

touching base

2007-05-01T20:10:00.001+01:00

I meant to write about the excellent free exhibition recently on at the British Library, on Migrant, the little Press founded in 1957 by Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer. But I completely failed to do so ... Here's the BL's press release on the subject.

My best Christmas present

2007-02-04T18:37:00.002Z

Kenneth Patchen, Sleepers Awake (NY: Padell Book Company, 1946). I saw it for the first time a few months ago (at Red Snapper in Cecil Court) and must have mentioned it to H, who braved the high-caste book dealers Bertram Rota to acquire one (at a brave price, lacking dw but vg) and gave it to me for Xmas, a complete surprise. I knew nothing about the book (as will be apparent), and next to nothing about Patchen, and it's been intriguing and enjoyable to make it out from this point of ignorance. It's a beautifully designed book of prose ... fiction? perhaps a series of connected short stories, printed very black in a bold sans-serif typeface, plus some red on tp and caption title; but also with lots of visual and display-type layouts, and non-verbal elements. Lists and diagrams and pictures, parallel sequences through pages ... It's a slightly disturbing read though: a surreal, drug-influenced? and sometimes violent picaresque, set in a dystopian near-future, or indeed present (wartime?), with a motif of shootings marked by hardboiled epithets -- 'the head of a crimson mouse working out of his cheek'; 'Thane's shirt was growing a big red rose', etc etc --. Things transform grotesquely, or seem hallucinated; characters morph into others with similar names. There are also passages of obscure soap-box fulminations and exhortations on alienation, God, love, possibly attributed to the unstable narrator. It's a very weird book, but I'm excited to have found it. 1946! amazing. Pre-Concrete, etc. Here's a picture .
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Last week, H in the Charing Cross Road carried away for me a New Directions paperback (ca. 1966?) 'doubleheader' (i.e. printed head-to-tail with two title pages) of 2 Patchen books (first pub. by Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society), 'Poemscapes' (put together with 'A Letter to God') and 'Hurrah for Anything'. The latter consists of very small poems with drawings, with a strong whiff of Edward Lear cum Stevie Smith, some really limericks ('There was an old bronchobuster ...', 'There was a forgetful litle commuter ...'). The drawings are great actually. And here's a page of quite recent (1996) fully integrated 'picture poems'. These outsiderish works help situate the strangeness of Sleepers Awake; but I much prefer its visuals, predominantly rendered in type.
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A couple of weeks ago we went up to Highgate, ostensibly for a walk in the woods, but ended up spending most time in Sound 323, the purveyor of advanced and experimental music and sound art, just over the road from the station. I bought a CD of 'The City wears a Slouch Hat', the 1942 radio play written by Patchen, with music composed by John Cage for an orchestra of radio sound effects ('organiz[ed] ... with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind') together with frequency oscillators, buzzers, marimbula, coil of wire, contact-mic'ing etc. etc. I remember hearing this first on that marvellous first pilot season of Resonance 104.4FM, in fact it's certainly somewhere among all the unlabelled cassettes I recorded during those weeks. It's great, a bit chaotic; lots of crunchy noises and bells. More slightly uncanny narrative, a semi-psychic looming 'Voice'; more preaching: 'I think we need more love in the world ...'.
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What I bought at the Book Fair (briefly, for Thomas)

