Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Edric Mesmer : 100 Protége-feuilles : on opening a box from No Press



1

There are certain things catalogers shouldn’t do (we often joke) after 4pm, on a Friday.

One such example: opening this repurposed red and white box (printed “100 Protége-feuilles”) from Banff, Alberta, caringly sent from poet and publisher derek beaulieu; to open this box—on a Friday afternoon, after 4—will surely spell agony for the cataloger trying to sort, describe, and categorize such gorgeous print evidence from No Press.

I’d say this box might better be called a Monday’s delight—and it seems no coincidence that just last week graduate student Lilly Reynolds and I were sorting through ephemera from Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Wild Hawthorn Press; in retrospect, this seems great preparation for the red and white box from Banff… For the poetics of No Press shares something with Finlay’s endeavor—that of a cadre of writers/artists (need that be defined?) looking into the formal “concreteness” of language, where verbal, vocal, and visual markings intersect, intermingle, sometimes share a line.

That they would find a “small” publishing outfit in Alberta willing to fashion such poetic investigations into custom-made editions of gentle materials meant for a circulation to the few seems at first surprising; then, miraculous; finally, graceful.

This is close-knit…where often the poetics of the materials approaches the work.

2

Corresponding with derek, he tells me (with printed “sigh”) that the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection is “the only library (in the world) who subscribes to no press.”[1] Though I’m a bit shocked by this, I’m only too glad to know that we do!

Working as a cataloger, I sort the items first by format and dimensions—a sort of pre-classification, separating each item individually to be entered into OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center, searchable though the web interface WorldCat), which requires classifying each work first through format, such as Book or Visual material. The extent of each piece must also be described: whether a one-sheet broadside or a many-leaved volume. There are 67 such pieces in this “100 Protége-feuilles” box, and—judging by past experience—most will not have been entered yet in OCLC’s database, meaning no other library participating in online cooperative cataloging, in the world, holds even one copy of any printed piece in hand. (To revise my earlier assessment: this is a cataloger’s delight!)

So how sort?

Things that are large; things that won’t fit in a filing cabinet folder, or a drawer. Bound volumes; volumes with side-stabbed bindings; those sewn along their spines. Works presenting as anthologies, with multiple contributor access points. Papers needing to be stored unfolded, versus those that might last better folded. Chapbooks; single sheets of papers featuring arrays of fold; folios with leaves stitched inside. Envelopes with unnumbered items. Miniature broadsides, to be measured in millimeters (versus centimeters, which is standard in cataloging). Second editions…alternate editions…the “Deep Blue” edition. Works that are primarily textual versus those that are purely visual. And those that are textual and visual. (And those that are textual-visual.)

3

Some sorting is merely practical: things I don’t want to misplace… Soon I uncover a pair of miniature broadsides, both by a visual poet publishing under MWPM. The first, “You and I” (2018), printed in black on orange paper, features a lowercase “u” wherein the right arm is superimposed with a lowercase “i”—so that it seems to be a symbol from a phonetic alphabet. The reader is left to ponder what symbolic this orthography proposes, as it’s clear this symbol is greater than the “some” of its parts.

The second mini-broadside by MWPM is “Talking loud saying nothing” (2018), also printed in black but on paper of light green. Mostly illustrative (the former wouldn’t be classified as such, because its particular visuality is made of text, which remains true for typewriter art as well—a cataloging conundrum I imagine MWPM might find apropos), this small panel presents a set of geometric shapes, like tangrams but overlapping, playing at symmetry and repetition while nevertheless delivering—under scrutiny—difference.

4

A few things here from Lindsay Cahill too, a poet whose work I’ve admired since the advent of the Niagara Falls, Ontario publication Dead Gender ([2011?]- ). Included here are two miniature collections by Cahill: one mostly textual, The Silly Archive (2018), the other of typographic text and color-marks, called XYZZY (2017).

“flora and fauna / plops and droops” opens the The Silly Archive; and by the second numbered stanza we arrive at “cubo-futurist vision machine”; and “unprincipled machines / reassembled and rearranged” by two more. Meaning is held at bay through abstraction, a form of resistance possibly paralleling Cahill’s critique of museumification or—more pointedly—criticism: “mouth chart / walking fashions // stretching, squashing, deforming and dissecting.” Further references allude to Jan Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue and On Beauty (E. Scarry?—Z. Smith?—both?), but I don’t want to give it all away.

From Nick Montfort, two typographic works (sheets (folded), not volumes; each one “1 unnumbered page”), both titled Basho, though only the “2nd revised edition” bears the diacritic macron over the o: as in Bashō. Each presents a poem made of three typographic marks, arranged vertically rather than as horizontal line. Are these text? Sure. Do they sound…? In the first edition, a “?” appears between parentheses that open outwards, above and below. What is this telling us about questioning and silence? What does it suggest that the [question mark] is the only mark revised between editions?

