ISBN 9780226657424, 9780226657431

Citation:

Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin, Eds. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Contents:

• The sound of poetry / the poetry of sound / Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin 1
• Prelude: Poetry and Orality? / Jacques Roubaud (translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel) 18

Part I. Translating Sound.

• Rhyme and freedom / Susan Stewart 29
• In the beginning was translation / Leevi Lehto 49
• Chinese whispers / Yunte Huang 53
• Translating the sound in poetry: six propositions / Rosmarie Waldrop 60
• “Ensemble discords”: translating the music of Maurice Scève’s Délie / Richard Sieburth 66
• The poetry of prose, the unyielding of sound / Gordana P. Crnkovi 79

Part II. Performing Sound

• Sound poetry and the musical avant-garde: a musicologist’s perspective / Nancy Perloff 97
• Cacophony, abstraction, and potentiality: the fate of the Dada sound poem / Steve Mccaffery 118
• When cyborgs versify / Christian Bök 129
• Hearing voices / Charles Bernstein 142
• Impossible reversibilities: Jackson Mac Low / Hélène Aji 149
• The stutter of form / Craig Dworkin 166
• The art of being nonsynchronous / Yoko Tawada (translated by Susan Bernofsky) 184

Part III. Sounding the Visual

• Writing articulation of sound forms in time / Susan Howe 199
• Jean Cocteau’s radio poetry / Rubén Gallo 205
• Sound as subject: Augusto de Campos’s poetamenos /Antonio Sergio Bessa 219
• Not sound / Johanna Drucker 237
• The sound shape of the visual: toward a phenomenology of an interface / Ming-Qian Ma 249
• Visual experiment and oral performance / Brian M. Reed 270
• Postlude: I love speech / Kenneth Goldsmith 285

Notes / 291
List of Contributors / 239
Index / 333

Reviews:

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Marjorie Perloff

An “unsolved” issue, at least in the case of reproduction: Eaves is quite right to argue that no computer-screen image of one of Blake’s illuminated plates can possibly capture the color, texture, and materiality of the original. But, as I shall suggest below, the case is quite different when the verbal / visual text in question is produced directly for the reproducible printed page or for electronic dissemination.

In the eighteenth-century context within which Blake was making his books, Eaves reminds us, “texts and pictures were reproduced by different technologies. . . .they were created by different skills practiced by artisans working with different tools and materials in different shops, printed on different presses, and in many instances, sold in different marketplaces. . . . [the] separation of graphical and textual modes of production assured deep inefficiencies, slowed production, [and] increased costs” (Eaves, p. 3). Hence, according to Eaves, neither producers nor consumers knew how to deal with Blake’s illuminated books and his reputation languished. When, in the 1860s, poets like Rossetti and Swinburne came to his “rescue,” they played down his role as visual artist in favor of his poetry. The visual images were now pronounced secondary and “decorative”– in Swinburne’s words, “the mere husk and shell of the Songs” (see Eaves, p. 14). The poems were said to be “clothed” in an “incomparable charm of form.” And so it remained for almost a hundred years.

In Eaves’s view, Swinburne’s was a calculated and cynical move to “save” Blake, whose work would have remained unknown, in view of the production problems I cited above. And although recent Blake scholars and editors have tried to bridge the poetry/picture gap, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to produce inexpensive editions, much less anthologies, that will give readers a proper sense of what the illuminated plates are really like . Even on hypertext, which theoretically can provide “good” reproductions of the illustrations, the imbalance remains, for not only is accurate reproduction impossible, as I noted above, but editors, as Eaves points out, continue to stress linguistic codes and to use “graphical means to a linguistic end.” The simple fact is that words, lines, and stanzas can be reproduced exactly as Blake wrote them; pictures cannot. So once again, the verbal takes precedence over the visual.

I agree with Eaves’s conclusions but not with his rationale for them.

