[The
following was written for the First Annual Conference in Memoriam
Eric Mottram, London, September 19, 1997, & has been revised several
times since.]
is
strange to begin—as indeed we have to begin—in Eric Mottram's
absence. For myself this is the Þrst time that I've been in London
since his death & the Þrst time that I'll be speaking to his interests
& not have him here to listen & respond. Eric was for me one of the
great listeners & responders—a quality that entered into his
own work as a poet & as a writer on poetry & on the larger world of
which poetry is a part—a small part maybe but crucial for those
of us for whom it's been an entry to that world at large. With Eric,
as with few others, I could speak at length, because he gave the sense
that what we said between ourselves could matter & that he was there
to hear.
My intention
today is to return to an interrupted part of a longer conversation
that we had back in 1981. I can do that because Gavin Selerie was
there with a tape recorder & with the intention, which he soon carried
out, of transcribing the talk & publishing it in what was then his
series of Riverside Interviews. I had been very much connected until
then—through the anthologies & through my own readings & performances—with
a re-exploration of the oral bases/the oral sources of our poetry.
And what Eric took as an opening for our talk was a statement of mine
that I was (or thought I was) "much more honest as a writer than
a speaker." The reference was back to an earlier "dialogue"
with William Spanos in Boundary 2, which Eric described as
having to do "with this whole problem of the relation between
oral poetry & the text." Having raised a question about what
had been & became even more fertile ground for me—the idea, I
mean, of writing & the book, which I had been exploring in some sense
since Technicians of the Sacred—both of us passed it by
in favor of a discussion of various aspects of oral poetry "past
& present [& to come]." And when the conversation got around—as
it later did—to matters of ethnopoetics & ethnicities, there
was a passing suggestion of the book concern in relation to the Jewish
sources I had been exploring in Poland/1931 & elsewhere, but
mostly to point out that the Jews, while founding much of their mystic
tradition in oral law & a poetics of the voice, were preeminently
the people-of-the-book. So the book, again, was a point of contrast
rather than departure.
Eric,
in other words, had given me an opening & I had let it pass without
making it clear (as Eric was perhaps pushing me to do at the beginning)
that the book & writing had always been part of my poetics & even
my ethnopoetics & was at that moment becoming—if anything—still
more overt. To begin with, I was at the time of the Riverside interview
the author of some 27 books of my own poetry, eight other books of
translations, & seven (mostly very large) anthologies & assemblages.
And it was alongside these—& not apart from them—that I
had, like most of us, been entering deeply (I thought) into performance
as a strategy of voice & body. With that came what I described to
Eric as an attempt to "desanctify & demistify the written word"—initially
by Þnding ways to present or represent those vast areas of language
art that seemed—everywhere—to precede or (often) supercede
the act of writing. At the same time I began—but possibly more
slowly—to recognize the similarly diverse origins & possibilities
of writing & that a "symposium of the whole" (in Robert
Duncan's phrase) would also involve a mix & possibly a clash of writings.
It was as if, in place of the Bible, say, as a singularly Þxed text,
we were to view it now as the multiple books (the biblia, plural)
that it actually was. And all this, in the contemporary context, against
the resurgence of those (fundamentalists & others) who pretend to
a single book, not in Mallarmé's sense but in that of the tyrannies
from which they've descended & which they threaten to restore.
