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Jill Maji's Labor (Nightboat, 2012)

Jill Magi describes her book LABOR (Nightboat, 2012) as "A fiction ... / An installation / A handmade employee handbook." But, of course, it's also A Poetry. Read more about LABOR, and see more images of the author's text and text-work on Magi's site, here.

Find excerpted poems from LABOR at jubilat, here; and at The Brooklyn Rail, here. Read reviews at CSU's Center for Literary Publishing, here; at Tupelo Quarterly, here; and at Drunken Boat, here.

In an interview with Andy Fitch, Magi explains how, when drawing from source texts, such as those she found at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (a public archive at NYU's Bobst Library), "[T]he words are openings into, portals into something generative, a story about to come." 

still from LABOR: Finding Guide

LABOR is a physical, not merely intellectual work; Magi reminds us, "I actually made boxes, lined them with fake fur, and put documents in them while I was writing LABOR."
 
Even more: view Magi's LABOR: Finding Guide on YouTube; read her curated chapbook Labor Poetic Labor! (Essay Press), online here; and, be sure to check out Magi's series on Textile Poetics at Jacket2.

The Place of Scraps (Talon Books, 2013)

Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps (Talon Books, 2013), from Marius Barbeau's Totem Poles (1950)

Totem Poles, Vol. 1 (Ottawa: King's Printer,  1950)

The Place of Scraps "explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. [These] poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions." - explains Abel on his website.

Mercedes Eng explains, "Totem poles tell the history of a people. Like its source, Scraps deploys linguistic and visual systems of representation to record First Nations history but unlike its source, it reveals anthropology as a colonial weapon in its creative distillation of Barbeau’s ethnography." Read the rest of her consideration of The Place of Scraps at Jacket 2, here.

Read an interview on Lemonhound here, more about Abel's project here, here and here, watch Abel on YouTube here, visit his website here.

"Community Chest" cards are finished, but the "book" is still in progress -- here are some first (not quite right) attempts building at card case boxes for Community Chest.

Materials: cardstock, stamp, scoring board, scissors, double-sided tape.

From "Community Chest,"* a work-in-progress. Ultimately (I think): 12 sets of 12 different cards, to be variously combined or singled out to create poems.

Materials: self-inking stamp, ionized paper. 

*with thanks to Mary Fitzpatrick for the title.  

Emmalea Russo's "Stanza V," from Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation (pub. 1956) featured in her interview with the Textile Arts Center. Russo's entire project, they (GAUSS PDF, 2014), is viewable online here.

Find more of Russo's work, poetry preoccupied with thread and textile, including her deconstruction and reconstruction of Anne Carson's Nox, and her installation Rooms, from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, online.

David Dodd Lee's Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: the Ashbery erasure poems (BlazeVOX, 2010).

"Most of the poems I chose to erase came out of three books from A’s middle period--Hotel Lautreamont, And the Stars Were Shining, and Flow Chart," Lee explains in a very thorough interview here; he goes on: "I will say I wasn’t trying to ruin Ashbery’s originals—it felt to me like I was simply trying to take advantage of A’s genius (he’s got plenty to spare) and make something wholly separate seeming (stress here on the word 'seeming')." More info and excerpts here. Reviews here and here.

 

from Ania Wawrzkowicz's series Ambiguous Documents (2012?). More images (but very little information) here, here, here, and here.

 "for locating the room" -- Study for Green Room (May 2015) -- a poem in progress.

 materials: "Martian Green" paper, typewriter, glue.

Still image from "Clevemark Dr.," a collaborative installation by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer and Cheryl Wassenaar (fall 2014, St. Louis), based on Schlaifer's manuscript Clarkston Street Polaroids.

"The text, visually reinterpreted by Wassenaar in cut vinyl lettering, comes from Schlaifer's poems. Sculptural objects are covered in, made from, or altered by sugar, pickling salt, or soap," according to the artist's statement at Vimeo -- plus, "walk-through" the installation, which includes the poem "When the eye saw     it appeared," below (first published in Kestral (2011)). More images and discussion at the Fort Gondo site, here.