2006-12-10T22:26:00.002Z

(That would be the Small Publishers' Fair, at the Conway Hall in London, way back on Saturday 21 October.)
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My favourite book artists, for want of a better term that would encompass these two rather different makers, one dedicated to image, the other to type. Both subtle and refined perfectionists.
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From Helen Douglas (weproductions), now able to print directly on, or rather into, fine tissue paper from a computer, which extends the potential of her work. Glyph, a single-section pamphlet, 3 folios sewn in a plain card cover. The prints are square, photographs of a water surface (pond? or even a flooded meadow) with short points of grass or reeds poking though, and reflecting. They are colour images but (?)highly exposed and appear almost black while the water has 'evaporated' completely: the effect is reminiscent of textual marks (as suggested by the title). I'm a sucker for anything like that. Meanwhile, the depth and recession achieved by the tissue (and perfect registration of the image of course) is enhanced by the way that the ink has gone right into it so that the verso of every image is a mirror-version almost as sharp; thus again this is like a proper book -- with text on every page -- not just a sequence of prints on rectos only. Like everything Helen does, Glyph is beautiful and exact.
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I still haven't put away the one I bought from Helen at last year's Fair: Loch. A series of circular vignettes (but largeish -- 8 cm. diameter); photographs printed b/w, in this case bringing out linear patterns: verticals, horizontals and zig-zags, of water ripples and reeds, with here a white swan, there a reflected tree ... They resemble enlarged wood engravings of microscopic slides, and fingerprints, and planets; floating on a tall page. The leaves are bound in a folded Japanese format and stiff black boards with a white title label. This book is a whole meditation kit, all you need; and anyone who doesn't buy it, for a mere £8, is missing something. (Pictures are on the website as above.)
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From Colin Sackett.
typd. Another tall thin book (20 x 10 cm.); an exercise in minimalism, which rings changes in hues tonally somewhat reminiscent of Neapolitan ice-cream (khaki, Wedgwood blue, black, pink), on a short text (further shortened by omission of letters) reiterated across the gutter of each opening. It's a very pretty book, but the exploration is austere.
TransLATER Sacket (I have no idea if that's the title: it's on the front cover that way). The (sur)names of Henry Moore, Hans Arp and Herbert Read are cycled with the words French, English, Lost and Found, to create new formulations that look like titles (Read FRENCHMoore; Arp LOST work, etc.) in the typography of (??)Penguin books of the '50s: bold sans caps; with also an element of HMSO government publications, in the coarse grey paper and buff wrappers.
onsixpagestoday is one of Colin's more copious texts: a double-column alphabetical sequence throughout, in a handsome italic sans face, of (most often) fifteen-letter phrases; but some are longer if roughly the right length in points. E.g.: dealinginletttters, ebayarmsdealer, goingdownthetip, pickitupdropitoff. A blurb I can't lay hands on referred to something like 'a bad-tempered auctioneer', and the cover image is of a cattle market (empty). I have no idea what motivated this fascinating book.
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From Moschatel Press I bought two of quite a few 2006 titles. By Laurie Clark, Ragged Robin, a sequence of 6 coloured drawings of that flower, in specimen portrait mode (i.e. not as growing in the ground). Though it might seems that the book form here is merely a handy container for a set of images, a sequential dynamic is at work, to do with the number of flowering heads and buds.
By Thomas A. Clark, Names (132 x 92 mm.) of which mainly I couldn't resist the dust-jacket, with its colour photograph of a green woodland with silver birches, shrubs and bracken. The names in question are those of things in the natural world. During my day-and-a-half away in the country this weekend, I have been thinking about how impossible it seems to bring the non-verbal experience of nature, place and landscape, into the poem machine. I think I need a precomposed corpus to work from. But this little poem perhaps points to simple vocabulary as already text, for 'gather[ing] things around you' etc., which of course it is.
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I bought books by three of this year's Poetic Practice MA students at Royal Holloway. Sophie Robinson's lovesic is roughly 12 cm. square, full of messy text and imagery generated by the look of it from several media/techniques including hand drawing, manual typewriter, photoshopped image and physical collage. Very Writers Forum, and we like that. The text is all 'mucus-hearted and gloopy-headed' (till the very end, when it goes into a nice 2-page spread of a single line repetition) but I seem to recall that Sophie gave a very convincing reading of it at the Fair. Bright pink cover.
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In Octets, Kirsten McGarrie (as far as I know) invents a new poetic form, and it's not everyone that does that. Each page has 3 parallel versions of the same triplet, which starts out life as a set of (very unusual) 8-letter words (e.g. toplofty, arbalest, dystocia etc.), then a numeric version based on assigning values to the letters, a=1, z = 26 (e.g. 88.89.87); then these in turn are converted into binary octets: (e.g. 01011110.01000001.01100110). The book has a narrow calendar format. 12 x 22 cm. , with black tape at spine, cream covers. I'm not sure that this is very profound work, but I've never seen anything quite like it, and I enjoy its aesthetic very much. The font looks like an enlarged version of the old typewriter face I used to be fond of as Letter Gothic.
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Graeme Estry's poem in new york is a 'kitbook', to be cut and folded from a single A4 sheet of blue paper, ending up around 48 x 74 mm. Paging one way through, you read all the poems, the other way, see the photographs. It's low-tech and modest, but ingenious too, and the cutting and folding instructions are clear and economical (even I could get it right, and I'm diagram-blind). And the pictures and text are exactly as good as they need to be.
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I also earmarked Rosheen Brennan's book to buy, but then forgot to, so can't describe it well now. It combined photography, text overlaid in such a way that it looked as if it was part of the photographed scene, and then cut-outs that gave you a different look at the same material. Very well conceived, and not badly executed considering the ambitious design and short time available: the Fair is only a few weeks after the beginning of their first term, but course leader Redell Olsen insists that the students all get a book made and editioned in time for it!