For one thing, as W. T. J. Mitchell points out in Blake’s Composite Art, there is a particular “rivalry between text and design in Blake’s illuminated books” which is largely a “matter of conflicting aesthetic appeals. To open one of Blake’s books is to be confronted with two equally compelling art forms, each clamoring for primary attention. . . . I suspect . . . that there are many readers like myself who find it difficult to read Blake’s text in his illuminated books with any extended concentration.” [1] Then, too, Mitchell suggests, Blake’s pictures don’t really “illustrate” his text; they are symbolic analogues, sometimes distracting rather than reenforcing meaning. The motives of Swinburne and Victorian editors and critics may thus have been less cynical than Eaves assumes: perhaps they felt that Blake’s difficult poetry would only gets its due with a minimum of distraction. Or perhaps they felt, as have most art historians, who tend to regard Blake as a marvelous eccentric rather than as a major artist, that however fascinating the illuminated books may be, it is the poetry on which Blake’s reputation must finally rest.

This raises a larger question implicit in all three essays in this section. To put it crudely: is intermedia art additive–verbal plus visual and hence separable into verbal and visual domains which are not necessarily comparable in mode or quality– or should intermedia art be regarded as something Other, with its own criteria and modes or reception? And, if the latter is the case, can we backtrack and expect “composite” texts like Blake’s illuminated books to fit comfortably into the accepted canon of Romantic poets or Nineteenth-Century English Painting or, for that matter into the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1? How, in other words, are such texts to be disseminated?

In the case of Blake, it is not only possible but quite normal, to read the poems independently. Indeed, the plates often confuse rather than support our readings of the poems, as when, in the case of “London,” the plate depicts a boy leading an old man with a crutch and, below, the same little boy maintaining the fire of life. The political and social meanings encoded in the poem itself–as embodied by the references to the chimney sweep, the “hapless soldier,” and the “youthful harlot”– play no part in the visual image. Here, then, we still have a verbal-plus-visual code and hence the possibility, if not desirability, of textual presentation that subordinates one to the other. But when it comes to the postmodern bookworks, installations, and hybrid art forms discussed by Mary Ann Caws and Renée Riese Hubert in their respective essays, the situation is radically different.

The artist book, as Hubert demonstrates in her masterly study, “Bookwork, or Editing as a Fine Art,” is now an important intermedia genre, attracting a wide range of artists whose techniques are extremely sophisticated. Hubert’s examples, all taken from the 1980s and 90s, range from Tom Phillips’s justly famous A Humument, his “writing through” of the Victorian novel A Human Document by William Hurrell Matlock (a book whose subtleties and complexities Mary Ann Caws also discusses); Helen Brunner’s A Primer of Ritual Elements (book one), an assemblage of mutilated fragments derived from various documents; Harry Reese’s Arplines, which plays in complex ways on the Dada and Surrealist work of Hans Arp; Buzz Spector’s A Passage, Broodthaers, and Kafka, books that “shortsheet” and transform some famous originals; and Walter Hamady’s Gabberjab Number Six, perhaps the most literary of the group, which parodizes contemporary theoretical discourse, the high culture/ popular culture divide, and bookmaking itself. In all five of Hubert’s examples, the dominant mode is one of appropriation or, as she puts it, “editing.” The parodic is central to Spector’s as to Phillips’s and Hamady’s project.

The artist book, says Hubert, “has not received the attention it deserves,” primarily, she suggests, because its main mode of dissemination is the exhibition catalog rather than the critical review or scholarly discussion. What she doesn’t quite say is that the audience is thus a coterie audience of exhibition goers, a fact not surprising given the artist book’s normal mode of production. As Hubert’s bibliography makes clear, the presses in question–Turkey Press (Reese), Perishable Press (Hamady)–are primarily the private presses of the artist himself or herself: Johanna Drucker called hers “Druckwerk.” The artist book, in other words, is the individual creation of an artist-publisher-distributor, who presides over every stage of production. As such, the contemporary artist book can be understood as a reaction to the commercialism and commodification of the publishing industry on the one hand, and the depersonalization and lack of individual “signature” of electronic publishing on the other. The production of an artist book, usually published in miniscule editions (fifty to one hundred copies) would thus seem to empower the individual author-artist, whose work cannot be tampered with as was Blake’s (or later, William Morris’s or Ezra Pound’s) by manipulative editors, greedy publishers, or careless printers.

