alan,
i can't recall ever seeing an artist's book except in an art school
degree show but presume such a thing would be a "one off"? are these
things for sale?
i think david kennedy is beginning to describe how rich media work and i
feel that his understanding is not so far from that of those who make
poems for the web. the book as [art]object (i'm presuming a one off, or
small "limited edition") would _seem_ to be a "richer" poetry and this
_ought_ to mean less of a tendancy to refuse to connect.
having said that, if the book as [art]object is a flowing together of
standard literacies (of poetry and "art") then the tendency to refuse to
connect could be said to be still present. for instance, the object's
rareness could mean that the text has to be (and can be?) stripped bare
for a wider audience, like jeremy prynne's "poorer version", which you
mentioned. and if the text can be easily extracted from the work then in
what manner was the poetry "rich", in what manner were the combined
elements irreducable?.
as a means of distribution for _poetry_ the book loses efficiency as it
becomes more splendid, an economic fact of life of [traditional]
print publishing. the book as [art]object _could_ be said to represent a
total rejection of mass culture in favour of a "gallery culture", and
thus a move towards exclusivity, a refusal to connect.
regards
steve
On [Sun, 16 Apr 2000 02:13:44 +0100]
Alan Halsey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> In message <[log in to unmask]>, steve duffy
>> <[log in to unmask]> writes
>> >in as much as the poem conforms to "standard literacy" it is austerity
>> >itself. strategies of bold and italic and white space may be acceptable
>> >but that's as far as it goes in terms of risking "integrity".
>> >
>> >a "rich", (e.g. visual) language would compromise integrity and
>> >therefore must be resisted by poets who would follow the tradition of
>> >austerity. there are lots of "rich" poetries (the oral tradition, visual
>> >poetries, and etc) but these are not as _pure_ as "the real thing", the
>> >[plain] text.
>> >
>> >purity is important. the poem as pure text represents a culture which
>> >resists the technology of "rich" language.
>> >
>> Combining recent strands here, Steve, & allowing for the fact that I'm
>> just back from Saturday night in the pub & thus in a well-advertised
>> dangerous state, would you say therefore that the primacy accorded to
>> the book-as-object, as promoted in recent posts by cris & David Kennedy
>> (also by Geraldine a while ago, and I'd like to say silently by me since
>> my work becomes more & more geared to page- & book-design), is
>> fundamentally opposed to poetry-as-pure-text? I'm curious in so far as I
>> feel I could be accused of both tendencies: but I've never felt it's a
>> problem, or a real dichotomy. Maybe I just don't really grasp (I'm quite
>> seriously pissed, and puzzled too about David B[rom]'s request to play
>> my wife's jukebox) your distinction between 'rich' and 'pure' - to take
>> an example, I'd assume that Jeremy Prynne would be in your terms a
>> 'pure' poet but there are works of his (I think particularly of _Into
>> The Day_) which in their original printed forms fall into both
>> categories: a 'pure' poetry given a 'rich' presentation which is lost in
>> the bland reprints: the loss, I think, is serious and yet not the result
>> of a dire contradiction. The text simply exists in two different states;
>> one I'd regard as 'richer' but wouldn't by the same token regard the
>> other as 'purer'.
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