Thereby Hangs a Quote, and a New, Must-Read Book on Books

by Stephen J. Gertz

When poet, master printer, and Perishable Press publisher Walter Hamady casually mentioned to master printer and Poltroon Press publisher Alastair M. Johnston, Peter Glassgold's book, Hwaett!,  Johnston, without skipping a beat, interjected:

"From Anglo-Saxon. It's the first word of Beowulf."

I have no idea whether Johnston, with whom I am acquainted, had been waiting decades for the opportunity to slip that factoid into a conversation but he did and I'm impressed.

As I am by the new word for today,  "slobagoody," which Hamady uses to describe a slapdash, thrown together, gallimaufry of text, later turned into readable narrative prose.

Hwaett and slobagoody (attorneys-at-law?) appear in Hanging Quotes: Talking Books Arts, Typography & Poetry, a new book by Johnson from Cuneiform Press. It's a keeper.

It's easy to be impressed with all of Hanging Quotes, a series of conversations Johnston had with book and printing people Nicholas Barker; Robert Creeley; Matthew Carter; Sumner Stone; Fred Smeijers; Joan and Nathan Lyons; Sandra Kirshenbaum; Dave Haselwood; Holbrook Teter of Zephyrus Image Press; Bob Hawley (Oyez Press); poet David Meltzer; and Graham Mackintosh, that widely ranges through the world of books, printing, and the visual manifestation of poetry in print.

More than impressed, you'll enjoy the book. Johnston, and his partner in Poltroon Press, Frances Butler, seem to ask just the right questions and pursue the right leads, tapping into their subject's interests, taking the conversation into unexpected places, and allowing it to take delightful turns.  Fascinating anecdotes, details, stories from book and printing history, unusual factoids, and captivating digressions are the reward.

You can read the interview with Nicholas Barker, renowned bookman, author, and editor of The Book Collector, for instance, and feel satisfied with the book without reading further (though you'll be sorry if you stop there). In this interview, which, as all the others in Hanging Quotes, is kaleidoscopic and delightfully all other the place, you'll learn about:

Trade secrets of medieval book illuminators, the private press movement and Barker's welcome apostasy ("Who the hell reads Kelmscott Press books?"), the degradation of paper quality, the improvement in ink, bookshop merchandizing, the importance of visual detail and symbolism and how the ability to read images has decayed, the importance of the shape of letters as a map of the human mind, Congolese bards, calligraphy, copperplate engraving and the personality of the engraver, Victorian typography, Goudy, Gill, Dwiggins, Morison, the importance of curve, and the current state of "Jine" printing.

Did I mention that Johnston, Butler, and those they interview are often quite amusing? This is not an academic book. It's absorbing, engaging,  informative, and highly entertaining; a wish-you-were-there read. You will not get a headache. But if you have one before reading it, Hanging Quotes may do more good than Advil.

You know you're in for a good time when the book opens with these quotes: 

"Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre" (Everything in the world exists to produce a book - Stéphane Mallarmé)

and

"Talk is cheap, but a Flair pen costs 69 cents" (Darrell Gray).

I'm still in the book, around three-quarters through it, and am hooked. This, despite a rare, interesting, and heretofore unexplored phenomenon associated with the topography of a book and reading that I experienced with my review copy, which arrived water-soaked in an unlined envelope during a recent  storm. After allowing it to dry I found myself hanging ten while reading Hanging Quotes, surfing the text block, which had more waves than Waimea, up and down, up and down. To all appearances my head was bobbing to music only I could hear.

It's unlikely that you'll experience motion sickness while reading Hanging Quotes, though you'll likely feel pleasantly lightheaded after reading what are simply amongst the best, most engrossing and enchanting interviews we bookpeople will ever be treated to.

I have a good news/bad news fantasy that I'm a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I reach the million dollar round. The million dollar question is, What's the first word in Beowulf?, the ultimate  Trivial Pursuit question from the, alas, never-issued Bibliomaniac Edition. I mentally spend all the money. But I have to correctly pronounce the answer I just happen to know only because I read Hanging Quotes. Yet I didn't put Alastair Johnston on my Friends list; I can't call him.  Preceded by an "Oh" I utter an Anglo-Saxon word I can pronounce.

"Is that your final answer?"

I kiss that windfall goodbye.

