WRITING THROUGH & CUTTING UP
Visual poetry often experimented with concepts related to the book or little magazines—including the foundations of pages and book structures themselves. The practice of creating “erasure poems,” or of “writing through,” is perhaps most well-known in the work of British artist Tom Phillips, who created the monumental, decades-long work A Humument by continually modifying an existing copy of a book he found in a junkshop. In these works, the physical modification of texts—by tearing, sewing, cutting, and more—becomes the poetic intervention. Due to the challenges of reproducing this work in commercial contexts, small presses and self-published projects are often the most innovative sites for this type of visual poetry.
Buzz Spector.
A Passage.
Granary Books, 1994.
For A Passage, Spector has torn pages in a sequence of lessening increments to make a cross section of his text; each and every volume in the edition of 35 copies has been altered in the same way, leaving a shredded typographic field that nevertheless makes legible Spector’s poignant personal narrative. The book was typeset by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press, printed offset by Brad Freeman at InterPlanetary Productions, and bound by Jill Jevne.
David Briers, ed.
Pages, no. 1.
Autumn 1970.
Displayed is an opening of Tom Phillips’ work, A Humument.
Contributors include Gianfranco Baruchello, Eugenio Carmi, Luigi Ferro, Jochen Gerz, P.A. Gette, C.R. Ginzburg, Mauricio Kagel/Joseph Beuys, Richard Hamilton, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Tom Phillips, Diter Rot (Dieter Roth) (selected by Emmett Williams), Gianni-Emilio Simonetti, Timm Ulrichs, and Jiri Valoch.
Jen Bervin.
The Desert.
Granary Books, 2008.
Taking John Van Dyke’s prose celebration of American wilderness The Desert (1901) as a point of departure, Bervin has sewn, row by row, with over 5000 yards of pale blue thread, across 130 pages of Van Dyke’s text, creating a poem that forms its own elemental landscape and shares Van Dyke’s poetic attention to visual phenomena. Overall, in her work, Bervin explores the relationship between text and textile, and the ways that elements overlap, combine, and obscure meaning.
Raphael Rubinstein.
A Geniza.
Granary Books, 2015.
This book was inspired by Rubinstein’s reading of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, and the ancient form of the geniza, a temporary storage room for worn out and discarded Hebrew texts of all kinds until they can be properly buried. Incorporating a range of materials—from long out-of-print poetry collections to YouTube postings—Rubinstein creates his own geniza from the voices of dozens of witnesses to contemporary life in Cairo. The book was produced by Steve Clay and Diane Bertolo, printed letterpress by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press. The accompanying pamphlet was bound by Judith Ivry.
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Tom Phillips.
A Humument.
Tetrad Press, 1970.
Now regarded as one of the most important artists’ books of the twentieth century, A Humument has humble beginnings. In 1966, Tom Phillips obtained a copy of W.H. Mallock’s obscure A Human Document (1892), at a junkshop for threepence. He then altered every page with painting, collage, and cut-up techniques, creating an entirely new version of the book. The first printing was issued by Ian Tyson’s Tetrad Press in a series of boxed pages, from 1970–1976.
Wallace Berman.
[Untitled: Opt.82. Booster Bng. Anguinea / Y].
John Martin, 1967.
This poster/poem by Berman was published by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. Berman was known for his Verifax collages, which incorporated the Hebrew alphabetic and evoked Kabbalistic elements, often with the same repeating motif of a hand holding a radio upon which other images are projected. Berman was the editor of Semina, an influential assemblage magazine published between 1955 and 1964.