/ubu PDF Series [2003/04]

The first book that I created for ubu.com is The Brakhage Lectures by legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage, originally published in 1972. The page at ubu.com contains all of the necessary acknowledgements and background information.

Strictly for bookkeeping purposes, here is the version of Gulf as it once appeared on ubu.

I edited and typeset two series of /ubu editions in 2003/04. Kenny Goldsmith designed the amazing covers based on the image bank of ubu.com.

Spring 2003

Fall 2004

Editor’s Note: First Series [2003]

My hope, with the /ubu (“slash ubu”) series, is to complement and augment relatively “traditional” methods of publication by usurping one of the most common functions of independent presses — bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public — while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books.

What made this idea seem interesting now, as opposed to eight or so years ago when internet publishing began its colorful but checkered history (prematurely vaunted by poets as the sequel to the “mimeo revolution”) is the realization that people are willing to read long, complex works of literature from the internet provided they can print them out.

By formatting these books with professional typesetting tools and publishing them as Adobe Acrobat files, not only is the amount of paper needed to print out a book lessened because web page items like menu bars and graphics are absent, but the letter-size (8.5 x 11) page is transformed into a visually pleasing “book” page, its seductive gutters, leading and tracking making Cinderellas out of the plain-Jane ream of photocopy paper.

Publishers of innovative poetries on the web have always had trouble formatting works in html (which, among other limitations, does not have tag for a tab), but the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat format is perfect for giving the designer all the features of advanced typesetting and graphic techniques that are stable and consistent across several computer platforms. A color printer lets you fully enjoy the cover pages of these files, most of them original designs by Goldsmith and including one of the artworks from the ubu archive.

And over the course of the many years these books will be online, they will no doubt be downloaded, printed out, and most importantly read by hundreds of readers who might not otherwise have access to poorly distributed, limited edition small press books. New works will enter circulation relatively quickly, and older works, after some hassling with a scanner and proofreading, will make their bids for being unjustifiably ignored classics.

All of the reprints in the /ubu series from books that were not already digitized (any title published before 1992 will be one of those) have been painstakingly reset, either after having been scanned and OCR’d, or being retyped into the computer. More recent titles are based on the files used to produce the original book, either from Word files or, in that rarest of instances, Quark files.

The original mandate for the series was to publish single-author titles of creative literature but as with any venture such as this there are stirrings that suggest new approaches in the future. For now, we encourage you to please steal our books — you don’t have to be bored Hollywood starlet to walk out with bags full of priceless items here. Please check back regularly for new titles as they arrive, and thanks for stopping by.

Editor’s Note: Second Series [2004]

This year’s titles range from the visually sophisticated Concrete poetry of Gustave Morin, a native of Windsor who spent 10 years on his “novel” A Penny Dreadful, to an obscure volume of satirical translations of Baudelaire by the English poet Nicholas Moore, from the experiments in frame and format that Caroline Bergvall and designer Marit Muenzberg explore in their daring resetting of the poet’s Eclat, to the equally daring, if entirely unscrupulous, logorrhea that is the 130 pages of another “novel,” Name, by Toadex Hobogrammathon.

The big news this year might be the introduction of color into the pantheon of effects being used in our e-books: both Bergvall’s Eclat and my own Alpha Betty’s Chronicles rely heavily on it, in ways that would have been unsuitable to html and impossibly expensive to print in a book. Likewise, the volumes by Morin and Lytle Shaw – two of his uniquely low-tech Shark chapbooks – are primarily graphic works, while the titles by Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman and Larry Price attempt to re-conceptualize the page of an Adobe Acrobat file as a middle-space that ironizes the permanence of type (Dworkin’s use of Courier fonts) or digital flow (Fitterman’s box-like containers) as well as the “writing on the wall” soixante-huitard-style (Price’s poster-style typography).

Of the republications, we are happy to present the final section of Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts, The Chinese Notebook, probably the most influential of his early books outside of Kejtak, two small works by the increasingly-prized Jean Day, whose 1998 Atelos volume, The Literal World, woke so many up to her understated talents. Robert Kelly’s quasi-fiction – yes, yet another “novel” – called The Cruise of the Pnyx has long been one of my favorites of his, but has never appeared in another book, nor has the original Station Hill edition of 1979 been republished.