Still,
for me, the central impulse in Technicians of the Sacred, the
Þrst of the big assemblages that I've continued to construct, was
to bring together a display of those ("oral") poetries that
seemed to exist apart from writing & the book. This was the start
of my ethnopoetics as such, but even within that there were spaces,
inevitably, in which the source poems were themselves in written form—the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, say, or the Chinese Book of Changes,
among the works that were the most immediately familiar. And there
was also an intuition, a sense that began to play itself out, of writing
like speech as some kind of universal (human) constant. So, in Technicians,
there was, among other entries, a section early in the book called
"The Pictures," with examples of pictographs & glyphs from
a number of diverse cultures (largely American Indian & South PaciÞc),
paired in the commentaries with works by visual & concrete poets of
our own place & time. And elsewhere in the book I was able to include
Mid¯e [healing] songs & picture-songs from the Ojibwa Indians, nsibidi
[secret] writings from the Ekoi in Africa, & pictorial songs & narratives
from the Na-Khi "tribe" in China.1 Accompanying
commentaries [as later also in Shaking the Pumpkin] called
attention to the thin line between "writing" & "drawing"
that made it "hard [as I said there] to keep the functions separate
or to assert with any conÞdence that writing is a late development
rather than indigenous, in some form, to the human situation everywhere."2
When
Dennis Tedlock & I founded Alcheringa in 1971 as "a Þrst
magazine of ethnopoetics" [of the world's tribal poetries], the
emphasis, again, was on "poetry made in the mouth," but
our pages were open as well to a range of traditional & early written
art: paleolithic calendar notations, Egyptian & Mayan hieroglyphs,
recastings of Bible & other Jewish bookworks, Old Norse runes, & Navajo
pictographs (among others). I was also working by the middle 1970s
on A Big Jewish Book (later revised as Exiled in the Word), where
I could focus on the written alongside—& drawing from—the
oral, & with a strong awareness of how central the "book"
was in that highly charged, sometimes over-determined context. (Earlier
anthologies of the 1970s like America a Prophecy & Revolution of
the Word also put a high emphasis on the written, including—most
surprisingly I thought—instances of both traditional & modern
[experimental] alternatives to our normative ideas of books & writing.)
This was still before the 1981 discussions with Eric & with Gavin
Selerie, as was the founding, after my separation from Alcheringa,
of a successor magazine, New Wilderness Letter, in which I
promised as editor ("a poet by inclination & practice")
to pursue poesis "in all arts & sciences...[&] not [to] be specialized
& limited by culture or profession" but to enlarge the context
of poetry as "a report, largely through the creative work itself,
of where that process [of poesis] takes us."
That
in brief was the situation in June 1981, a year before the appearance
of the book issue of New Wilderness Letter (about which, more
later) & during the preparation of Symposium of the Whole as
an anthology of writings by poets, anthropologists & others "toward
an ethnopoetics." In the latter work Diane Rothenberg & I were
attempting as co-editors to open from the more specialized emphasis
on oral poetry to a still wider view that would encompass writing
& the book as well, along with other forms of visual poetry & language
(that from the cultures of the deaf a prime example) for which there
was as yet no actual poetics. By the time, then, that I returned to
London in December 1982 & was interviewed by Gavin Selerie alone,
the concern with writing & the book took up (for me) a signiÞcant
part of the conversation. And since I certainly saw Eric then, I feel
quite certain that these concerns were also part of what was further
said between us.
Looking
back at the conversation with Selerie, I'm aware that the point of
departure for me—the emblematic point at least—was in the
poetry, the shamanistic veladas, of the Mazatec shamaness María Sabina.
For her—& this was a matter that had been made clear to us by
her American translator Henry Munn—there was no actual practice
of writing (or reading) but the words of her extraordinary chants
were opened to her in the form of a great Book of Language that was
given to her in her Þrst empowering visions & that, although she remained
unlettered, she was (in her own mind) fully able to read & to give
back as song. In light of this & of my own meeting with her a few
years before, I went on to speak of myself as a writer & of writing
as a primal human function:
Increasingly
[I said to Gavin] I've had to assert that what I'm involved in is
not a denial of the powers of a written language, because that—the
written language, writing—would be a part of the exploration
also. Over the last couple of years, in fact, I've been trying to
explore the uses of writing in cultures that we usually speak of
as oral, non-literate, pre-literate, & so on. And the conclusion
I'm drawn toward is that writing in some sense is also universal
& shared among all peoples. Therefore, when human beings developed
as human beings at some point in the far past—at the point
where we became human beings we were probably already using some
form of speech— & along with that, I would think, some form
of writing, art-making, & so on.
And
I added (by way of conclusion): "It's all very old."
In that
sense, as Eric clearly knew, the book (taken as the "scene,"
the place in which the writing comes together) was the hidden side
of my ethnopoetics, as the city was (for me) the scene of the "new
wilderness" named as my project of that time. And as the talk
with Eric & Gavin & others helped all of that develop, I found a number
of ways over the next two or three years to let it come to surface.
Symposium of the Whole had appeared by middle 1982, & in the
aftermath of that we were organizing (through the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles) a second international symposium on ethnopoetics
for the spring of 1983.3 With that, as with the book
from which we took the conference's name, the idea was not simply
to recapitulate what had been said before, but to bring the discourse
on ethnopoetics into areas from which it seemed to have been set apart.
