Saturday, November 13, 2010

Keeping It Moving




... thoughts about/after The Library of Last Resort


I’ve been thinking about the past two months and the little energy or inclination I’ve felt to write or make anything. Then, on Thursday afternoon, something gels, I go upstairs and I’m back in it ... How to account for this?

The day before I’d chanced upon Jill Magi’s site* and I was immediately taken by the papery quality of her writing: how it asserted its physical existence. I was also struck by her admission of working with no purpose, simply seeing what will happen. I felt a lifting – weeks of self-crippling faded away. Yes! Why not make a few little books to while away a rain-drenched afternoon and send them out afterwards? It didn’t have to be A Big Deal.

Then, the question: what to use? Another potential source of panic and block. The answer: just use what’s to hand. For text I decided to use phrases I’d culled from earlier reading intending at the time to work them into a text. (That had been one of the ideas for the mid-term break – and hadn’t materialised – compounding my sense of frustration). I had the sheets typed from last week – which goes to show: nothing goes to waste. Now, with a different project in mind, the very same phrases started to become more suggestive. And the title declared itself – The Library of Last Resort. I liked the ironic grandeur (this a volume of shards); “last resort” in the sense of nothing else to do that afternoon and the very words and papers being recycled scraps. Another moral: just start sit down and start and things will start to happen.

I wanted papers that would be physically engaging but not ‘beautiful’ as such. Pushing it further, I thought of deliberately untypical papers for printing – the flimsiest possible. Thus: tracing paper, sandwich paper, brown backing paper, shoebox lining paper and a more ‘mousse’-feel packing material which nearly wrecked my printer (I had to chuck that one).

Print format was determined by the binding – I wanted to try my hand at Japanese-style side-stitching. So, a longer horizontal than vertical page.

Watching as the text sheets printed, I began to imagine a series of interleaved pages of calligraphy. Nice idea – but save it for next time. This book had to be done in the few hours available. Instead, I opted for ink straight onto tracing paper – at least, to see what would happen. However, tracing paper is not absorbent: the ink simply pooled and would take a day to dry. I dabbed at it and then used the inky tissue as a tampon: these marks were suggestive. Another sheet with a few fingerprints led to another design (and woke up a latent possibility in the unattributed quotation-of-a-quotation – originally Melville – “the human integral”). And as I’m working on the sheets I’m starting to think of the implications of working with tracing paper (copying, transparency, fragility ...) the support for the words now starting to work with the text itself – meaning emerges out of material process. Had it been there all along, somewhere tucked in the back of mind, Don Delilo’s question:

Does poetry need paper?

This volume starting to take shape using so few words and such thin surfaces ... perhaps unconsciously posing the question in reverse: does paper need poetry?

As for the cover, it decided itself: leftovers (tracing paper remnants, the holes punched to give an added sense of removal and unattachment (“abstract zero”)). The title is a rip off – a sticky tape ‘lift’ glued down and given another layer of pseudo-transparency. The threads in the weave of the torn Japanese paper reinforce the sense of distress and give a useful 3-D effect.

Of course, there’s a risk in writing all this – making more of it than the actual book deserves. In another way, though, the volume becomes a monument (however clumsy) to a moment in time. A way of focusing energies which would otherwise have been profitless. There’ll be six volumes – five to go out – and I hope they’ll give pleasure. Better still, provoke a response. And it’s the sort of thing I’d like to receive (wasn’t that one of Tom Raworth’s rationales for his work: – write the poems you’d like to read).

I’m already thinking of ways I could improve on this one – you learn in the process of doing. And new ideas suggest themselves (what about sandwiching text?).

With so much talk these days about the useful, the profitable, what goes on in the ‘real world’ (sic) maybe it’s ever more important to produce something ‘useless’. So evidently there (not virtual) while also questioning in its flimsy incompetence what is there ... On to the next! Keep it moving!


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* http://sites.google.com/site/jillmagi/

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