But of course this freedom from institutionalization is more illusory than real, since power merely passes from publisher to gallery: someone, after all, must exhibit these artist books otherwise no one will know of their existence. Collectors like Marvin and Ruth Sackner (whose archive in Miami, Florida is legendary) and art libraries must be urged to purchase them. Exhibition catalogs thus become competitive and advertising takes on increasing importance. Most important, given their necessarily high prices, artist books cannot, at least at the moment, enter a larger public arena. How would one anthologize Spector’s Kafka, a “volume” with a black interior that contrasts with the light cover of which only the frame remains visible. Hubert tells us that the book “has undergone radical reduction: sections of the pages have been torn out, producing a sloping effect which in itself deserves the appelation of kafkaesque since no viewing or reading can take place without going ‘downhill’.” “The artist,” she further observes, “has eliminated the anecdotal and narrative aspects of Kafka’s oeuvre so as to display its philosophical essence” (Hubert, p. 26). But in this case the reader/viewer must see the object whole and must see it in the original (“the black sloping surface has lost its smoothness”) to get its full effect, an effect the reproduction (see Hubert, figure 12) cannot duplicate.

A similar conundrum occurs in the case of Ian Hamilton Finlay ’s wonderful garden installations, described in such moving detail by Mary Ann Caws in “Building Textures, Keeping Difference.” Like the artist book, of which Finlay is also a major exponent, Stonypath or Little Sparta, as Finlay’s Scottish garden site is called, can be understood as a protest against what Caws dismisses as the “dull and dreaded sameness” of ordinary texts. Finlay began as a concrete poet and his individual plaques, works on paper, paintings, and large glass pieces have been reproduced and disseminated widely. James Acheson and Romana Huk’s recent collection Contemporary British Poetry, for example, contains an essay by Nicholas Zurbrugg called “Ian Hamilton Finlay and Concrete Poetry”–testimony that Finlay has finally been acknowledged as a central figure in postwar British poetry. But the nine small illustrations in Zurbrugg’s essay focus on individual concrete poems rather than on Stonypath, and they can hardly give the reader more than an inkling of the inventiveness and imagination that characterize Finlay’s work. [2]

Who is to blame for this situation? Certainly not Zurbrugg who was probably given a tight budget nor the editors whose academic publishers evidently felt they couldn’t make room for large-scale illustration in a set of essays on poetry! Indeed, Finlay is usually classified as an “art” rather than a “literary” figure; Yves Abrioux’s excellent recent study Ian Hamilton Finlay (MIT Press, 1992) is characteristically subtitled A Visual Primer. But packaged as a “visual artist,” Finlay has failed to win the wider audience that he deserves, and now that Stonypath has been closed by the local government, for the absurd political reasons Caws details in her essay, one wonders how the work is to be disseminated more broadly.
Academic indifference to the work of Finlay and Tom Phillips, to the Arakawa / Gins Mechanism of Meaning, the exhibition made so immediate by Caws’s vivid personal account, to the Arplines of Harry Reese or the Gabberjab series of Walter Hamady, is especially unfortunate given that these are postmodern texts par excellence and hence no longer “verbal and visual” but verbal-visual in new and complex ways. These texts are not classifiable as “poems” or “paintings” or “photographs” or “novels” and they are surely not illustrated books. As such, neither the university art department nor the English or Comparative Literature department does them justice. What Caws’s essay implies, although she does not say so directly, is that we need a new department, course of study, critical mode, and especially new publishing outlets that might accommodate what “verbovisivocal” artists (Joyce’s term) are actually doing: not only book art but exhibition, installation, performance, photowork, site sculpture, and so on.

A first step in this direction has been made by Johanna Drucker’s new Journal of Artist Books (JAB) and the Granary Press, which is the publisher of some of her own artist books as well as her scholarly study The Century of Artists’ Books (1995) and Judd and Renée Hubert’s forthcoming study of contemporary exemplars of the genre. More immediately: we need more inexpensive editions of artists’ verbal-visual works on the model of The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Smithson’s widow Nancy Holt and beautifully produced by New York University Press in 1979. In this edition, the layout was based on Smithson’s own design: text and image (mostly photographs but also drawings and graphics) were totally in sync. But–and here is the downside Morris Eaves talks about– consumerism soon won the day. The second edition, now called The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson(University of California Press, 1996) is a clever repackaging job: the publisher has added a sizable section of fugitive pieces (mostly interviews in the art magazines of the late sixties and early seventies, but also juvenilia) and a new introduction by Jack Flam. Along the way, Smithson’s own layout has been largely destroyed: the proportion of text to image has been altered so as to get more words on the page, and the pictures are no longer placed in meaningful relationship to the text. The photographs, moreover, are smaller and have less contrast and the printface (Star Type, Berkeley; 10.5 / 13.5 Bembo) is quite ordinary. The 389-page volume sells for almost twice the amount of the 221-page original but constitutes a serious violation of Smithson’s very particular aesthetic.

