from Report from the
Smith Society Vol. 1 No. 1
The
most precious shelves in my library are those corrugated with what look like
rows of 45s, jagged with chapbooks hiding their titles. Time spent here is of
the most pleasurable kind—rediscovering treasures of singular desktop
publishing beauty, raw intuitive design, outrageous experimentation, traces of
history, exchange, and bold moments in poets’ development. If the poem has a
natural habitat, it’s the chapbook. More surprising are those items that buck
traditional format and are bound to sit awkwardly on bookshelves, including
some of the most beloved items in my small press collection: Foursquare
Magazine, edited by Jessica Smith, and her self-published book works (which
I call ‘works with paper’), ruthless grip, blueberries, Sommarhuset, and
bird-book. Put out between 2001 and 2005, these limited-edition
publications reached me thanks to Jessica’s generosity in making community
through poetry. Her publications speak to and convene this community, shedding
warmth across distances in time as well as space.
What
follows is an edited sort of catalogue raisonné of these publications along
with some commentary on their relation to Smith’s theorization of “plastic
poetry” and, as works with paper, to my own understanding of, and appreciation
for, the values of small press publishing.
bird-book (2001)
18
different colored sheets of origami paper (6 x 6 in.) with a cardboard back in
wax paper envelope: poetry printed on numbered white sides.
Dedicated
to Rachel Carson: “because without her bird-watching might be a rather dull and
hopeless activity.”
Colophon
includes note on source material from Carson, Audubon field guide, Eshleman,
McCaffery, Frost; a list of 35 birds; a quotation from Mandebrot: “to have a
name is to be.”
“solitary
sandpiper” — “skids// bobs with his head,/ into the water”; veery’s “cryptic
coloration” — “rich/ downward
echoes// spiral . . . descending whew/ relief/ in the gloaming//
make a little house and stop working.”
This
is consistently one the most satisfying small press publications to open and
unfold, with its fan of bright colours and its poems creating vast spaces
within their small frames. They do what blueberries says it does (see
next entry). Plus . . . that whew!
blueberries (2004)
“blueberries
are intended as an invitation to my work. These poems [6 in total] are an
experiment to record the vast and shifting virtual architecture of memory in
the space of very small pages [5 x 5 in.]
. . . made in a batch of 200 in early summer 2004. The first 45 have
handmade blue flower paper covers and blue endpapers. . . . The following 155
were printed with plain blue construction paper covers. . . . Each recipient of
the first 45 booklets has been provided with an additional copy. These
blueberries are for tasting, not for selling.”
“Blaubeerenwald”
— “little hans/ faded like an old one// is it// it/ the blueberry king”
(Personal
association: a moment at the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo
when curator Bob Bertholf brought out a box of Ted Enslin’s ‘blueberries’
—“finger exercises” jotted, while walking, on 3 x 5 in. scratchpads Enslin
carried in his front shirt pocket—a selection of which I later published in ecopoetics
06/07 [2009].)
Confession:
I couldn’t part with the construction paper edition, so I still have both.
Sommarhuset (2005)
6.5
x 4.25 in. white envelope containing 8 objects and an 8.5 by 5.5 in. trifold,
with a ‘Manifest’ of the contents and a ‘Manifesto’ printed on 4 of its front
and back panels:
“These
items [fragment of bedroom wallpaper, antique shipping label, photographic
negative, sand, dried blueberry, bit of handmade lace, page from children’s
songbook] were stolen in the summer of 2005 from Martin Hägglund’s family’s
summerhouse in Käxed, Sweden, which is in the High Coast region on the Baltic
Sea.” Also includes a mini CD-Rom with video clips.
“Manifesto:
1.
Language is a system of signs.
2.
A set of gestures that indicate or record a specific space and time,
intentionally or unintentionally, ‘man-made’ or ‘natural,’ comprises a system
of signs.
3.
Gesture is language.”
The
medium of the mini-CD Rom is now obsolete. But not the envelope and trifold and
language of objects.
ruthless
grip (2005)
Poem-objects
in a tiny white Chinese take-out box: open work, handheld, fortune
cookie, fireworks.
“•
poetics • a group of poetic objects created for a singular reading at a
specific spatiotemporal location • intended as investigations of touch,
gesture, gift-giving, memory, poetry as dictation (instruction) & craft,
startle response & extemporaneous audience collaboration •
•thematically
organised around exchange (gift, communication, handoff, touch), fortune (luck,
time, futuricity, chance), American assimilation of ‘chinese’ culture (china to
americans: fireworks, take-out, fortune cookies), & containment (boxes,
holding, ‘ruthless grip’) •”
open
work
is a poem that works with the origami (6 x 6 in.) sheet, printed on both sides
of a sheet of “blush-pink paper” and folded to 2 x 2 in. dimensions in a (manji
or fylfot) pattern of four cuts and eight folds, box-tied with
“chocolate satin” ribbon.
