Notes on poetry, printing, and other pursuits, from Anna Lena Phillips Bell.
poems — printing — A Pocket Book of Forms — Forces of Attention
prose — working machines — &c.
Douglas Steere remarks very perceptively that there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Thomas Merton, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, Image Books/Doubleday Religion, 1965–66. From the 2009 edition, p. 81.
Love this. (It appears to me Merton is using activism to mean something slightly different from what we use it to mean now.)
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Poet/librarian Patrick Williams is doing some really good thinking about poetry and poetics via his journal Really System. The whole enterprise is well worth investigation, not least RS_Labs, where folks play with, mess with, extend work published in the journal’s issues. Patrick has included three of my endearments in issue 6. From the About page:
“Really System is a journal of poetry and extensible poetics. We seek new, interesting writing that exhibits a keen awareness of the forms, patterns, and channels through which we find ourselves connected with other people, other things, other worlds. We are looking for vibrant poems inflected by our shared technocultural moment and the ways it envelops us, fascinates us, dances with us, ignores us, and fails us.“
Read RS and you may feel, as I do when I do, as though little wires and possibly some letters and words are being reconfigured in your brain and possibly your belly.
A Pocket Book of Forms, fancy edition, was selected for Abecedarian Gallery's Artists' Book Cornucopia VI, on view at the gallery from January 29 to March 14, 2015. What fine company to be in!
All fifty-one books from the show can be viewed in the online exhibit catalog. Some of the many I'd like to see close-up: Lisa Rappoport's Words Fail {Me} is a study of reading, erasure, and erosion of text—such important ideas, and beautifully conceptualized. A couple of my favorites incorporate embroidery: We Had the Hare for Dinner, by Tekla McInerney; Rational-Irrational, by Heather Doyle-Maier; and several wonderful embroidered canvas books by Candace Hicks, the show's featured artist.
Sarah McDermott's Channel and Flow is a stream in book form, and I wish I could experience its eddies and foldouts firsthand; Katherine Venturelli's Universe at Play I makes use of similar surprise with a Turkish map fold. There's a three-species florilegium by Radha Pandey; a gorgeous and bold value study, fittingly titled Value, by Annie Cicale; and an unassuming black box, by Victoria Bjorklund, that contains great secrets—a View Master with a handmade disc of images of Washington State.
After a nearly seven-year run, Fringe ceased publication in summer 2013. Thanks to the work of our art editor and webmistress, Julia Henderson, and to the generosity of editor Erin Elizabeth Smith and the folks at Sundress Publications, Fringe now has a new home at the Sundress Gone Dark archives, where good magazines go to retire. I’m so happy about this.
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The fancy edition of A Pocket Book of Forms is included in BookOpolis 2014: Printmade Artist Books, which runs through November 30 in the gallery at Asheville Bookworks. So many good and interesting takes on the artist book form—it's well worth a look if you're nearby! Bookworks is open Tuesday–Friday 1:00 to 5:00 pm, and Saturday 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
At In Quire, a very short essay for the Picture Postcards project. It's about the main post office in Durham, North Carolina. And about writing letters.
"To Do in the New Year," after which this site is named, is up today at Redux—in time for the start of the new school year. Thanks to editor Leslie Pietrzyk for publishing the poem, which originally appeared in International Poetry Review. As always at Redux, there's also a little essay about the making of the poem.
Happy new year, everyone, and may your to-do list be both short and full of good things.
Abigail Greenbaum invited me to participate in the writing-process blog tour that’s been happening. Her essays and stories are well worth reading, and you can find the latest in print in the summer/fall issue of Free State Review, and online at the Southern Foodways Alliance's Gravy. Read her thoughts about the writing process here.
1) What are you working on?
A manuscript of poems about oldtime music and about the piedmont of the southern United States.
I've also been thinking and writing about those plants with beautiful and interesting scents and unassuming white flowers. How to identify them when, as is often the case, all you have is their scent? Here is one I learned this summer: buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis). This individual is at Oconee State Park in upstate South Carolina, where you can rent a not-too-leaky john boat and paddle around a little lake. What is that plant? I said, and nearly fell out of the boat trying to get close enough to see if it smelled nice or not.