5

A folded sheet can bear text, image—music.

§  Hart Broudy’s [untitled] (2018) opens to reveal a lengthy image of varied step and surface, obscuring a lowercase “a”.
§  Jessie Kennedy’s An Albertan Hunter’s Cetology ([2019]) is two pages of text sampled from Moby Dick (chapter 32) “altered to apply to the Albertan landscape and the animals that inhabit it,” per the colophon.
§  Petra Schulze-Wollgast’s Patchwork (2017) is a single sheet folded into eight surfaces, dividing and obscuring (and reframing?) metal type patterns of azure and charcoal.
§  derek beaulieu’s occupied floor ([2019]) presents a visual poem that plays between line, blotch, and type—a question of “line” itself, be it compositional, textual, or spillage.
§  Eight Lines by bpNichol (another ancestor under whose sign this imprint might operate) is “a pirate edition” of—you guessed it—an eight-line drawing. Attributed to Nichol, the work harkens not only to the unquotability of image but also to the limitations placed on reproduction (i.e. copyright)—all the while dancing the line of a rarefied sheet torn from an artist’s notebook to be sold at auction, reproduced here for us on matte-finish blue paper.

6

Legacy is a small press issue, as demonstrated by Litmus Press’s valiant feminist undertaking to preserve the backlists of O Press and Post-Apollo. No Press addresses this on the level of the individual work, as seen in such reproductions as dom Sylvester Houédard’s “Haiku (for Kenelm Cox)” (2017), Mary Ellen Solt’s “Moonshot Sonnet” (2017), Judith Copithorne’s “Horizon” (2018), and bill bissett’s “an ode to d.a.levy” (2018)—levy being another ancestor apparent to No Press.

This form of “reproductive archiving” isn’t limited to single works of poetry, either. Included in this box is “How I Didn’t Write Any of My Books,” an essay by Aurélie Noury (translated by Russell Richardson), excerpted from Publishing as Artistic Practice, edited by Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). Also of note: 4 by bill bissett on his 80th, printed as homage to highlight bissett’s significant role in opening “Canadian poetry to postmodernism.” These pieces show a currency of thought; the works themselves mark its circulation.

7

Voluminous visual variety:

§  Mark Laliberte’s Little Boy (2018), harkening comics and caption.
§  Catherine Vidler’s Table Sets (2017), a reworking of Microsoft Word’s “tables” until veritable miniature modernist surfaces appear.
§  Dani Spinosa’s Glosas for Tired Eyes (2017) of different-sized pages bearing typographic patterns that play at being word searches, typeface inkblots, and optical palindromes.
§  Pearl Pirie’s broken fractal fractions ([2018]), cascading trails of visually sibilant and cirrus-like stanzas.
§  Eryk Wenziak’s SQUARES (after Malevich) (2018), compositional tributes to Malevich’s red and black.
§  a.j. carruthers’s EPSON L4168 Consonant Studies (2018) of picto-lettrist helices.
and
§  The PresynapsiS anthology (2018), edited by Gregory Betts, showcasing “early Canadian visual poetry by visual artists”—from the font-y to the messy, and from the sonic to the grid-y—including Brooker, Gysin, Itter, Coughtry, and more.

8

What better place to end this sorting than with a work by the poet-artist-publisher?

beaulieu’s Tattered Sails is a playful homage to Marcel Broodthaers’s Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard, itself an homage to Stéphen Mallarmé’s Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard. beaulieu tells us in his note to the above/ground press edition (Ottawa, 2018) how Broodthaers replaced all of Mallarmé’s text with solid lines of the same length and shape, thus drawing attention away from sense to draw it instead toward the radical spacing of Mallarmé’s poem.

Here’s more from beaulieu’s note:

With “Tattered Sails”, I have continued the tactile treatment of this poem by folding the double-sized pages of Broodthaers’ poem (suggesting the hang and fold of sails on the mast) , shifting Broodthaers’ bars in to the heaving beams and broken masts of a ship-wreck of meaning.

These are fractals, flattened into an angularity that might pass for collage, though the folds remind us of dimensionality (that silent meaning?), perhaps unreadable, yet held in mind—or only legible now through some technological sorcery—a scanner; a heat sensor; an x-ray.

What do we make of the fact that the above/ground edition and the No Press edition were released the same year, containing the same images but in different orderings? That readings are multiple? That arrangement is subject to chance? The folds hum…

9

The overall effect of opening this “100 Protége-feuilles” box is orchestra.




Edric Mesmer works as a cataloger for the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, where he edits the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series on little magazines.



[1] Email from derek beaulieu, October 30, 2019.