A related case is that of Susan Howe’s poetry. Until recently, when Howe began to gain a wider audience, she published with very small presses where she could supervise production. As someone who began her career as a concrete poet, Howe has always paid a great deal of attention to the look of her poems and, in her case, the visual is inextricably bound up with the verbal so far as meaning-making goes. Mainstream publishers, unfortunately, are rarely sensitive to this issue. To take a specific example, consider Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987), originally published by Awede in Windsor, Vermont and printed on letterpress in an edition of one-thousand. Figures 1-5 illustrate the book’s title page with its circle made of two red double-tipped arrows that don’t quite meet (1), [3] the frontispiece (2), the “EXTRACT from a LETTER (3), which provides a frame structure for the lyric text, the title page for the first section (4), and the first eight-line stanza of the poem (5). In this frontmatter, most of the versos are left blank.

Reprinted along with Thorow and Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk in the collection Singularities (Wesleyan, 1990), Articulations reads quite differently. The punning and phonemically charged passage “from seaweed said nor repossess rest / scape esaid,” originally placed by itself on a blank page (see figure 2) has been moved to the title page (figure 6), presumably in order to save space. On the other hand, the new edition contains a two-page historical background sketch called “The Falls Fight,” in which Howe, evidently in response to reader puzzlement as to her Hope Atherton story, provides the necessary historical background as well as her own meditation on its meanings. And finally, the opening page (figure 7) now contains not one but two stanzas (see figure 5 above), again in order to save space. Further along, sections centered in the original are often moved left and in the case of “Taking the Forest,” Howe was told to eliminate one whole section (she chose “Light inaccessible as darkness” Articulations, p. 28) so as to meet page number requirements.
All in all, then, Articulations, as represented in Singularities is simply not the same poem that appears in the Awede edition. The same thing happened when Howe’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike (1989), beautifully produced by Paradigm Press, the type used for the cover and title page being hand set by the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, again in an edition of 1,000 copies, was reprinted in the New Directions volume The Noncomformist’s Memorial (1993). The first Eikon Basilike is an artist book; the second is presented as just one more poetic sequence (albeit a sequence with very distinctive lineation–lines being placed diagonally, upside down, etc.) in a volume of poems.

Thus, although the artist books and visual poems discussed by Caws and Hubert may seem to be the unique products of their authors, in practice, if a text is to reach more than a small coterie audience, its production is likely to be subject to a number of constraints that counter its author’s intention. Wesleyan and New Directions are hardly commercial presses and even so they have to operate on budgets that don’t allow such “luxuries” as the red double-arrow circle design of the Awede edition of Articulations. And since in Howe’s poem, more than in Blake’s illuminated books, the visual design is an important element in the text’s larger meaning, one can only hope that publishers will become more sensitive to questions of layout, design, and typography. Indeed, they must become more sensitive, given that the basic unit in much of the most interesting new poetry is no longer the line and certainly not the stanza, but the page itself– a page whose visual design determines the semantic structure. Take, for example, Maggie O’Sullivan’s new anthology Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK.[4] This a small-press book (Reality Studios) but inexpensively produced and priced competitively. It uses ordinary paper and type fonts but does, like the “Light & Dust” website I mentioned above, respect the layout of the visual poems that fill its pages–poems, for example, by Susan Howe, as well as by such visual poets as Joan Retallack and Diane Ward. Here, I would posit, graphic signifiers no longer function primarily as bibliographical codes; they take their place as central to the semantics of the text. And, to return to Morris Eaves’s “unsolved foundational issue,” unsatisfactory as electronic presentation may be in the case of the reproduction of Blake (or Rossetti or Pound), it works much more effectively when the texts in question are designed for cybertext in the first place. Some examples may be found on such excellent new visual poetics websites as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Ubuweb: Visual, Concrete, and Sound Poetry, and in John Tranter’s new online magazine “Jacket.” [5] Perhaps Ian Hamilton Finlay’s marvelous “garden,” closed to visitors in Scotland, will reopen in another form here.