New writers include the playwright Madelyn Kent, whose Shufu plays – part Butoh, part Richard Maxwell-like deadpan, with a touch of Clark Coolidge — are bound to become recognized as innovative theater, and Aaron Kunin, who is becoming known in New York and elsewhere as a writer of uncommon intelligence and tremendous technical precision. The English poet Ira Lightman drops in on the series like a lightning bolt, spreading his art in a sort of spirit of personal renaissance, while Barbara Cole’s Foxy Moron – a text I see as existing somewhere between poetry and drama if only because she reads it so well in public – strikes a little lower, not so much toward “renaissance” as sexual catharsis, over and over again.

Lastly, we are especially happy to have Deanna Ferguson’s long-awaited follow-up collection to her 1993 book The Relative Minor (which appears as a reprint in last year’s series). Several of the poems in Rough Bush have already played parts in some of the signal poetics statements of the nineties; it’s good to finally have such a stash of Ferguson’s recent writings in one place.

Book Introductions from /ubu.

Eclat
Caroline Bergvall

56 Pages

The product of a year-long collaboration between Bergvall and the designer Marit Muenzberg, /ubu’s web version of Eclat ups the ante on what can be done with a poetry e-book. The print version of Eclat, a slender yellow-covered volume, first appeared from chris cheek’s Sound & Language press in England in 1997; the text itself was the byproduct, or page interpretation, of a walk-through performance environment that Bergvall had developed the previous year. This Acrobat version is the first in our series to use color as a central component, thereby complicating the screen-to-print relationship and foregrounding the invisible DMZs of technological remediation, but it also investigates the very architectural borders of a computer text file, thus turning the once innocent “margin” into a malleable facet of its poetic grammar (and the page into a frame of a flip-book). This document, a sort of fetish object in itself despite its immateriality, makes of our screens and printers vessels of language.

Pause Button
Kevin Davies

77 Pages

Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier’s wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, Comp., in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary Pause Button, first published in 1992 by Vancouver’s Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada’s choice used bookstores.

Linear C & The I and the You
Jean Day

84 Pages

Though she might seem over-shadowed by some of her West Coast peers, such as Rae Armantrout or Kit Robinson, as the “lyric” Language poet, Day—who has been wary of such group associations—has amassed a body of exquisitely constructed poems and longer sequences over the past two decades that have long deserved a greater reputation. She has continued to expand her range in such books as 1998’s The Literal World, with its variable stanza patterns that can resemble at times Williams’ late improvisations, while not straying far from a miniaturist’s eye to visual and social details.

Linear C first appeared as a Tuumba chapbook (part of the legendary series edited by Lyn Hejinian), and is a small tour-de-force of verse forms, including prose poems and poems that are aggregates of short stanzas. “The I and the You” was the final section of her Potes and Poets volume of the same title, a poem in serial forms governed by a Rilkean examination of personal ontology through relationships.

Smokes
Craig Dworkin

59 Pages

Dworkin’s writing over the past decade has involved some of the most strenuous examples of “conceptual writing”—replacing the words of a nineteenth century treatise on diagramming sentences into its own antiquated grammatical terms, for example—as well as some of the more giddy soundscapes to come out of the practice of phonetic translations. A prolific essayist with an eye for paradox—his paragraphs can often turn on the misreading of a phrase that, in the end, turns out to be the only reading possible—it’s fitting that, in Smokes, he turns his attention to the minimal concrete poem (in the manner of Aram Saroyan and Robert Grenier, for example), poems never reducible to single-line summations or dismissible as eye candy, but manage to tease with the perpetual promise of profundity looming in their translucent depths: “CLUE / that which holds / a tension.” Smokes is infected with a comparable witty charm, augmented by the fact that they were originally published on cigarette papers, rolled and ready to inhale, taking the Sentences idea one step closer to immolation.

Rough Bush and other poems
Deanna Ferguson

86 Pages

Ferguson’s long-awaited follow-up to her debut volume, Relative Minor, adds to the image of this writer’s integrity with its strong sonic qualities and extravagant, but never indulgent, verse architectures in the service of serious intellectual concerns. By turns as machine-gun witted and caustic as one of her dedicatees, Lenny Bruce, then as vulnerable and fluid as the writings of O’Hara or Hejinian, Ferguson also manages the turn from the personal to the civic that is a hallmark of Kootenay School writing (think Jeff Derksen and Lisa Robertson): “your brown lashes flutter revealing two / perfect orbs, a perfect morning, coloured / by the State.” Each of the poems of Rough Bush, even the still-point of “t & tenth & alma,” are performances, sometimes metrically baroque and syncopated, sometimes, as in “Turf Builder,” extending from a basal formal unit, managing wide variations without straying from a one-or-two word line. Ferguson runs the poem through enough attitude to make even the punctuation marks mercenaries in a march on capital.