Writing & the book clearly marked off one such territory—aided
in this instance by the visit of Edmond Jabès, whom I had brought
to San Diego as a visiting Regents scholar. (Others who were there
were Robert Duncan, David Antin, Marjorie Perloff, Michael McClure,
Roger Abrahams, Wai-lim Yip, Hugh Kenner, Paula Gunn Allen, Nathaniel
Mackey, J. Stephen Lansing, Clayton Eshleman, Wendy Rose, David Guss,
& Barbara Tedlock.) I had already by this time lifted for my own uses
Jabès's aphorism that "the book is as old as Þre & water"
& had juxtaposed it with Tristan Tzara's contention that "thought
is made in the mouth." So those two were now, in my mind at least,
the axes for our discussions of an expanded ethnopoetics.
In the
year preceding the symposium, then, I had opened the concern with
writing & the book in a still more deliberate way—co-editing
with David Guss a book issue of our magazine New Wilderness Letter.
The work had by then accumulated—including preliminary work for
the international symposium—& had been accelerated by Michael
Gibbs's retranslation & visual commentary on Mallarmé's Le
livre, instrument spirituel. The push provided by the Mallarmé
(as I later wrote) "not only brought us back to the Þrst modernist
breakthroughs but also provided a context in which those breakthroughs
corresponded to an ancient sense of book as sacred object." All
of this—for me—was now no longer hidden but brought to surface—abetted
also by the California visit earlier that year of the Peruvian curandero
Eduardo Calderón Palomino, whom David Guss had led into a useful discussion
of his mesa (his healing altar) as an assemblage of objects that could
be read the way one reads a book. The rhyming with Mallarmé
was perfect—like that of Mallarmé with María Sabina—&
suggested a series of links, a web of ancient & modern possibilities
that could be woven into a new display or book. And the gathering
itself—a small anthology of works immediately to hand—ranged
between new & old (deeply traditional & startlingly avant-garde),
in such a way (I thought) that we could "grasp the actual potentialities
of writing (as with any other form of language or culture [& by so
doing] could extend the meaning of literacy beyond a system of (phonetic)
letters to the practice of writing itself."4
In concluding my "editor's note," I wrote:
It
is our growing belief (more apparent now than at the start of the
ethnopoetics project) that the cultural dichotomies between writing
& speech—the "written" & the "oral"—disappear
the closer we get to the source. To say again what seems so hard
to get across: there is a primal book as there is a primal voice,
& it is the task of our poetry & art to recover it—in our minds
& in the world at large.
That
recovery, of course, is also a matter of demonstration & of coming
to understand the implications of where such a view might lead us.
As such it is a process that those like Eric or myself or any of us
here might help to start but without the real hope or even the desire
to bring it to conclusion.
A decade
& a half has passed since then, during which time the books have multiplied
for all of us. For myself I have been lucky not only in the normal
run of book publication but to have joined with book artists like
Ian Tyson (a longtime companion in this work) & Barbara Fahrner, Walter
Hamady, Steven Clay, & others in the making of particular works that
correspond to their ideas of where the art of books might take us.
I have also worked with Pierre Joris on two volumes of an end-of-century
assemblage, Poems for the Millennium, as a work drawing from the writings
of the last 100 years & more—both those that work from a demotic
spoken base & those that draw on visible language & the written word.
(That there is often no clear division between the two—both the
works & the makers of the works—is likely an obvious point but
still a point worth making.) With regard to the book & writing (at
their "limits") the work that opens the century for us is
Mallarmé's—both the notes for his Le Livre & his
promethean Coup de dès of 1897. (A page from William
Blake's Milton: Book the Second is the actual Þrst volume opener
in a section called "Forerunners.") This focus—most
of it book-referential—is followed up in the experiments of Futurists
& Dadaists, but also in exemplary works by those like the "outsider"
writer/artist Adolf Wölþi & the master of the collage-book Max Ernst,
as well as in an ethnopoetic Þnal section that draws from a range
of works —both oral & written, ancient & modern.
