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.
Both references witness Smith’s connection to a group of writers influenced and enabled by Creeley (as well as by Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Dennis Tedlock, amongst others) at the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, but also by Buffalo’s patronage of the arts (through the Albright Knox, Burchfield Penney, and Hallwalls art galleries, venues like Rust Belt Books, and Just Buffalo Literary and Western New York Book Arts Centers, amongst other) and its support for experimental communities. The spirit of work conducted around name, ferrum wheel, and many other endeavors—notably house press—was collective, radical, cross-disciplinary, performative and remarkably unfettered by literary careerism.
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)
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.