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JOHNSTON, Alastair M. Hanging Quotes. Talking Book Arts, Typography, and Poetry. [Victoria, TX]: Cuneiform Press, 2011. First edition. Large octavo. 270 pp. Illustrated wrappers. $22.00. Order here to support a small press publisher and allow them to make a decent profit without Jeff Bezos unmercifully squeezing their...uh, margin in the name of public service.

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Full disclosure:

Alastair M. Johnston designed the print edition of A Wake for the Still Alive, Booktryst's series from last year. He's a friend but I have no idea what the "M" stands for; it's news to me. I'm hoping, Murgatroid.

Kyle Schlesinger, publisher of Cuneiform Press, along with his associate, Wm. S. Burroughs aficionado Jed Birmingham, is a friend of ours through Mimeo Mimeo, their publication (and website) devoted to the mimeograph revolution and grass-roots printing. Read Booktryst's O Solé Mimeo here.

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A Book Is Not An X

by Stephen J. Gertz

Auerbach, Tauba. Cut-out book, interior.
From the exhibition, A Book Is Not An X.

Artist Tauba Auerbach is a polymath, her work spanning a wide variety of both traditional and non-traditional media encompassing everything from paintings and photographs, to prints, films, and musical instruments.

From August 12 through September 20, 2011 an exhibition of her new work, A Book Is Not An X, will be presented by booksellers John McWhinnie & Glenn Horowitz at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY.

Tauba Auerbach website homepage.

Since the very beginning of her artistic career Tauba Auerbach has been devoted to the creation of inventive artists’ books. Whatever the medium, Auerbach is drawn to patterns, orders, and systems, and her work frequently explores language, typography, mathematics, and other tools for communicating or recording information. Her methodology resembles that of scientific inquiry and the works themselves are often like thought experiments. What makes the work so compelling is the extraordinary formal clarity with which she renders ideas into images and objects.

In a 2010 Artforum review of German artist Carsten Nicolai’s book, Grid Index, Auerbach wrote that, “a book is an X-axis. The format is almost always linear; the content, bound in a prescribed order, marches single file.”

[2,3]
Six individual pop-up volumes
housed in a cloth slipcase.
Tauba Auerbach & Printed Matter, 2011

The title of the exhibition riffs on the first line of her review and hints that Auerbach’s impetus to create this body of work was a desire to assert a far more open-ended conception of a book. The notion of an axis remains in play, but is variously collapsed, rotated, or fractured.

Auerbach has created nine new works, each made in an edition of ten or fewer copies. The creation of these books, and indeed all of Auerbach’s recent work, has been driven by her interest in topology.  Topology is a branch of mathematics that inquires into the basic characteristics of surfaces and objects in order to understand the range of incarnations the form can take while still retaining its defining properties. Thus, each of these books is an experimental object, and a radical reconsideration of what a book may be.

CHAOS
With essays by Will Bradley, Brian Sholis, and Chris Jennings.
Artbook, 2009.

Each was conceived in order to uncover possibilities within the book form and as a way of seeing how form, once reinterpreted, could be used to contain or convey content. Several of the books rely on tomography (the practice of using cross-sections to visualize the internal structure of an object or volume) to transmit information, others re-imagine the binding and other structural elements of a book so that they become central to its meaning, still others further develop ideas that Auerbach first began to explore in creating a much anticipated series of pop-up books for Printed Matter. Altogether the exhibition demonstrates categorically that a book need not be merely “an X.” 

FOLDS
Sternberg Press, 2011.

Tauba Auerbach lives and works in New York City. She is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery. Her first one-person museum exhibition opens this November at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway.

Tauba Auerbach website landing page.
A name is not an X. But if you look closely...

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Header image courtesy of John McWhinnie. All others courtesy of Tauba Auerbach. Our thanks to both.

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Important New Book on Modern Poetry and Visual Art

by Stephen J. Gertz

Cover painting Untitled #12 (1960) by John Altoon.

Between 1974 and 1976, Kevin Power, on a fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies, interviewed eight modern American poets about the relationship between painting and poetics in postmodern American poetry.

The interviews - with poet and art critic Bill Berkson, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, George and Mary Oppen, and Jerome Rothenberg - were originally published in small literary journals in the mid-70s through 1980s. Those issues of Texas Quarterly, Vort, Spanner, Line, and Niagara, are now extremely difficult to come by.

Poltroon Press of Berkeley, California, now celebrating its thirty-six birthday, has,  fortunately, gathered the interviews together into a just-published collection, Where You're At: Poetics & Visual Art.

