I think maybe I'll pause right now
and read my typography poem, OK?
And I don't know why I had to do it.
And I don't even think--
sometimes, I don't think it's a very good poem
but it's what I had to write.
I love that story.
I just heard it a couple of weeks
ago of Ginsberg at one point telling Creeley
that after a certain amount of time,
you can afford to write a bad poem, you know.
They don't all have to be good.
This is part of a long work which some of which
is a little bit autobiographical.
And it's called "Pushing Water Part 15."
And it includes some of my own ideas
about typography and in making these things.
And it also makes reference to one person RL, which
is Ruth Lingen, whose idea of design in books is more
is always better, more decoration, more decoration,
and more decoration, so.
"Pushing Water Part 15.
Some precepts do not mix symmetrical typography
with asymmetrical typography.
Do not set type vertically.
Nothing ever looks aligned as each letter
has its own width unto itself.
Try always to avoid borders and boxes
because appropriate layout and spacing can do
the same work without the fuss.
And as to fuss, decoration by any other name qua decoration
is usually pretty boring unless you
are RL and decoration is the message and never boring.
Clue and clue, the watchword.
Let small markers that occupy a small part of x height
and don't create a visual block, lie outside the justification.
They cause less visual noise that way.
Apostrophe or quotation.
I learned the hard way never to set 8 point type unleaded
but then it just looked right that way.
There are no rules not to break when the need calls in
that way much like punctuation, grammar, and etiquette.
Duncan wrote on the top of the page
he returned to me, newsprint page,
on which stood passages in blood's domain.
Something more than a pleasure to see that my notation can
be translated into a typography, blue, and black,
and red, condensery of color and metal alphabet
with numbers and marks of all kind
made to be the total articulation
of the sound of the poem.
Made in this condensery out of grocery lists and children
sleeping and madness dancing in front of windows,
dancing in downtown bar to nothing but a driven beat.
While down the block the auctioneer
asks who will pay 100, 200, 300, 800 for color
rubbed to light or poem made of letters,
made of a few precepts, no ideas but in things
only emotion endures.
The poem must at all points disperse at all points."
Dispersal's been a particularly interesting idea to me
to kind of try and capture in book form.
And the whole idea that a book is this contained
form which in fact, probably spends 90 some of its life
closed.
And yet much of the poetry that I most strongly respond
has to do with dispersal in one way or another,
with the way meaning does not stay put.
It does not hold.
It flows.
It keeps coming apart.
It has its own kind of entropy.
And one of the most recent books up here that kind of deals
with that idea, I didn't bring the most recent things I've
worked on.
But Chartings, which is a collaboration
in poetry between Ray DiPalma and Lyn Hejinian.
It's a collaboration in which the method of collaboration
involved dispersal.
That is one poet wrote I think 10 lines and the other poet
wrote in between those lines.
And then they came together again.
And sometimes change delineation and things.
But they didn't change the order in which it occurred.
So there's this sense as the last poem in the book has it.
"There's every meaning in its place and the cadences
it can contain.
And those it cannot.
Time cut into words and words and time cut
into space, the pictured place."
And what I did in this poem, in this book
after trying to make a book that just was very sort
of small and contained, and tearing it up at some point
and starting over again, was to print
the whole run of the poems in the book
on this handmade Japanese paper.
And then tear each one out by hand.
So there's these no two anywhere alike and paste them
in sort of a collage into this book with numbers and letters
sort of floating in more or less uncontrolled ways.
And then sort of doubling that notion of flow
with charted paths.
I don't know if you can see them from there.
You see them when I pass it around.
Cut into the page with what looks like perforation but it's
done with an instrument used by seamstresses and tailors,
a tracing wheel, it's called.
And sort of letting this book trying
to imagine how could a poem be in a book yet almost
feel like it's not in the book.
And I don't know how successful that may be.
I think the book is successful but whether it actually
is in the way I want it to be, I'm not sure.
But it's one I really enjoyed working on.
Probably the only other thing I'll show before.
Do we have questions at this?
Or do you have questions at the very end or you
do that either way, both ways?
Maybe a little bit of both.
OK.
And one of the favorite books I've ever worked on
is this book called Individuals, a book of 24 poems that
were written in between the poets
or to and from the poets Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson.
Each poem in correspondence, sent sometimes in letters
but often in postcards.
And so I wanted to sort of preserve
this notion of individuality while having
tenuous connections between and a notion of the book
as kind of moving somewhere too.
So we made this book, in which each poem
is on an individual piece and sort of a blank line
in between the two.
It's not strictly that there's one poet and then the other
because the flow of their own collaboration
wasn't that one to one correspondence.
But each one is labeled who it's by.
And what I like about something like this is it's
also sort of practical.
I mean you can sit here and just turn the pages
and read it as a book.
But you can also imagine the different ways
that might exist in your mind.
And I think finally, that's the important thing, how
it exists in your mind.
I mean, I would never claim that what I do with poems
is an attempt to make the perfect realization of that
poem.
Because that thing doesn't exist.
And in fact, it's my reading, and interpretation,
and often in collaboration with others too,
I love to collaborate in these works.
But the one thing that sort of got me
over this strange feeling I had for a long time about books
always being closed or being closed so often I was just
telling myself finally well once someone has read it,
it's never closed.
Because it's not physical anymore.
So I have this strange idea that despite the intense physicality
of these works, there sort of have to do with things
that they aren't physical at some level.
And I love appreciating both of those poles.