This
book form enables recombinant spreads of its eighteen panels (counting both
sides) that work both vertically and horizontally, affording (for instance) the
following transformations —closed brackets [ ] indicate jumps to another
square:
“it
still resides/ there/ my memory of [
] the image of / pulling off / strips
of / clothes / dripping / the” > “it still resides/ there/ my memory of [ ] finger / restraints that bind more/
tightly the harder [ ] and a second / a small / fist” > “it still resides /
there / my memory of [ ] a bright pink / flower unfolding [ ] to / georgia’s watercolors / later [ ] and a
second / a small / fist.”
handheld also folds to 2 x
2 in. dimensions, also box-tied in ribbon (“vanilla satin”), but offering
sixteen panels, cut and folded in a ‘boustrophedon’ form, on “grape” (front)
and “cappuccino” (printed side) card.
The
form of handheld affords touching pairings and re-pairings, an intimate yet
promiscuous erotics: “eric // two pink pinkies / intertwining” opposite “aaron
// five / finger-shaped / bruises” opposite “ashton // tiny girl-hand i / still
feel.”
Ric
Royer’s “in the joining” (ferrum wheel 1 1/2) is credited on a colophon
panel, as well as name (2003-04 “onward” edition) along with Louis
Zukofsky’s valentines. The references to ferrum wheel and to name
are significant:
ferrum
wheel,
“an assembling of found ephemera, visual poetry, and manipulated gifts,” edited
by Ric Royer and Christopher Fritton, appeared in six issues from August 2001
to March 2007, featuring work by Mike Basinski, Tawrin Baker, Eric Gelsinger,
Matt Chambers, Charlene Dickerson, Bill Howe, Tim McPeek, Sheila Murphy, Brian
Carpenter, Christopher Casamassima, Justin Katko, Kevin Thurston, Ben
Friedlander, and others. In a review, Mike Basinski (also a contributor)
described ferrum wheel as “a sculpture formed by many hands. It is a
work or art itself and brings to mind the word combine as Robert Rauchenberg
used the term for his constructions that were beyond painting and sculpture.”
Smith contributed to the first and the third (and possibly to other) issues.
name was the
undergraduate magazine for the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo that Smith
founded and handed on once she completed her BA in 2002. The 2003-04 “onward”
edition, dedicated to Robert Creeley, edited by Elena Barlow, Robin Jackelow,
Allen Krajewski, Julia Purpera, and Jay Silvis—some of the last cohort to be
taught by Creeley at SUNY Buffalo, who took up an invitation to become a
Distinguished Professor at Brown University in 2003—and to which Smith
contributed, is a multi-authored layout on large boustrophedon form fitted into
aluminium CD-Rom cases repurposed from AOL (America Online) junk mailing, each
case featuring original artwork on the lid.
butterflies (2006)
Small
(5 x 5 in.) cut, folded and sewn card pamphlet with deco butterfly-patterned
cover published, in an edition of 50 copies, by Big Game Books (Washington,
D.C. / Maureen Thorson) as tinyside #1.
Four
poems (three page-sized and the fourth taking up the spread of the final two
pages) in the spirit of blueberries: efforts to record the ‘spatiality’
and “vast and shifting virtual architecture of memory” within the constraints
of a small space, a standard font, and software-imposed limitations. These memories—of
a grandparent, a mother, a first love, a journey to an island—which can be read
down as well as across, dissolve and resolve into contact with butterflies:
“
I
see the dead leaves
her of
, on the wall
like an overheated summer
swallowtail a
vertical doormat blue and
stretched out black with tail trails like
:
a bruised princess”
(“Summer
1998 or 1994, Homewood, Alabama; Papiliondae”)
The
contact is often tactile:
“on
my finger a brown-grey
moth there
kissing
my salty skin then
I
felt brown eyes lighting on me even
like a goddess of butterflies
fluttering”
(“March
1994, Mountain Brook Junior High, Alabama; Hesperiinae”)
While
the first three poems claim space through stanza-like columns intersecting with
gapped lines, the fourth poem fragments words and even individual letters
widely across the spread, connectable in glancing or ‘stepped’ adjacency:
“second// s of (color,/ flying”; “phase/ phrase shifts”; “on the sad ground,/ on the grave
ground,” “patterns/ pilgrims/ orange
im/ age”; “burnt/ ment”; “heaps of dead colors”.
[Mexico]
The effect mimes the scattered, scattering and heaped bodies of monarch
butterflies at the Oyamel fir Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacan,
Mexico. It also explores how space intervenes on language and language on space
in the construction of poetic meaning. Metamorphoses of language in Smith’s butterflies
both embrace and challenge the metaphorical dimension of poetry—here the
age-old lepidopteran figure for transmigration of souls. Where does memory
inhere (in the body, on the page)? Is there a body beyond “the grave ground,”
at the end of life’s transformations? If pages can become-butterflies, what in
the creative process can become-chrysalis? And what becomes-caterpillar?
Ephemera like the butterflies they enact, these small press editions challenge
assumptions of scale.