Relative Minor
Deanna Ferguson

83 Pages

Ferguson’s long-awaited follow-up to her debut volume, Relative Minor, adds to the image of this writer’s integrity with its strong sonic qualities and extravagant, but never indulgent, syntactic and verse architectures in the service of serious intellectual concerns. By turns as machine-gun witted and caustic as one of her dedicatees, Lenny Bruce, then as vulnerable and fluid as the writings of O’Hara or Hejinian, Ferguson also manages the turn from the personal to the civic that is a hallmark of Kootenay School writing (think Jeff Derksen and Lisa Robertson): “your brown lashes flutter revealing two / perfect orbs, a perfect morning, coloured / by the State.” Each of these poems, even the still-point of “t & tenth & alma,” are performances, sometimes metrically baroque and syncopated, sometimes, as in “Turf Builder,” extending from a simple basal sonic unit, managing wide variations without straying from a central one-or-two word line. One of the central poets discussed in Sianne Ngai’s essay “Poetics of Disgust,” Ferguson runs the poem through enough attitude to make even the punctuation marks mercenaries in the march on capital.

This Window Makes Me Feel
Robert Fitterman

77 Pages

For the past several years, Fitterman has been exploring a poetics of “sampling,” taking the practice of collage and procedural writing into the computer age, away from the edgy, splice-based works of Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath and Berrigan’s Sonnets, to something akin to the seamless web of cut-and-paste in music composed with digital tools. Such minimal, often “ambient” pieces give the impression that, with the right algorithms and a limitless database, the poem could potentially go on forever and never repeat itself.

This Window Makes Me Feel, like “Flarf” and Google poems, is based on sentences collected from search engines, but Fitterman creates a rich, understated emotional core to the work by the repeated motif of the title phrase, which balances on the delicate irony that something generally considered “invisible” (i.e. transparent) has become the subject of a civic meditation. The dedication to the victims of the World Trade Center attack seals this work as a response to trauma, a spiraling reaching-out to a wall of stability which, to the eye, had never been previously remarked.

Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!
Richard Foreman

38 Pages

For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark’s Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky’s postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his “reverberation machines” into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play’s New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman’s high style are alive and flinching in Now That Communism is Dead.

What The President Will Say And Do!!
Madeline Gins

148 Pages

Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing Mechanism of Meaning, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one “refuses to die.” What the President is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.

Vexed
Jessica Grim

76 Pages

Grim’s style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the “New American” vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a “post-Language” sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim’s poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.

Name, a novel
Toadex Hobogrammathon

137 Pages

Name is about as close as one can get to a “novel” that was written by a machine and for a machine: it seems especially primed to attract and repel spam-blockers with its pseudo-porn opening, and yet it also tosses a distracting bone to the bots with its stream of seemingly random verbiage after its first paragraphs. But far as we can tell, Name is the exorbitant creation of a single human being who is known only by the name of “Toadex Hobogrammathon,” the same person who created the Jarry-esque, day-glo colored website Dagmars Chili Pitas, the only “poetry” blog that renders even the marginal trappings of the format itself—such as the date, tables, fonts, colors, etc.—fodder for its neo-Dada somersaults.

Surprisingly, Name turns out to be a good read, perhaps more along the line of Kenny Goldsmith’s barnstorming procedural projects or Peter Manson’s aggregation of junk phrases, Adjunct, than anything from Toni Morrison or Alan Davies, but nonetheless something to keep the retina fused to the screen, with a furious, decidedly No Wave soundtrack to boot. This is the perfect novel to run your computer’s voice emulator on in the background while you while away precious life at the office.

Cruise of the Pnyx
Robert Kelly

40 Pages

Originally published in 1979, Cruise of the Pnyx predates Kelly’s several books of short fictions—four volumes appeared between 1985 and 1994—and yet shares many affinities with those and his novel The Scorpions (1969), building their rich atmospheres through the careful accumulation of details, and largely concerned with investigating alternative currents of being that never depart wholly from what one might witness in “real life.” Written in three distinct forms—left-justified verse, full-justified prose and a right-justified “between-rider, or transitional grade between poetry and prose… a prose song”—Pnyx shares affinities with Pound’s Cantos and with “global” novels such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or V, all three works of which seem to occupy a still place—a Lethean “cruise”—in the center of a vortex of the detritus of culture. The present edition represents the 46 pages of the publication with a one-to-one correspondence, preserving the many interplays that occur from the left to right pages between writing styles.