The poets that Powers interviewed were directly involved with painters or American Art, or highly influenced by them, bringing the aesthetic of modern American art to their writing.

"They were all part of a prolific range of American writing that was opening up new possibilities for poetry and poetics: literally exciting times," Powers declares.

Here, Jerome Rothenberg discusses the deep image, "perception as an instrument of vision," an attempt "to bring the ojective and subjective world together and to try and eradicate the differences between them."

Robert Bly makes a distinction between "the picture, on the one hand, in which there are simple objects from an outer world, and an image." The former is a fairly straight and objective visual metaphor or simile, the latter, a subjective visual with qualities of surrealism.

Michael McClure talks about the nature of the exchanges between poet and painter in San Francisco during the '50s and 60s, the ideas that flowed back and forth, and the mutual influences.

Creeley relates how, in college during the '40s, he was influenced by Paul Klee's Notebooks in which the painter talked of taking a visual line for a walk; the verbal analog is obvious. (Yet one could strongly argue that the visual/verbal line takes the artist/writer for a walk; the difference between leading and following, between control and abandon). "The whole imagination of art interested me." When he moved to France he became closely involved with art, particularly with painter René Laubies, introduced to him by Ezra Pound.

David Meltzer recalls the role of artist Wallace Berman's L.A.-based Semina in providing a home for visual poetics; indeed Wallace Berman pops up more than once in the collection,  which was thirty-five years in the making; estate clearances prevented Powers from publishing it sooner.

The interview with Robert Duncan, at forty-five pages the longest, is worth the price of the book. Deeply immersed in the art scene of the 1940s and '50s, he was particularly attracted to Miro's busy canvases with lots of objects in them. "I liked the whole feeling of a mosaic going to pieces and that's what I wanted to happen in poetry." His goal was "writing that would be like painting."

"The important thing to understand is that the picture we had of a possible painting or possible poetry is not the painting we saw but the painting we could imagine from what we saw." 

In short, the grammar of modern art - collage, surrealism, abstraction, chance, visual puns, assemblage, typographical design, etc., was co-opted by and informed modern poetry in an attempt to short-circuit objective language and subvert its superficialities toward deeper understanding and insight. It was also, at times, an exercise in throwing words up in the air and seeing where they landed, with the  hope of unexpected revelation. The overarching aim seems to have been a desire to break-up objective reality and put it back together in such a way that the line between the objective and subjective became blurred if not erased. Objective reality was over-rated and not all it was cracked up to be; it was time to make that deeper reality manifest in the work: objective reality as a subjective construct.

Along the way there's a lot of personal anecdote and revelation. Creeley talks about putting a drunk Willam de Kooning to bed, then checking out his studio; McClure mentions his encounter with still-inebriated De Kooning 3000 miles away when the artist makes clay animals with his daughter. The Oppens admit they don't approve of Ben Shahn because he began to imitate himself. They tell startling stories about the expatriate Jewish community in Mexico City. Berkson discusses the New York School in relation to painters like Philip Guston, Alex Katz and Larry Rivers, while Meltzer brings Berman, George Herms and Bruce Conner to the discussion. And Robert Duncan, a close friend of Anaïs Nin and an intimate member of her circle of artists and writer friends in Greenwich Village in the early 1940s, admits that he turned against her work, as well as Kenneth Patchen's.

"I'd actually been lost in admiration for them as only an 18 year old could be...[But I later] realized that, as artists, they weren't responsible for their art, that their art was sort of a plaything for their personalities."

To some readers the influence of modern art on postmodern American poetry will come as no surprise; you may have read these interviews (or any of Berkson's critical prose, i.e. Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006) when originally published. The magazines they appeared in are no longer, and copies have become quite rare. To have these interviews brought together to read as a whole is a gift.

I don't think it an exaggeration to assert that this fascinating collection of interviews is required reading for any student and/or fan of the arts and poetry.

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POWER, Kevin. Where You're at: Poetics & Visual Art. Berkeley, CA: Poltroon Press, 2011. Octavo. 209, [1], pp. Pictorial wrappers. $19.95. To order contact the publisher.

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Images courtesy of Poltroon Press, with our thanks.

Poltroon Press' "Alastair Johnston and Frances Butler, who provoke each other to ... pyrotechnic abandon, conceal a real sense of the outer edge potential of letterpress" (Nicolas Barker in The Book Collector, London, Summer 1990).

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