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.