São Paolo
Madelyn Kent

100 Pages

Kent, a young New York playwright, has investigated an aesthetics of extreme slowness that permits her to descend deep into the breaks of syntax that occur in language as it is spoken by non-native English speakers. Her dramaturgy, influenced by traditions of Butoh though in no way exoticized, involves precise, incredibly slow movement coupled with dialogue spoken at an iceberg pace. Her themes are often humanistic with an interest in politics and world events as they affect one on the most intimate levels, and language as it cracks and reforms when traversing cultural bounds.

Her “shufu” plays, of which São Paolo is an example, are written as collaborations with her Japanese ESL students (“shufu” means “housewife” in Japanese) who create, in workshop-like situations, the plots, character names, and, finally, grammar, in that these plays preserve the ticks, glitches and vulnerabilities of a person speaking English as a second-language. This is not “imperfect” English, nor is it a heedless act of formalism, but a language that bears the marks of their transport from a singular heart and mind into the general world-space, from a fluid interior into the superego of syntax.

The Mauberley Series
Aaron Kunin

30 Pages

The Mauberley Series takes some cue from such works as Kit Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas by constraining itself to the use of a closed vocabulary while engaging in a highly philosophical and formal play that examines the lyric interior of this seemingly arbitrary set. But Kunin’s The Mauberley Sequence uses the words that were transmitted to the poet through his irrepressible hand as it beat out phrases on a table involuntarily. Like many of Kunin’s poems, this one describes a spiritual universe that is on the verge of being subsumed by the ironizing force of mundane psychology; the words “Jesus” and “moron,” “rats” and “pleasure” are in constant motion in this recombination machine. Additionally, the sequence is exquisitely mapped on Ezra Pound’s 1920 “farewell to London,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a virtual encyclopedia of meters by the then-young poet. Kunin’s response, from within the space of his limned but discomforting vocabulary, echoes Pound’s line-by-line, in a play of logopoeia—the “dance of the intellect” upon the words—that is stunning and absorbing.

Trancelated (from Coinsides)
Ira Lightman

68 Pages

Lightman creates a universe of mirrors in his continuing poetic sequence Coinsides, though not mirrors as reflections so much as translations, with one part of a middle-justified poem responding to one or more other center-justified parts, prey to the same invisible gravity. There is no set procedure—this is an artist’s logbook and follows the caprices of the days—but one half usually involves a modified translations of writing by Lightman’s poetic and philosophical predecessors (Baudelaire, Horace, Jamme and St. Augustine among others), and the other half is a response which can take on any number of forms of address, including the minimal Creeley-esque lyric, the Langpo stew, or, most distinctly, the spontaneously spiritual or religious affirmation, making him sound often like a latter-day Henry Vaughn or, with his prolixity, John Clare. “Trancelated” is a strategically random, though thematically coherent, selection from the ongoing project, a bouquet of sorts of what can be called word sculptures—they challenge the rectilinear rightness on more than four fronts—or even musical compositions: Lightman, an avid fan of Stockhausen, views all of his text works as scores to an aural, if not conventionally “musical,” performance.

Spleen: Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire’s Je suis comme le roi…
Nicholas Moore

56 Pages

Moore was considered one of the leading English poets of the Forties, winning major awards on both sides of the ocean, and in line to be among the successors of the generation of Auden and Spender. Several personal misfortunes along with a few mysterious circumstances (undiagnosed diabetes possibly among them) made him retire from public view in the following decades until he was nearly entirely forgotten. Soon he was considered an eccentric, fit only for the fringes, prolific, dexterous, but hardly someone for the pages of the London Review of Books.

The thirty-one poems of Spleen—in voices ranging from H.D.’s to Kenneth Rexroth’s, Bob Dylan’s to Bee-Bop scat—were submitted to a contest being judged by George Steiner for the Sunday Times and mailed from several locations around London. The project, though a product of Moore’s own personal demons regarding the problems of translation, not to mention the ironies of his once promising life, falls in line with any number of more conceptually aligned works such as Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliard de Poèmes, and the giddy conceits and deceptions of Ern Malley, Araki Yasusada, and Roger Pellett.