e and eye: art and poetry between the electronic and the visual

2006-11-08T23:36:00.001Z

'e and eye' is an interesting short series of free presentations / discussions taking place at Tate Modern, London, peripatetic within the permanent-collection galleries after they close to the public on Monday evenings. They are intended to explore and discuss 'the relationship between the visual, the poetic and the electronic in art', with particular reference to those aspects of digital or new-media art that might fall within some definition of 'electronic poetry', but reflecting also some of the specific art movements and work represented in the Tate's current new re-hang. In practice, a wide range of digital and multimedia art has been shown and talked about. An extensive blog-site gives details of all participants, includes texts or summaries of some of their presentations, and also includes new commissioned essays by several 'virtual theorists', together with the opportunity for anyone to add comments or start an independent discussion.
http://web.mac.com/shadoof/iWeb/eandeye/
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I took part in last week's session (30 October). The evening began in the room for Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, with Tim Mathews (professor of French at University College, London) talking about the Calligrammes of Apollinaire, with reference to A's involvement in the contemporary visual arts we could see around us. Tim proposed a crucial question about visual literature: Is it (can it be) a truly critical form? or is it confined usually to the impressionistic?
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I gave brief presentations of work by the venerable e-poet Jim Rosenberg (US), who explores interactive, diagrammatic layouts (also varieties of 'simultaneity')
http://www.well.com/user/jer/index.html
and by the digital-artist and/or 'code-poet' Ted Warnell (Canada), who produces astonishing images, often referencing modern art (including e.g. analytical cubism), purely through the means of writing code for an internet browser. My rubric was: 'How far can you go? boundaries of the visual in (e)poetry'. An extract of what I said about Ted's work is on his blog, mo'po.
http://pbnmopo.blogspot.com/2006/11/e-and-eye.html
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We then moved to another part of the gallery, where Sharon Morris (London-based poet & artist), without discursive preamble, gave an accomplished and atmospheric staging to a sequence of her own poetry on the city (specifically London), performed off the page and accompanied by photography and film (taken digitally and intended for web distribution). It was also a cleverly site-specific presentation, both physically and thematically, relating to the 'City Symphonies' installation of several experimental art films in the gallery. Demonstrating that one response to doubts about the visual word's limitations is to work in compound visual and verbal modes, potentially deepening rather than diluting the potentialities of both.
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Work by the 'virtual practitioners' for the evening was then projected to full advantage inside the small dark screening room. Talan Memmott's Self-Portrait(s) [as Other(S)] is a comically apt recombinant montage, visual and textual, of famous artist self-portraits and art-historical tropes of artist biography, whose accessibility perhaps belied its technical virtuosity: Talan has long been acknowledged as a major figure in digital art/poetry.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/memmott/spo_Memmott/index.html
Maria Mencia's 'Cityscapes' offers a rich and highly interactive, Flash based 'Make your own' montage, using a plethora of imagery and texts from city streets: advertising, road signs, graffiti etc. etc. (which Mencia calls 'new calligrams'), and also sounds (collected from vocalisations in many languages).
http://www.creativefromwithin.co.uk/citytoday.html
This piece demonstrates the potential for electronic arts to make social, public engagements, and is most attractive and optimistic; and as a bonus since Maria is based in London, she was able to be present and talk about it too.
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The cross-currents and questions raised by the session as a whole were to ponder, as are those emerging from the whole series. The last session is next Monday, 13 November, 18:30-20:00, Tate Modern. (Free.)

*Bad typewriter book

2006-11-02T20:51:00.002Z

I hereby condemn C.A. Forget's Margin Release (NY: 3x5 Books, c1976). It consists of a bunch of 5x3 cards printed with, I'm now inclined to feel, really quite dull typewriter 'mats'. But the unforgiveable thing is that this collection was packaged (presumably as issued) in an unpleasant plastic wallet; and just now as I stood on a stool putting away Lotto by Kaia Sand, on the top shelf where the tiny books go, I discovered that this wallet had adhered itself tightly to the next book along -- the precious Ideas on the Culture Dreamed Of by Allen Fisher (Spanner, 1982) (also typewriter-typeset, and miniaturised). As I started gently to peel the two apart, fibre from the Fisher's yellow cover card, and ink from its author-designed motifs (which are matched on red end-papers), adhered to the plastic. I proceeded above a boiling kettle (possibly it would have been wiser to heat an oven ring) and managed to preserve the total design of the cover (the front, alas, as Fi precedes Fo), but most of the images are greyed, and the whole surface is now rough, and vulnerable to dirt, & more damage.

Women's books (&c)

2006-10-22T13:17:00.001+01:00

Two weeks ago was the excellent Cambridge Experimental Women's Poetry festival, a project of cambridgepoetry.org, of which I attended two days. I reported to the ukpoetry list, and Elizabeth Treadwell kindly requested to post it on her blog, so please see her Secret Mint.
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These are the books I came away with.