Study for "Green Room" (April 2015) -- a poem-in-progress. I'm interested in the way the lines / stanzas of the poem can be shifted and moved from one pocket to another, allowing the book (the poem-draft) to be read in different configurations and allowing me to see new ways for this poem to progress.

The form is "X-Book with pockets" (can be found on pages 33-34 in Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books). 

From As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), a collaborative project by Andy Fitch and Amaranth Borsuk. As We Know "repositions erasure procedures at the origins of (rather than in response to) a published text. Here Amaranth Borsuk has taken Andy Fitch’s summer diary and reshaped 60 passages...into a new type of collective confessional/constructivist collage that brings her own voice into the text and foregrounds the tensions of authorship," according to the As We Know website.

See more images of the project at The Volta and Matter, discussion here, here and here, a conversation between Borsuk & Fitch here.

 

From Anne Gilman's The Jolly Balance (2009, 2012), based on drawings made in a handwritten physics journal from 1918. "The Jolly Balance was a phrase I found in the original physics journal and refers to an instrument that measures specific gravity. I use it to refer to our attempt to balance all the parts of our lives on a day-to-day basis," she explains at the Center for Book Arts website, here. 

Gilman's 2012 "site-specific installation: a series of a multi-panel, interactive drawings...reads like a book on a wall," according to Art In New York City. More here, and here. View more amazing photos of The Jolly Balance and other projects on Gilman's website. 

the ‘Infinite Jest Project’ by Corrie Baldauf (photo by PD Rearick)

1) An image from Corrie Baldauf's Infinite Jest Project, flagging all the colors in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest (Little Brown, 1996). "'It started as a tool, which is how someone would start drinking coffee or doing cocaine,' Baldauf says at Hyperallergic. 'But once the tool resolved the problem of not reading it, that was when it became an obsession.'" See more photos of the project on Baldauf's site, and read more here and here.

Infinite Jest p. 215 "Canadians"

2) From Jenni B. Baker's ongoing erasure project Erasing Infinite, here. "I only work with one page at a time. I scan each of the pages in as a JPG, which I open up in Photoshop and look at independently without the context of the pages that come before or after," Baker explains in an interview. Read more at HuffPost, here, and see images on Baker's site, here.

P.S. Baker is the founder of The Found Poetry Review -- take a peek.

 

The Infinite Atlas Project

3) The Infinite Atlas Project (2012- ), "an independent research and art project seeking to identify, place and describe every possible location in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Check out their site!

Snow Flakes (Green Chair Press, 2013)

Susan Angebranndt's Snow Flakes (Green Chair Press, 2013), artist's book of Emily Dickinson's poem "Snow flakes." "Snow flakes." is included in Dickinson's handwritten and handbound Fascicle 80 (image below, from the amazing online Emily Dickinson Archive), ~1858.

"I liked the idea of counting snowflakes, which seems like such an impossible task," Angebranndt explains on her blog, here. Hop over for more details, and links to a free Emily Dickinson typeface. More images at Green Chair Press.

"Snow flakes."

 

 

E. M. M.'s  A Little White Shadow (Brown & Gross, 1889) 

&

Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow (Wave, 2006)

"A Little White Shadow, it turns out, is a book replicating—and containing—another book.... E.M.M. is Emily Malbone Morgan, a writer and philanthropist who wrote and self-published the novella A Little White Shadow, a Christian-themed inspirational tale of a young heiress summering in Italy, to raise money 'for the Benefit of a Summer Home / for Working Girls.'"

      —read the rest of my essay '"Destroying' the Text to Create the Poem" over at Post45. More images of Ruefle's work are here and here. Also, check out Mary Hickman's essay "Defaced/Refaced Books: the Erasure Practices of Mary Ruefle and Jen Bervin" over at Jacket2, here.