Spaghetti Dreadful (trailer for A Penny Dreadful)
Gustave Morin

38 Pages

Morin extends the tradition of “Concrete” poetry into a space of incredible visual subtlety, such that one can link him, without embarrassment, to the works of image-makers ranging from Goya to his countryman, film director Guy Maddin, from the deep prehistory of Radical Graphic artists (where Marshall MacLuhan and Quentin Fiore of The Medium is the Massage hold court) to the low-tech work of those working in zines and the traditions of “dirty concrete.” More than sophisticated “one-liners,” Morin’s work encourages one to look closer, for even as one rationalizes and “consumes” the various components of the image, settling on a static, reproducible “meaning” is difficult without betrayal of the semantic aura. This “trailer” (as in movie preview) of his sepia-tinged A Penny Dreadful, which was ten years in the making, should encourage many to go the extra yard and purchase this graphic “novel” that is also a valuable satiric commentary on the benighted paths our planet is treading.

Circadium
Larry Price

90 Pages

Circadium, with its headline-size opening gambits playing reveille for its heady prose meditations (often in the form of short fictions), has the surface appearance of Conceptual art, wittily attacking issues of money, the market, the self and the spectacular “writing on the wall” in an echo-chamber of counterpointed themes. “While on behalf of this half of what halves us, we dress each thought in lesion. Nothing could be simpler.” Disgust and alienation—classic resonances with a bygone literature of Nietzschean aphorism—gird these poems, lifting them beyond “New Sentence” poetry or the magical-realist version of a avant-gardism that a nostalgia for Surrealism has fostered. Circadium is hard but rewarding writing that updates a powerfully subversive strand of literature, one in which a rapier intellect guides the whiplash of form.

Verité
Michael Scharf

58 Pages

Scharf’s poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of “otherness” are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of VÈritè takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, “lieder” and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.

Low-Level Bureaucratic Structures
Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound

Lytle Shaw

38 Pages

These two chapbooks, originally published by Shaw and Emilie Clark’s Shark Press, can be figured at the nexus of several forces: conceptual writing like that explored by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer in their short-lived journal 0 to 9—in which procedural processes and the very frames of the letter-size page conspires to create a visual enigma—the naive word/picture art often associated with Raymond Pettibon, and the ‘pataphysical expository prose of Spiral Jetty creator Robert Smithson, which can make such subjects as the factory ruins of New Jersey seem of a piece with excavations of Neolithic artifacts (Shaw’s first book, Cable Factory 20, was based on Smithson’s work). Other interests peculiar to Shaw, such as Enlightenment concepts of Bildung (personal mastery), the problematics of canonical “knowledge,” not to mention a trademark goofy humor, animate these two works. Shaw encouraged the degradation of the image that photocopying incurred in the original publications, a downward spiral that lends pathos to the projects and which is all the more encouraged with its translation to reduced digital images.

The Chinese Notebook
Ron Silliman

30 Pages

The third and final section to appear in /ubu from Silliman’s seminal, long out-of-print book The Age of Huts (“Sunset Debris” and “2197” appeared last year), “The Chinese Notebook” has become a key text for Language writers, being part manifesto for a deterritorializing and reference-troubling aesthetics and part meditative and procedural exercise, forming an important bridge between New American poetics of the “daily” (think Whalen, Kyger, and Ginsberg) and the hardcore constructivism of Language writers like David Melnick and Barrett Watten. Most distinctly, “The Chinese Notebook” is a poetic insistence, an act of positioning poetry as more than a tributary of philosophy but philosophy itself, and of form being as troubling a determiner of genre as content (Wittgenstein’s numbered aphoristic works provide the gravity, here). This poem had the force of both a treatise and an anthem, and counts as one of the most influential of the Language School.

2197
Ron Silliman

110 Pages

Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long “new sentence” (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman’s wide formal experimentation and mastery. “2197” is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.

Sunset Debris
Ron Silliman

38 Pages

Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long “new sentence” (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman’s wide formal experimentation and mastery. “Sunset Debris” is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.

Response
Juiana Spahr

84 Pages

Spahr’s deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood — one’s sense of uniqueness and of the permanence of one’s personality — has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr’s poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. Response, Spahr’s first book (Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.

Little Books / Indians
Hannah Weiner

90 Pages

Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability — she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations — to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner’s oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined “other,” and Little Books/Indians, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.

The Tapeworm Foundry
Darren Wershler-Henry

62 Pages

Toronto-based Wershler-Henry’s last book of poems, Nicholodeon, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. The Tapeworm Foundry is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, “andor.”