Emily Critchley, When I Say I Believe Women ... (Bad Press), 2006)
23 pp. A5 stapled. Cover art incl. col. ill. by Marianne Morris. Strong paratextual articulation of the page, with foot- and side notes, and columnar layouts. These features of the scholarly page (dating from before print), together with the caption title leading straight into the text, and some retained deletions, drive an exposition, the book has things to argue and work out with an intellectual passion.
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Susana Gardner, To Stand to Sea (Tangent Press, 2006)
[3], xxxiv pp. 14 x 14 cm. stapled. Grey card cover with discreet glitters; title printed in gold, cover art by Elise Tomlinson. A small gorgeous book, numbered ed. of 100, but robust to be handled. Short sections of text looking variously like verse or prose or either, some Procrustean play with text width, no titles but grand Roman numerals like the Commandments on a church wall; i.e. a definitely visual approach to each piece (though a couple of recto-verso run-ons have not been avoided). As Thomas A. Clark has (I think) written, 'to learn to look at the sea is to learn to look', and part of Gardner's thematic here seems to be the experience in human relationship between what can be seen (or in some of her other words, gazed at, deciphered, spied) and the immense and sensate sea (which also 'sounds', in her emphasis on saying, telling, naming).
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Carol Mirakove, Mediated (Factory School, 2006) (Heretical Texts series).
91 pp. 23 x 16.5 cm., perfect-bound paperback, shiny full-colour cover (design by the author).
This book shows you can transpose a good deal of the direct buzz of authorial typography into the materalities available to conventional trade book-making. Flicking through makes you want to read it, with its use of bold, oversize titles, varying type styles and densities, dispositions and ventilation of text (in a nice readable size); lots of numbers, abbreviations, punctuation, lists; and a section which by dint of overprinting a half-tone screen, pretty successfully reproduces a manuscript of mixed print and holograph. Well done the publisher. The work spits feathers, and they remain aloft.
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Marianne Morris, A New Book From Barque Press, Which They Will Probably Not Print (Barque, 2006).
38 pp. A5 stapled. Col. cover image from a Jeff Wall photograph (contents page shows some poems reference Wall).
Great value this book: loads of words; some long lines run way too close to the edge (a good way). There are a few stanzaic arrangements, some use of indents and extra space within lines, but predominantly this poetry is typographically quite plain, just brilliant free verse lines, often of drastically differing lengths, that perform great readings for anyone willing to take them as such into voice. The copiousness is authentic.
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Kaia Sand, Heart on a Tripod. [16] pp. 22 x 10 cm. stapled. Col. cover image by Jessica Berg Swanson.
AND
Lotto. [32] pp. Roughly 10 x 10 cm. single stapled. Gold card cover (unique) and wax seal.
Both: numbered eds., of 100 and 33 respectively (Dusie, 2006.
Dusie chapbooks are as I understand it about enabling the author to make exactly the book they want, and in some cases they themselves manufacture it once its design has been realised by the publisher. Heart is a pleasingly tall thin book of widely spaced short lines, concerning (I think, at least in part) pace and rhythm and adaptation to physical limits in sport and life. Lotto, every copy of which has a different cover, also functions literally as a lottery ticket, with individual prizes (e.g. in my copy, a 10% discount on any other Dusie title). It also resembles a wallet (pocket-book), and I think concerns not only the small-scale state-endorsed gambling of popular lotteries but the relationship between finance and all the other probabilities that determine one's chances of a long, happy, healthy and prosperous life.
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MORE TO FOLLOW ...

First books: C

2006-09-30T22:21:00.001+01:00

Lord, three weeks since last time. I'm really not cut out for a blogger ...
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Carol Watts had an auspicious start this year, with a first collection published by Equipage and launched with a reading at the Runnymede Festival (at Royal Holloway College, Egham), on, I think, 23 April, 615 years to the day after the death of Elyenore Corp, a young woman whose memorial brass in a Devon church inspired the fifteen beautiful 14-line poems in Carol’s book.
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The title alone, brass, running, quickly suggests a whole series of transformative levels, within and beyond language, matter and spirit. I can’t but think of the whole Hildegard of Bingen thing, that a few of us have messed with in verse, plus modern addresses to other medieval spiritual/mystic women, such as Jane Draycott’s and Lesley Saunders’s semi-documentary collaboration on Christina the Astonishing, who could fly (a lovely book, published by Peter Hay’s Two Rivers Press, with his illustrations, in 1998) or Alison Croggon on the endlessly weeping Margery Kempe, and others, in 'Specula’

http://www.masthead.net.au/alison/poetry/specula.html . In Watts’s sequence, associations of the sea, ‘gulls / tacking before the wind’, ‘light / and its qualities’, the molten history of a brass, plus the reference to ‘the anchorage of one year’ suggests that Elyenore may have lived some kind of specifically spiritual rule; however I don't think it really matters. What here ‘brings breath to metal / as if the wind lifts her’ is an attainable if fugitive human joy in the sensational world and the body, channelled in the imaginary by the poet. I find it delicately and yet robustly achieved, the writing very rich but remaining fluid, turning from one thing to another, including some fragments of contemporary text and apparently particular historical references, always thinking and composing as well as riding a flow of impressions:

... think of the sound of light as
a guttering of limbs its rush a hunger
to sustain the evidence of breathing snatched
from other open mouths the denial
of burning is not harmless she is not here
is something inflammatory baptism: light
and water implicated in the frenzy of cities
(from ‘IX’)

Carol Watts, brass running (Cambridge: Equipage, c/o Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge CB5 8BL,.2006). £3 post free.

First books: B (overdue post ...)

2006-09-04T22:21:00.001+01:00

Rosemary Stretch is not Betsy Fagin’s first chapbook, but I think her first since coming to England from the US. It’s ten small numbered poems, arranged in a variety of stanzaic and visual groupings; tonally calm and abstract they seem delicate, veiled reflections on identity and a life, gathered and dispersed, rigid and fluid, linked and alien (‘venusian’) -- every relation seems fissured with ambivalence expressed in profound (yet remarkably unobtrusive) linguistic ambiguities. Documentation and sensation are among disturbing reassurances of one’s particular existence. There is also a wider world of the broken, despised, downtrodden, inflicted, of devastation and contempt, in which the self is implicated (‘everybody / regimes oppressive from time to time’) and I don’t know why these large complications don’t overbalance the poetry’s subtle poise but they don’t.
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This is lovely work and impossible to excerpt, but happily it is on the web: the book is part of the Dusie kollektiv project, a poetry publishing project that embraces web distribution while retaining the potential for the book as a material medium, that often characterised small press poetry. This one is cleanly and carefully designed by the poet for its modest production niche, with a sweet cover image (for which, and the title, I don’t have a reading). I like it that a stapled A5 pamphlet adopts the Japanese format (i.e. the fold is at the fore-edge) which gives body and opacity without needing special paper. I think that there’s a small (numbered) print edition, and otherwise it’s PYO, to read on- or off-line, in print or not, as you like, for free.
Available at http://www.dusie.org