The
second volume is dedicated to Eric Mottram & attempts—with probably
"unpardonable" omissions—to bring the work into the
(almost) present.5 The volume, at over 850 pages,
is both long & complex, but one of the dominant thrusts is to deliver
the sense—as far as can be done within anthology constraints—that
poets will often write not only for the single (visible) page but
with an idea of the poem as an extended work or book. (Jabès
with his lifelong Book of Questions would be a case in point,
but only one among many.) On its strongly visual side, however, the
Millennium Two book includes works by Michaux, Cage, Mac Low,
Cobra artists Christian Dotremont & Asger Jorn (but also other Cobra
artist-poets such as Karel Appel, Gerrit Kouwenaar, & Pierre Alechinsky),
Robert Filliou, a whole range of concretists (Eugen Gomringer, Ian
Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Seiichi Nikuni, Ilse & Pierre Garnier,
Haroldo & Augusto de Campos, & Karl Young, whose "bookforms"
had earlier appeared in New Wilderness Letter), Hannah Weiner,
Kamau Brathwaite, George Maciunas, Bob Cobbing, Steve McCaffery, Carolee
Schneemann, Tom Phillips, Clark Coolidge (in collaboration with Philip
Guston), Cecilia Vicuña, & Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Along with these
come chapter-length excerpts from text-centered works composed as
books & not compendia by poets such as Alice Notley, Anne Waldman,
Jacques Roubaud, & Lyn Hejinian, among many others. And there is also
a section, "Toward a Cyberpoetics," going back to visual/verbal
machine works by Marcel Duchamp & Abraham Lincoln Gillespie & up to
computer-generated texts by Jim Rosenberg & John Cayley—as a
starter.
I have
no theory as to where all of this may lead us, though some sense of
theory (neither "critical" nor "French" but very
much, I hope, my own) must underlie all that I'm saying. Still I feel
it's close to whatever basis for a poetics Eric Mottram was pursuing
in his art & thought. The work continues of course, as it has to,
& over the last year—but no longer able to share with Eric—I've
supervised the republication (by Steven Clay & Granary Books) of the
New Wilderness Letter book issue—now an independent volume called
The Book, Spiritual Instrument. And looking ahead (& very much
at Clay's instigation) I've embarked on another anthology project:
a wide-ranging book of writings on "the book," taken in
some sense as an extension of what The Book, Spiritual Instrument
was attempting with those materials that were then immediately to
hand. (This is the difference, then, between a magazine & an anthology.)
It is in this context that we hope to explore more fully the points
at which a poetics & an ethnopoetics of the book & writing come together
or illuminate each other. And we want at the same time to expose the
material bases (ink & paper, manufacture & dissemination) of those
ends to which the work of Mallarmé was leading.
There
will be no limits here to what we might include—of books that
have been made & books that have still to be imagined. I believe in
this regard that there is also a future of the book—as
an extended & self-contained compendium of (visible) language—&
that the emergence of new technologies—new cyberworks
I meant to say—is not a threat to our identity as poets & book
people but a new aspect of it that can & will enhance all that poesis
is or ever has been. In much the same way, I no longer believe, if
I ever did, that the book or writing had—in some earlier time—destroyed
orality or made the human voice obsolete. The book is as old as Þre
& water, & thought is made in the mouth—as it is also in the
hands & lungs & with the inner body. If that was our condition at
the beginning, it will be also in the end.
A FINAL
NOTE. In making such a book-of-the-book we have been able to draw
in the Þrst instance on a range of discursive writings that deal with
one or another aspect of the book & writing. Here the many recent
books, artist's books, & essays of Johanna Drucker need immediate
mention, along with others in roughly the same (largely contemporary)
territory by Michael Davidson, Marjorie Perloff, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix,
Renée & Judd Hubert, Jerome McGann, & (in their new historical
anthology of alternative forms of languaging, Imagining Language)
Jed Rasula & Steve McCaffery. Some of these we have included in the
Þnished volume, & some not; & we have reinforced the inclusions with
critical & philosophical writings by thinkers like Jacques Derrida
& Maurice Blanchot, but also by poets & artists like Anne Waldman,
Michael Davidson, William Everson, Keith A. Smith, & Karl Young—the
last three engaged as well in printing and book production. (Short
poems or excerpts from poems by poets like Whitman, Stein, Jabès,
& Khlebnikov serve a similar function.) Such works, evoking positions
& preferences across what we think of as a wide artistic spectrum,
appear within our opening section of pre-faces or at strategic points
elsewhere in this volume.
