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

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

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). 

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.

John Eric Broaddus's High Time (1986). "I had no qualms about eliminating the entire text," Broaddus explains here. View more of his work here, here, and here; watch Johanna Drucker discussing his work here, a list of exhibitions here.

 

Susan Porteous's The Essential Gandhi (Green Bird Press 2012). "By finding books written about Gandhi and systematically spinning each page to make a continuous paper thread, the record of his life become intertwined with the spinning process. Each spun book is wound onto an antique spool of the appropriate size and the title of each work is appropriated from the book used in its creation," she explains here. More on her website, here.

The Essential Gandhi (Vintage Books 1962, 2002)

Ros Rixon's "Violence in the Art," which looks to be from John Fraser's Violence in the Arts (Cambridge UP, 1974). "I am often asked if I think of the idea before I find a book or the other way around? I tend to work both ways," Rixon explains. More altered books and sculptures on her site, here. 

 

A mixed-media miniature from Karen Green's "Tiny Stampede," here. Green explains, "I've been making this "found poetry" for years. I thought I invented it, but found out later I most definitely did not. Some of these are taken from a poetry anthology--I cut out just the first lines and spent an afternoon or two rearranging them. Then I got into a trance and cut those up and rearranged those. Trances are hard to come by these days; I am happy for those hours. And yes, "to give sorrow words", sneakily, using the words of others who tried to do the same," in an interview here (and also here).

Green's forthcoming book including similar visual/poetic work Bough Down (Siglio Press 2013), is an "unusual narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with miniature collages." Some discussion of Bough Down here. See/read some images and excerpts here, here and here. More with Green here and here, a previous publication, Here/Gone (2008), here.

Deborah Chodoff's "Sacred Poem XXXVII" (2007), in the Center For Book Arts "Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection" exhibit. See more images from the exhibit here.

Buzz Spector's Marcel Broodthaers #2 (2010) at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts here. Spector "gives a Walker Art Center/Rizzoli catalog of Broodthaers's work the full treatment, covering every page in gesso and methodically ripping the pages.... Spector's engagement with Broodthaers goes at least as far back as his 1983 History of Europe, a work not included in this retrospective. Here Spector inverted Broodthaers's very first artistic effort: he sank copies of his last book of poetry into plaster, symbolically sinking his career," in a discussion of a Spector/Broodthaers retrospective here.

And Marcel Broodthaers (1997) here. More of Spector's work here; some discussion here. Also see Spector's A Passage (Granary Books 1994) here: "Clearly, A Passage is every book...". Spector's website is here.

Jody Alexander's Exposed Spines (2010), here. Alexander's version of The Handmaid's Tale here, more work here, and her website here.

1) Justin Quinn's "Moby Dick Chapter 55 or 9200 times E" (2004), here. More here.


2) Linda Carreiro's "The Fossil Whale." She explains, "Within the contemporary context the transplanted versions are necessarily changed from their original meaning, unable to be read in the same way as the context in which they were created," here. More images here. Also see her "Passage" (2010), here.

3) Keith Smith's tunnel book, "The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory" (2009), here.

Alan Halsey's A Circumacetation of David Kenney's 'Cornell' (2011), photographs. More information and images here. Halsey's project takes its text from David Kennedy's "homage to Joseph Cornell," Cornell: A Circuition Around His Circumambulation (West House 2001), available here.

Georgia Russell's Harrap's Standard French-English Dictionary (2009) above and Manifestes du Surrealism (2009), below. According to her bio, here, "There is a simultaneous sense of loss and preservation in each construction, as [Russell] wants to retain and reclaim the past as much as her techniques attack it." Looking for The Bell Jar? See more of Russell's books-under-glass, here, and let me know if you find it.

Doug Beube's The Grand Design (1996). "Using the original title, 'The Grand Design,' by Franz Josef Strauss, portions of the book's printed matter are excised by drilling out all the words one at a time, a process that displaces the text's narrative content. . . . Each page is both a palindrome and palimpsest, a white veil through which the underlying page is glimpsed," here. & Beube's "A Void: Consonants and Vowels (after Georges Perec)" (2006), (below) here. More of Beube's book art here, here, and here.



On a somewhat related note, "A Perec Paper Plane" from Siglio Press, with text appropriated from Georges Perec's "A Page," here.

Altered books and altered pages (2006?) by Japanese artist Ryuta Iida. "His sculptural approach combines creation and destruction in one action, creating a constantly occurring paradox which in turn becomes the energy of his work," explains the Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, here. More images here, and Iida's website, here.

Lisa Kokin's "Selections from Mein Kampf" (2000), in How2, here.

And "I Love only What I Least Know" (1999). Her website, here. More here, here, and here.

From Yuken Teruya's "The Giving Tree Project" (2006), an artful pop-up of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. More here, and his website here.

Tom Blue's Children's Britannica (2006)


Jánis Nedéla 's Codex #3 (2005)


And more images of these books, here.

Ka-Pow! (graphite, paper, book)


The King of Golden River, a musical pop-up book

Beautiful altered and manipulated books by Jennifer Khoshbin. Visit her website for more, here.