Word Into Art (timely post for Jeff)

2006-09-04T01:47:00.001+01:00

Made it to the British Museum today for the last day of the exhibition, ‘Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East’ (in the upper level of the old BM Reading Room of blessed memory). 80 artists from all over the Middle East (or whose parents were), also Islamic North Africa and even Japan and China, each represented by one or two works in a very manageable show in 4 overlapping sections: ‘Sacred Script’, modern instantiations of the tradition of Islamic Arabic inscription in several distinct styles; ‘Literature and Art’, where the tradition opens to secular content; ‘Deconstructing the Word’, where since the 1940s forms of writing appear as elements of abstraction or association in the visual arts, and the rather different ‘Identity, History and Politics’, where writing shows as pervasive, rather than central, to the view of the modern world explored by engaged contemporary artists in painting, print and mixed media / collage. The show is full of fabulous things and gives rise to lots of ideas about text/image, which if I try to ponder now, this won’t get posted (how does Ron Silliman do it??) ... There's a batch of large sculptures by the Iranian Parviz Tanavoli, all versions of a Persian word ('heech' = nothing'), and throughout, play of scale is striking: juxtapositions of large and small, even micrographic. One intriguing and to me unexpected component is magic: amulets, magic squares .... One of the most exciting things was slightly at a tangent to the rest, the only instance of electronic media, a miniaturised video projection by the Israeli / American Michal Rovner, that created, from film of people moving to and fro, rows and columns of textlike forms creepy-crawling on the pages of a notebook.
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There’s a web version of the exhibition at http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/middleeastnow/word-into-art/exhibition.html and also a lovely catalogue (pbk only £12) (with a staesmanlike preface by the BM’s impressive director, Neil Macgregor).

Illustrating Dylan (My souvenir of Biggar)

2006-08-20T00:53:00.001+01:00

A photographer called Mark Edwards has published a book of photographs, each illustrating a line from Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. I opened it at ‘I met a young child beside a dead pony’, with a picture of exactly that (a scene of drought in Namibia) and picked up a general objective of concern about climate change and concern for ‘sustainable development’, in essays by Edwards and Lloyd Timberlake. Mostly I was transfixed by the story of Edwards, lost in the Sahara in 1969 (at the very moment of the moon landing), rescued by a Tuareg tribesman who made him a cup of tea and played him a cassette of Bob singing that song. Well, it would change anyone’s life, wouldn’t it? I shelled out the extravagant £15, some of which hopefully goes to some related good cause, but few of the images have that wow factor as illustrations to the lyric, and they are variably related to the socio-economic theme (e.g. the ‘white man who walked a black dog’ is in a grainy picture captured anonymously at Abu Ghraib, and the ‘girl [who] gave me a rainbow’ is Edwards's little blonde god-daughter on a trampoline in her green, (presumably English) garden, shaking out irridescent bubbles from a pot. I don’t really care for the enterprise artistically: it doesn’t add up to much for anyone other than the person who has made a hobby of collecting of images that resonate with the lyric, and it’s clunky to insist on finding some literal correlative to every one in this series of dreams. As for the association with a Cause, that is against Dylan’s spirit, as we understand it, no?
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Coincidentally, Len had reminded me when we visited him & Judith a couple of days before, of the Getty Museum book (that I also own) which juxtaposes details of James Ensor’s painting, ‘Christ’s Entry Into Brussels’, 1888, with the lyric of ‘Desolation Row’. It’s also naff in some ways, especially the Word Art-style text design, but at least has a certain speculative aesthetic coherence, in that (of course) neither element can be thought of as illustrating the other.
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Still, the pictures in Edwards’s book are mostly good and interesting, the project’s fervent good intentions are infectious; the texts are informative about the current state of international progress (lack of) and policies on development and the environment and there’s a useful bibliography. Then, this book overtly invites the reader actually to take action as a result of reading it, and includes suggestions about what and how: inform yourself, change your own lifestyle, campaign.
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Mark Edwards, Lloyd Timberlake. Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision With Nature. London: Still Pictures Moving Words, 2005. ISBN: 1-905588-00-3 http://www.hardrainproject.com/
In Biggar (where they have moved the Ian Hamilton Finlay sundial again) the independent, nice bookshop is called Atkinson-Pryce.

Explicating Joyce in Edinburgh

2006-08-20T00:50:00.001+01:00

In a hot room above a pub, fitted out with church pews, a typical Fringe venue, an American called Adam Harvey performs Finnegans Wake Chapter 7, 'Shem the Penman', all the way from, ‘Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob’, to, ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq’.
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The style of rendition was to my mind rather ‘RSC’, lots of enunciation and mime, squeezing out every drop of sense. The set is two chairs of contrasting design, the actor wears (and eventually removed most of) a black suit and underwear; there is much business (all of it to the interpretative point) with a bowler hat and some white handkerchiefs. But the text is after all picturesque and theatrical, and Harvey’s programme note cautions sagely, ‘any attempt to confine this extraordinary language to a single interpretation threatens to violate its author’s intentions. So please enjoy this performance as the abstraction it is intended to be. Think less about what you’re not understanding than what you’re experiencing’. A tour de force certainly, to me it seemed more an educational / reading aid than a true piece of theatre, but thoroughly meritorious on those terms, and very enjoyable. Harvey has studied and memorised no less than 5 chapters of the book, ‘working on one phrase, one word, sometimes one syllable at a time’, and apparently presents them often at Joyce conferences. It would be great to have them on DVD.