It is
our sense—mine certainly—that the practitioners—the
writers & the book-makers themselves—are the key to any future
poetics of the book. Accordingly we have included two large sections
in which the points of reference are to speciÞc artists & poets in
the aftermath of Blake (our pre-eminent poet-of-the-book). In the
Þrst of these sections ("The Opening of the Field," with
title after Robert Duncan), the inclusions start from Blake & run
through the avant-garde movements of the 1920s & 1930s: the self-constructed
fascicles of Emily Dickinson (in Susan Howe's accounting); the Mallarmé
notebooks & plottings called collectively Le Livre; the Blaise
Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay Prose of the Transsiberian (rising
to the height of the Eiffel Tower); the rough-hewn books of the Russian
Constructivists & the liberated pages of the Italian Futurists; Marcel
Duchamp's boxed notes & drawings; André Breton's musings on
the germinal collage-books of Max Ernst; & writing as an act of violence
& conjuration in Artaud's works on paper—what Agnès de
la Beaumelle speaks of, aptly, as his "spells & gris-gris."
And in the concluding work in this section, Jerome McGann runs through
a range of English-language sources—William Morris, Walter Pater,
Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Bob Brown—as early practitioners
of book & page art, & then moves on to Susan Howe as an exemplar of
its carry-over in "postmodern" writing.
But
before we make our own way to the "postmodern," we insert
a central section ("The Book Is As Old As Fire & Water"—from
the Jabès line quoted above) in which we offer alternative
ways of writing & of making books, not "modern" or "experimental"
in conception but drawing from a range of times & places different
from our own. These deliberately but not exclusively focus on traditions
of the Indian Americas—threatened for centuries but never totally
eradicated. As opener we are able to go back to a poem—recovered—from
the pre-Conquest Aztec poet Nezahualcoyotl in celebration of those
"painted books" that were later destroyed by the conquering
missionary zealots. Even more striking at present is the reconstitution
of the old Mayan writing systems, on the basis of which Dennis Tedlock
offers a Þrst attempt at a translation that reveals the underlying
poetics of the classical inscriptions. In two related works, Walter
D. Mignolo probes the range & character of "the book in the new
world," & Henry Munn shows how a tradition of the book underlies
the oral poetry & visions of the contemporary Mazatec shaman-poet
("woman of words"), María Sabina.
Apart
from this Indian-related framework, the range available to us has
been enormous & our selections necessarily restricted—from Nancy
Munn's description of forms of writings/drawings in sand among the
Walbiri people of Australia to Jean François Billeter's account of
Chinese writing viewed in its own terms as a unique & particular art;
Roland Barthes' approach to "the Japanese theatrical face"
as a surface that isn't painted so much as written; Toshi Ishihara
and Linda Reinfeld's interpretation of a well-known Japanese "anthology"
in the form of a boxed game of poem cards; Martha L. Carothers's bringing
together of traditional "novelty books" ("pages or
pictures that fold out, revolve, slide, move, slat-dissolve, pop up,
or are die-cast in special shapes") with their avant-garde counterparts;
a discussion by William J. Samarin of "glossographia" as
the written equivalent to the pentacostalists' more familiar "speaking
in tongues"; kabbalistic readings of the night sky as a book
of shifting letters ("Celestial Alphabet Event") & of the
creation of the world as itself an act of writing (Sefer Yetsirah);
& a similar account of language & creation from the Dogon thinker
Ogotemmêli.
The
final section of our gathering is called "The Book To Come"
(after Blanchot's essay on Mallarmé, also included) & covers
the latter part of the twentieth century—the second great awakening
both of experimental writing & of the artist's book as such. (It is
with relation to its "postwar" emergence in particular that
Johanna Drucker writes: "In many ways it could be argued that
the artist's book is the quintessential 20th-century artform.")
In approaching this second period, we have decided, very deliberately,
to avoid hard & fast categories of books & book-makers—except
as they turn up in the writings of the artists we're presenting. We
do however see the period as one in which—more than ever—artists
& poets took control of their own work apart from the nexus of dealers
& markets. Among the earliest of these we foreground Dieter Rot[h],
whose self-made books & single sheets of text broke open older conventions
of print & book design; Bob Cobbing, a master poet of the "democratic
multiple," whose oeuvre, utilizing mimeograph, xerox &
offset, inches today toward a thousand books as publisher & author;
Ian Tyson, among those independent artists of the book who continue
to work with Þne print & painterly, sometimes sculptural, surfaces,
in an ongoing interplay of words & images; and Jess, whose collage-book
O!, originally published in a cheaply printed offset edition by my
own Hawk's Well Press, we are reproducing in its entirety. As part
of a continuity from Max Ernst's bookworks, among others, O! rhymes
as well with Tom Phillips's A Humument—the latter a new form
of collage (or de/collage) in which old texts are pared away & painted
over, to let new texts (& images) emerge.
