'Slowly in October / Rain the transient structures the'

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)

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.)
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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'.

'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).
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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.
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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)

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.
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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.
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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 ...

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.
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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.
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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.
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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

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.

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

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

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

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)

(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

'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

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)

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

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 ...)

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)

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)

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

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

“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/