Linda Stillwagon at Pittenweem

2006-08-17T00:10:00.001+01:00

“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would / write, as are light bulbs in daylight”
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Projected on a white wall in white light, somebody’s name appears, then slowly fades, followed by another, and then another, and over the next few hours, had you the leisure, hundreds. Some are famous in European and American art / literary modernism, others rang a bell; many went unrecognised and may be practically unknown, giving rise to associations based more on the shapes and sounds and (where applicable) meanings of the words in their names, and not on anecdotes and images we already have in mind. It was everybody Gertrude Stein (or, in other versions, Frank O’Hara or Peggy Guggenheim) ever met, in chronological order; a piece of text art, blank and teeming, but synchronic not simultaneous -- by contrast with the blankness of teeming, and, too, with the fantasy that biography (as a literary form) evokes: that a life is a party where everyone is always present. Possibly even with the idea of society: a proper name erases a real face, if only momentarily. Did we meet? if at all, it was in the space quietly left behind each name, unhurried, but too briefly to become attached. For half an hour or so this was rather satisfying; I wish we could have stayed to see whether the long durée would eventuate in some sort of transcendence, or a restless insatiability (Derain, Matisse, Picasso, who else is there?), or something else again, perhaps some usefully recovered memories.
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This work is accompanied solely by two posters (a third is in the other room), with texts derived from (as it happens) Hans Christian Andersen’s fear of being buried alive. He kept a note on his pillow, that read (if I recall) “I only appear to be dead”. This is printed in black letters on one large sheet of paper that bears crease marks of having been neatly folded up small; its pair reads, “I only appear to be alive”. Resonant in themselves, these lend a further depth of field to the projected names, the majority of whose owners (do you ‘own’ your name?) are by now technically dead. But pace Lynne Truss, add a comma half way through each sentence: no sooner (in the grand scheme) do we appear in the world, than we are dead; but then again, the sight alone of our name can in some sense bring us back to life. Further readings again would be possible.
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The artist’s name is Ian Whittlesea. The show at the Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem, Fife, ends this week (20 August), but there are some great installation shots on his website:
http://www.ianwhittlesea.net/

First books: A

2006-08-04T01:21:00.001+01:00

Alyson Torns launched her first book a month ago, with a couple of readings, one of which was at Crossing the Line, the series (now at the Plough, Museum Street, first Fridays) where we probably first met, a few years ago. From the Lost Property Office contains work by a 'quartet' of personae: Stella Stein has an eating disorder, Alice Band a painful empathy with children hurt or destroyed; Eunice Pessoa exists through emotional relations but is insightful and reflective; Maria Pimenta engages (or at least 'watches') a wider world outside, and is alive to language as the material of perception and construction. Maria's poems are built on the page in rectangular chunks, while those of the other three are for the most part
intermittently stanzaic free verse. As a whole, the book reads like a growth and development, and that impression was reinforced at the reading, where Alyson presented some newer work again, which was more fractured and abstracted. It'll certainly be interesting to follow her trajectory; but this book is meanwhile a serious, consolidated achievement. The piece that touched me most in fact is one of Alice's, a little one:

Legs dangling
in the air
from energy
of my father's feet

exhilaration of
leaving my seat
flying away
for a moment.

The dangling is typical: these poems start and end in medias res -- they don't purport to resolve anything. The book ends with a piece by 'Alyson Torns', an account of a weekend in Lisbon 'In search of Pessoa'. The poet's experience and love of Portugal suggests itself as theme for wider work, and her prose style is engaging in quite a subtle way. I thought, She should do more of this! (and I rarely enjoy prose).
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Alyson is a lovely, open-hearted, vivid being; she's been holding her breath for this book, and it's brilliant to see it out, and see it good. (Visually too: she was allowed to do the design, and it's attractive & readable.)
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Alyson Torns, From the Lost Property Office: a Quartet for Pessoa (London: Hearing Eye, 2006) 1-905082-08-8