As Drucker's
essay, "The Artist's Book As Idea and Form," presents a
linkage between modern & postmodern artist's books, that by Thomas
A. Vogler points to numerous examples of new & hybrid forms—"books"
that areSemphatically not books, but rather Obook-objects,' physical
objects that trope on every conceivable aspect of Othe book,' from
the conventional codex format of the mass-produced commodity to its
semiotic functions as the instrumental embodiment of cultural authority
in the West." Alongside Vogler's numerous examples—works
by Kenneth Goldsmith, Greely Myatt, Helen Lessick, Marcel Broodthaers,
Buzz Spector, Byron Clercx, & Patrick Luber, among others—we
have added several seminal works, some of which emphatically changed
the surface of writing from the familiar book-as-codex to other vehicles
or conduits for visible language: Alison Knowles's monumental Book
of Bean, Allan Kaprow's Words, Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden
at Little Sparta, Carolee Schneemann's Up To and Including Her
Limits, Barbara Fahrner's encyclopedic Kunstkammer Project,
& Faith Ringgold's French Collection narrative quilts. These
are capped by Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky, an extraordinary
contemporary work of glossographia based on traditional Chinese writing,
& by Charles Bernstein's concluding essay, which both traces a history
of writing in the west & takes on the major shift into virtual (as
contrasted to material) text art in our age of audio/video/ digital
reproduction & internet dissemination.
To conclude,
then, is to say that here as elsewhere there is no conclusion. "Of
the making of books there is no end," as the old scriptural saw
once put it (while reifying a single book as the unalterable word-of-god),
and Mallarmé in his modernist détournement: "Everything
in the world exists in order to be turned into a book." It is
my sense—at least in our common work as poets—that the movement,
the dialectic (to use a once fashionable word) is between book and
voice, between the poets (present) in their speaking & the poets (absent)
in their writing. That is to say, we are (up to & past our limits)
full & sentient beings, & free, as Rimbaud once told us, to possess
truth in one soul & one body. For myself, as I surely would have said
to Eric Mottram (or he to me), the return to the book is the step
now needed to make the work complete.
—Paris/London
1997
—Encinitas 1999
NOTES
1.
A still larger presentation of such primal writings/drawings appears
in the revised edition of Technicians of the Sacred, in which
I open the distribution of poetries to include the European.
2.
A deeper level of our ethnopoetics was of course its exploration of
a poetry imbedded within the life of a people or community &, through
its traditional poets as well as its modernist experimenters, a poetry
that served as a primary vehicle toward the experiencing of an expanding
range of actual & possible realities.
3.
The Þrst symposium on ethnopoetics, possibly more restricted in scope,
had taken place eight years before at the Center for Twentieth-Century
Studies in Milwaukee.
4.
The works in the book issue, broken along the lines of modern & traditional,
included on its experimental side, Karl Young's sculptural
"bookforms"; Alison Knowles's The Book of Bean, a
monumental walk-through work with accompanying remarks & "auto-dialogue"
[reþections] by her & by George Quasha; & assorted writings & commentaries
by Jabès, Dick Higgins, Jed Rasula, David Meltzer, Gershom
Scholem, & Herbert Blau; & on its ethnopoetic side, the Eduardo
Calderón mesa; an essay by J. Stephen Lansing on "the aesthetics
of the sounding of the [written] text" in Balinese performance,
excerpts from Dennis Tedlock's translation of the Mayan Popol Vuh
that spoke speciÞcally of books & writing, Tina Oldknow's offering
of a Muslim practice using written (sacred) words removed from their
material base & decocted in an herbal mixture ("Muslim Soup"),
& Karl Young's speculative analysis of the Mixtec Codex Vienna,
one of the surviving illuminated books from ancient Mexico. Along
with this, there was a series of striking photo portraits by Becky
Cohen, in which a number of American poets were shown in the act of
reading, making of the book (as it were) "an instrument of performance."
5.
The dedication reads "For Eric Mottram poet, friend, & teacher"
& follows with a quote extracted from a poem of his: "that all
created life be rescued / from tyranny decay sloughed for a share
/ in magniÞcence hoof thunder silence of / pines & birches across
the taiga."
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