2) How does your work differ from others' work in the same genre?
That is the question everybody would like a good answer to. If my work does differ, it’s on account of a combination of things: an enjoyment of craft and sound, a concern for certain landscapes, a love also of oldtime tunes. Of chance, setting a procedure loose and seeing what happens. Of syntax and rhetorical conceit. Of vowels—the colors they have, seeing them next to the colors of different consonants.
3) Why do you write what you do?
Because I like setting a problem for myself and solving it, whether it’s how to convey a set of notions in mixed meter, or how to make something that satisfies me using a procedure or constraint—text mining, anagrams.
Because I love the places I love, and I want to see them appreciated, and I worry that they will disappear. Same way with plants—like poetry, there will always be more to find out about them, and, like poetry, they are threatened by faster-moving things than them.
Because the small stories are ones I can tell.
4) How does your writing process work?
I work slowly, whether on poetry or an essay, despite feeling the push to be quicker. I revise many times, and I read aloud to myself, and I ask friends to read. I like to move around in between working on things, and to holler sometimes.
I begin by hand, for poetry at least; on the screen it’s too easy to move things around, to follow the trail of a thought before it’s clear whether that trail will lead to something good or cut off something better. Having the uninterrupted (or nearly so) time that artist residencies provide is essential, and I’m thankful to the programs that have offered me such time, among them Penland School of Crafts, VCCA, and the Rensing Center. I’m an editor of other people’s work, and I appreciate working with a good editor.
Some things that lately help me return where I left off: 1) a small Syracuse China coffee cup, which I bought at the thrift store while on a residency this summer, and out of which I have been drinking black coffee. Setting that cup down next to my notebook signals my brain that it’s time to begin working.
2) On waking up, I open the front door and latch the screen door, so the cats can go out without escaping and so I can easily get to the table on the screen porch. I start out there.
3) That I write something down by hand before moving on to revision or anything else. Even if it’s just the date and the name of someone I love.
4) Peaches for breakfast, for as long as they're in season.
Next week Emily Hilliard will post. Emily is a writer and folklorist based in Washington, D.C. She writes the pie blog Nothing in the House—and is a fine oldtime musician also.
A Pocket Book of Forms at So & So Books in Raleigh, and in good company—including chapbooks by Dianne Timblin and Magdalena Zurawski, from Three Count Pour.
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String! Among the peachy things I purchased at the Pickens Flea Market during a residency at the Rensing Center for part of July. A few more orangey objects are posted at the center's blog—as well as nice reflections from fellow resident Ali Aschman, whose work is well worth checking out.
is out and available as of June 23, 2014. Thanks to everyone who made the preorder campaign successful! Copies were mailed in late May. The standard edition is offered at the link above at sliding scale; if you're interested in the fancy, just let me know.
Last fall I wrote for American Scientist about kids' books and poems that have tried to introduce children to computers. The poem quoted from above, by Gwendolyn Brooks, is my favorite of the lot. It's from her small book of poems for children, Very Young Poets (Chicago: Brooks Press, 1983).
The quote (along with the rest of the piece) was styled by AmSci's fabulously talented art director, Barbara Aulicino. You can see more of her work in this article about vocal matching in songbirds.
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Ink up the press, pull a print, immediately lay a sheet of faux gold leaf over the ink. Let it dry. Then rub off the excess gold, as shown here. Voilà! Gold title text with magenta peeking through. Thanks to Laura Ladendorf for filming—and to Rory Sparks for her genius schemes. Preorder for just a few more hours at igg.me/at/pbof.
Printing the back cover of A Pocket Book of Forms, fancy edition (top), a smidgen of hand lettering reproduced via photopolymer plate. Getting the polymer bits of the interior pages to register with the type (bottom) takes some setup. (All the running text save for the introduction is hand-set type; the intro needed to be eight-point, and there just wasn't enough of that size to make the page. The structures of the forms are shown in polymer as well, which is mostly a matter of expediency—I was already doing a press run with the titles, and I wanted just two colors on the interior pages; using type for the forms would have required a third run.)