Plantarchy

2006-07-24T00:24:00.001+01:00

What would plantarchy be? the rule of plants. A new poetry magazine with this title carries the motto 'every molecule an orchid', and no pious Green-ness is suggested by shocking pink covers. Something about the ineluctable luxuriance of plant life in all but the most privative conditions? that leaves the wielder of hoe and secateurs wondering which party governs the cultivation ... There seems to be a sense of spawning (when looked for) in quite a lot of the work in this issue, a strongly generative emphasis or drive, but also a shaping aesthetic that results (for instance) in really nice, clean production and editorial choices.
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When Martin Buber looked at a tree he knew the 'constant opposition of forces ... continually adjusted', but saw also its 'stiff column in a shock of light', perceived its 'suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves' and entered into 'mutual relation' with it (but 'the tree is now no longer It'. Among the good visual work here, Jeff Hansen's 'I & Thou' is a sequence of 'layered responses' to, I think, specific contemporary aggression that turns 'thou' into 'IT'. It has the dirty-concrete look of copier-collage, but the text also circle-dances. Each piece is paired with a magnified detail of itself, as if you moved closer and began to know someone. Geof Huth by contrast appears to be grafting various species of typographic figure -- archaic characters maybe, symbols, or kerns -- to grow original unitary images which are designated poems (like Ian Hamilton Finlay's one-word poems) that genuinely stretch the potential of poetic signification, by being (brilliantly) titled: 'Sound's First flight', 'The Muscle memory of Meaning', etc.
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Another Jewish philosopher, Alan Sondheim, is flooding with effluvia, desire, the infinite, mourning enormously, never far from death, in five smeary proses, one quite long. Everything he produces is exciting to read, despite its absurd quantity. Not being on any lists any more that he posts to daily, the regular hits are missed ...
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The magazine's dimensions are generous to writing that wants to stretch the poetic line. 13 pages of Matthew Klane’s ‘re Republic’ sequence spread right across their width, but (as well-trained espalier appletrees) with very deliberate visual patterning. The well-spaced lines belie their lexical density; you can see them grown from seed: ('I text parley / Malcolm X y Karl Marx / atomism y Islam') [17]; 'for the Other, a / the-O-ry // for my mother / myrrh' [23]. Taking time to read into this work, it's exuberant and rewarding.
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In these pages, language sometimes seems psychedelic. In Camille Martin's sculpture-landscape-poem (let's call it that for now) words cut out from magazines vibrate, tucked into an informal trellis: 'volcano', 'telephone', 'Believe' -- a kind of concentration that could go minimalist but here bristles. Likewise, William Howe lets off fireworks with no expense spared: these stanzas are #671-682:
Thief puker -- fever bloke -- / Narwhal fell -- lichen plumb -- / Revel bison -- assay label / Office-pro ground toucan --/
Oh God, they're not 'his Emily Dickinson' are they? (the sequence title is 'translanations'). If so, is it beside the point to go off and try to specify the relationship, noticing en passant Dickinson's own hallucinatory formulations (reticent volcanoes with pink plans, indeed!), as well as the bits in Howe that could be by her (Fever space ... dim / Immortality ... piece paucity ... Fructified instant [except it's actually 'Fuctified', hopefully a typo ...].
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'Plantarchy' the title is acknowledged as an indirect reference to a certain English punk song ... jUStin katKO, the editor, was in London last year, at e-poetry 2005; and there are some Brits in the mag: it opens in fact with 8 pages of outrageous rhyming verse by Jow Lindsay, who's no tree hugger ('gaia, the coyote, restructures this / forest for hansel'). Here too there's a sense that it's all made from the transformation of waste (or into it); and also a systematic interruption of flow (in this case with the names of now obsolete Anglo-Saxon letters). There's a shortish Tom Raworth extract from 'Caller', whose opening could be another rubric for the whole issue: 'nature corrupt nature / romped bound constituency'. And the one critical essay here, by Stephen Perkins, is about Stuart Home and Neoism, asserted as 'the last of the historic avant gardes of the 20th century'. It's quite interesting, but Perkins's association of plagiarism, a basically desperate strategy, with collage, is I hope resistable ...
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This post has been in draft for a week and must be let go. I've enjoyed reading everything in this excellently produced and edited magazine, and would love to comment on them all -- Maria Damon's 'decrepit text', pathetically unstable; Chris Stroffolino's unsettling unreliable polemicist, and plenty more. The next issue is out now.
http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html
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At last, it's raining.

Bookscapes (1)