Smith’s
Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper 2002-2004 includes a ten-page
introductory essay on “The Plasticity of Poetry (A Poetics),” exploring some of
the theoretical and poetic background to what Smith calls the “plastic poem.”
Like Arakawa and Gins’s architectural projects (“Reversible Destiny”), Smith’s
poems “respond to a preexistent topographical space as well as to existing
syntactical structures in the reader’s mind. . . . With plastic poetry, I want
to change the reading space in such a way that the one who reads is forced to
make amends for new structures in his or her virtual path.”
Smith
makes a point to distinguish plastic poetry from earlier mimetic modes of
visual poetry: “Unlike the calligram, the plastic poem makes the reader aware
of her eye’s movements across the page. She becomes aware of her memory’s
activity of putting fragments into letters, letters into syntax, and syntax
into narrative.” Here Smith is interested in “the logic of syntax and its
relation to the workings of memory.”
The essay discusses the “typewriter art” of Steve McCaffery
(in Carnival) and the “painterly historiograms” of Susan Howe (in Singularities)
as “foundational examples of plastic poetry.” A final section of the essay
discusses how the poems in Organic Furniture Cellar, the longest section
of which is comprised of “Shifting Landscapes,” take up and advance on
strategies developed by the “flexible” scoring methods of John Cage, Dick
Higgins, Yoko Ono, and Michael Basinski; as well as Cage’s “spines” and
“mesostic nodes”; Joan Retallack’s “splits” (Afterrimages); Christian
Bök’s, Ronald Johnson’s and Jay MillAr’s “ghosting”; and the “concrete poems”
in some of McCaffery’s and bpNichol’s early collaborations (In England Now
That Spring). In her “Acknowledgments,” Smith credits a “small second-hand
furniture store in Cambridge, Massachusetts” for the title of her book and
notes that “the store name evokes an exploration of memory, of mnemonics, of
the organic cellar of the mind and its structures.” The topology of the mind’s
sediment surfaces in the evocation of text here.
While
Organic Furniture Cellar exhibits all the seriousness of work addressed
to the academic context of the Buffalo Poetics program (whose intellectual
community and influences saturate the introduction), ‘ephemera’ like bird-book,
blueberries, Sommarhuset, ruthless grip and butterflies develop that
work with an eye and ear to communities of small press poetic production,
circulation, and exchange in formats that resist reification. (Smith also
resisted the conventions of the poetry reading—projecting her poems on a screen
at Rust Belt Books, for the audience to read silently.) Smith would next turn
her efforts toward summoning a feminist community of experimental poetry and
art by producing the monthly broadside Foursquare Magazine, in more than thirty
six issues over the course of three years.
Foursquare (2006-2010)
“A monthly broadside (single-sheet) magazine featuring experimental poetry by
women, with cover art designed by women, encased in fabric sleeves. There are
three years of monthly editions plus special editions featuring single authors.
2006-2010.” Each issue was printed in an edition of 50, with ‘textile
engineering’ by Pamela & Edward Smith of MAC Uniforms.
Foursquare, vol. 2 no. 9,
cover art by Bettina Cronquist; poetry by Deborah Poe, Jill Alexander Essbaum,
Julia Drescher, and Shannon Smith.
Foursquare, Special Edition:
K. Lorraine Graham, cover art by Alixandra Bamford.
Smith’s
small press publications enact their theory (and their politics) in objectified
forms that are intimate, ephemeral in deeply ecopoetic ways, and, while
engaging the inorganic iterations and ideals of mechanical reproduction (and
typography), designed, printed, assembled and distributed at the scale of the
handmade. They are, as she says about her blueberries,
invitations—inviting us into the spaces between poetry and art, writer and
reader, maker and holder, here and there, present and past. They are eloquent
about ‘betweenness’ as a desired condition.
Not
works on paper but works with paper—and textile, in the case of Foursquare—Smith’s
small press productions manifest both the singular aura of artworks and the
public, communal responsibility of publication, with its imperatives to edition
via means of mechanical reproduction and to distribute. This ‘bothness,’ a
feature of much of the vital work classed as ‘poetry’ that I value, also can be
a ‘neitherness’, insofar as such work risks invisibility in arenas literary as
well as artistic.
The
tactile, haptically engaging intimacy of these works can neither be easily
displayed nor mass-produced, nor recreated in the digital medium. While the
archive obviously provides a critical afterlife for such objects, they can
remain stranded amidst archival taxonomies of sorting, classification and
retrieval. In the personal collection, small press publications more readily
speak to one another and to the context of their production as well as to
communities of making, publication, distribution and circulation, activating a
‘manyness’ that may be the unspoken condition of such brilliant and energetic
work.
Jonathan Skinner
is a poet, editor, translator, and critic, known for founding the journal
ecopoetics. His poetry collections and chapbooks include Chip Calls
(Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers
(Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He
has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism,
landscape and sound studies. Skinner teaches in the Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
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