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.
Monday, 25 August 2008
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Certain Trees: LAST CHANCE TO SEE
'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.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
out+about
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.
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.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
how spring comes
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.
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.
Sunday, 2 March 2008
2007, some books (6)
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.
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.
Monday, 14 January 2008
2007, some books (5) ('you want marks')
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.
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.
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
2007, some books (1-4)
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.
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.
Monday, 29 October 2007
'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:
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-- 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'.
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
Sunday, 9 September 2007
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.)
*
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'.
*
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'.
Sunday, 12 August 2007
'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.
*
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.
Monday, 16 July 2007
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.
*
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.
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.
Monday, 25 June 2007
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.
*
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 ...
*
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 ...
Sunday, 24 June 2007
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.
*
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.
*
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.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
neon, etc.
Aldus Manutius, Rio Terrà Secondo, San Polo 2311, Venezia.
*
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
*
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.
*
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.
Monday, 28 May 2007
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).
*
(Just at the end of making up 100 copies, I noticed that I have myself introduced a new minor spacing error ...)
*
(Just at the end of making up 100 copies, I noticed that I have myself introduced a new minor spacing error ...)
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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.
Sunday, 4 February 2007
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 .
*
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.
*
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 ...'.
*
*
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.
*
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 ...'.
*
Sunday, 10 December 2006
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.)
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.)
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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!
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.)
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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!
Wednesday, 8 November 2006
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/
*
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?
*
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
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.)
http://web.mac.com/shadoof/iWeb/eandeye/
*
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?
*
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
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.)
Thursday, 2 November 2006
*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.
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