2006-07-17T21:42:00.001+01:00

Journey to the Lower World is a book, with DVD, documenting a shamanistic performance by the artist Marcus Coates, in a council flat in a condemned tower block on a housing estate in Liverpool. It seemed pretty offputting: was this some Beuys epigone with a community arts grant, patronising innocent citizens with a half-arsed orientalism, or was it a fatuous po-mo joke? The publicity postcard shows Coates draped in a deerskin (complete with head and hooves) standing in front of a lift with a small, slightly nonplussed-looking resident and a shopping trolley.
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The foreword, by Mark Wallinger, didn't help, with its casual dismissal of 'that symbol of man's folly, a tower block'. What's wrong with tower blocks is not the architecture, imo, but other kinds of structures. Drew Milne has a great sequence of tower-block-shaped poems that treats something of this subject (would't like to say what his precise opinions are though). I live on the top of a mid-rise council block, with views of the Lyons estate at World's End. I love it.
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Anyway, this book eschews conceptual formalism, with a large-ish landscape format allowing for the wide range of types of content inside: whole-page stills of the ritual in progress (blurry reaction shots of the audience of residents), prose, verse, screenlike or down-the-White-Rabbit's-hole images of animals like those Coates met on his trips into the Lower World, sequential frames of a demolition. As well as by Coates and Wallinger there are texts by the book's editor and publisher Alec Finlay, and extracts from anthropological accounts of shamanism. One of Coates's has been lineated into verse by Finlay. As art publishing goes, this is slightly out of the ordinary. If it seems a bit 'everything but the kitchen sink', that may be appropriate to the event, when large, unwieldy, potentially wild animals and possibilities enter small, domestic, contained lives, to activate, but perhaps also to discharge and convert their anxieties.
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After reading the whole book, and watching the video, I was won over. Marcus Coates was alive to all the possibilities for discomfort of his activities; he also cared (or appeared to) in an unpretentious and exploratory way, for ordinary people and for society. And the shaman thing didn't come from nowhere, or merely from the weekend course in Notting Hill(!): apparently he has been doing things with nature always. Learning to imitate animal cries, for instance. This mode of art practice came to seem a genuine if experimental attempt to contribute and discover, or uncover, something on behalf of a real world. The residents were about to be rehoused. They were looking for a comforting image, or omen perhaps; they were not deluded, but understood the nature of the avatar; and their paticipation, including embarrassment and defensive amusement, seemed really to be an observance of community, or of the desire for it, on the part of a self-consciously tiny minority of local inhabitants.
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Around the time of getting this book, in April, I attended a performance by the brilliant Chris Goode of his one-man show 'We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg', in the North London home of Sue F's friend Jonathan. This by no means purported to be a sacred ritual, and I am certain (I trust) Chris would run a mile from the word shaman, but there were solemnities, as well as sillinesses, and the gamut of stuff in between, and he is after something real. Chris presents with total theatrical command yet a resolutely 'normal' and even slightly diffident manner. And then he goes away, evading applause.
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Anyway, this conjunction left me musing a bit about, well, blokes doing strange things in other people's houses, I guess; and the potential social functions of performance ... But the aim here is to write about the book really. 'Bookscapes' is a new series of publications by Alec Finlay, under the 'Platform Projects' rubric, though his former press, Morning Star, is listed as co-publisher. I guess I first met Alec at small press fairs years ago, when he'd be hawking his exquisite little poetry publications, or you could say minimalist artists' books -- pamphlets and cards -- or sometimes minding the stall for Wild Hawthorn. Back then too I remember him giving a lecture at an art librarians' conference, about Little Sparta. With 'pocketbooks' though, Alec made a significant move into the trade press arena, and did some brilliant anthologies in particular, but also small classics by individuals, all working within an attractive unified 'brand'. Libraries of Thought and Imagination, about books and what they mean to people, and Helen Douglas's photo book Unravelling the Ripple, are my top favourites. 'Bookscapes' seem to be pushing the bounds of the bookshop book again by using a range of formats this time, and taking the multimedia further. I'll write about some more of them.
http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookscapes.html
(An account of the earlier pocketbooks: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr93-2/kelly.htm )
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This post is different from yesterday, because of wanting to write something potentially public about the bookscapes.

in these ends my beginning

2006-07-16T22:23:00.001+01:00

Yesterday afternoon a small bookshop trawl. Through the Brompton Cemetery (a picture would be nice, wouldn't it?) onto Fulham Road, and into John Thornton's for the first time. They had a little poetry, including a practically mint copy in glassine wrapper of a lovely Cape Goliard book from 1968 (another picture wanted), Gael Turnbull's A Trampoline, for the ridiculous price of £1.50. Who designed it? Tom Raworth had moved on by then. For the same price I left behind the first pamphlet publications in the early 1940s (but second impressions) of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding (the latter on hand-made deckle edge paper). There was also a copy of the old magazine Tlaloc (ed. Cavan McCarthy), with some great typewriter poems by d.a. levy, among other things. Bizarrely by contrast that cost £2. I'll maybe pick it up if it's there next time. The shop actually specialises in Catholic theology.

After a ciabattina, the bookshop at World's End, where having finished with the main shelves I spotted this little brown job in the glass cabinet: Down Where Changed by J.H. Prynne! £15 less 20% discount (this seems to be a permanent offer there). Slightly dented and damp-stained on the outside, but really OK. The clever thing then would have been to put back The Marginalization of Poetry (£6) but I didn't, I stuck with it ...

Finally at the Picador bookshop (new books) I saw Alasdair Gray's recent Book of Prefaces, a terrific anthology of paratexts, brilliantly designed and illustrated. I'll get this, in due course.

And all this time I should have been at Tim's and Chiaki's wedding, but we had the date wrong.

I'm not really sure yet what I'm doing here. There's an urge to gloss (which would have the merit of increasing and reinforcing what I know) and to illustrate (I do intend eventually to get a scanner again -- the old one wasn't compatible with the new PC-- and/or a digital camera) . But this whole thing may be nothing more than a strategy to stop failing to keep personal records. Writing offline's come to seem no fun.

"I Never read the book you gave me twentyfive years ago. I want you to know that I have Now, and that it is remarkable" (WCW to Reznikoff, quoted in Perelman, 'An Alphabet of Literary History', in MoP. I am hoping this practice, if it takes off, might reduce the interval between book acquisition, reading and articulated response.

Read DWC slowly and tiredly, yesterday, liking the large round type on the small pages; tonight skimming it rapidly brings it alive more: predominantly I get amazing weaves of sound (such as I have also noted all over my copy of the much more recent Acrylic Tips) as well as glimpses of a specific occasion, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall (1979).