Footnotes

Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 298 pp. $35.00 cloth. (VW)

Johanna Drucker, The Alphabet Labyrinth. The Letters in History and Imagination.

London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. 320 pp. $45.00cloth. (AL)

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artist’s Books.

New York City: Granary Books, 1995. 377 pp. $35.00. (CAB)

Johanna Drucker, ThroughLight and the Alphabet. Druckwerk, 1986.

Johanna Drucker, Narratology. Druckwerk, 1994.

Available through Granary Books, New York.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

Textual Practice, Volume 11, Issue 1 Spring 1997 , pages 133 – 142.

In 1986, the year she received her PhD in Visual Studies from Berkeley, Johanna Drucker produced a letterpress book, in an edition of fifty copies, called Through Light and the Alphabet. In her recent Century of Artist’s Books, she recalls:

I was intent on using contrasts in scale as a way of introducing hierarches of meaning and forms of movement into the printed text. [The book] disintegrates linear reading by the addition of a new typographic element on each successive opening. Once a typographic theme is introduced, it is sustained, so that by the time the book is finished, there is a complex multilinear text on the page. The differences in typographic scale allow these to be read at different rates but prohibit their ever being read all at once. (CAB 251).

The main such device, one Drucker discusses vis-à-vis Modernist experimental typography in The Visible Word, is paragonnage– ‘the incorporation of several different typefaces and/or sizes within a single line or word’ (VW 96). Thus the first two pages Through Light and the Alphabet look like this: (Figures 1 and 2)

The first page looks normal enough until we stop to take note of the repeated phrases in this ‘from A to A’ text. ‘A’s and ‘O’s (alpha and omega) predominate, and the visual field includes pairs like ‘conversations / conventions’, ‘amorphous’ / ‘various’, ‘according’ / ‘accounts’, ‘with’ / ‘wild’, ‘articulation’ / ‘imagination’. Visual and sound repetition thus serve to enact what the page ‘says’: this particular ‘conversation’ uses ‘conventions the others could be party to’, but takes off ‘on its own trajectory to mind the business being left out of the accounts.’ The new poetic world, Drucker suggests, is ‘too amorphous for repose inside of sweet articulation’; the material signifier is not just a transparent conduit to some ‘meaning’ above and outside it, but a ‘figure’ in its own right, whose various intensities haunt the retina. Inevitably, then, (page 2), paragonnage sets in, the isolated letters creating their own configurations– ‘NO’–’NO man’– map’–’manage’–’age’– ‘tO’ and, most interesting, ‘mage’, which calls upon us to hunt for the missing initial ‘I’– of ‘Image’, an ‘i’, in fact, available right above the ‘mage’ constellation in ‘na ming’. which also gives us ‘ming’. At the same time, the targeted words — ‘beguN’, ‘escaped’, ‘sle ep’, etc. –lose their identity; ‘begu’, ‘escaed’, ‘slep’: these have now become one-dimensional, there being no way to render them ‘meaningful’ except by restoring the original. But given the urge to take on the ‘business being left out’, typographical deformations become more and more marked until we come to the last page where ‘the’ provides its ‘e’ to produce ‘expEriEncE’ and simultaneously modifes the words ‘ sitE’ and ‘ReSPOnSE’. Experience–site–response: the reader is left to construe the relationship of these nouns in this particular narrative.

Of the many visual poets and book artists now working in the U.S. Johanna Drucker may well be the most important, especially given her range, from ‘letter’ texts like Through Light and the Alphabet and The Word Made Flesh (1989) to the complex ‘illustrated’ narratives like The History of the/ my Wor(l)d (1994) and the computer manipulated, ‘quarked’ and hand-painted Narratology (1994), whose ‘True Romance’ and science fiction stories and multiplex images are those, Drucker tells us, ‘acccording to which I thought my life would be lived, which shaped my expectations, the psychic disposition according to which the narrative of experience took its responsive form, in synthetic dialogue getting at the peculiar, particular condition of the imaginary in which living one’s life was in/through writing/ representation, not outside it, inside it, or in opposition, but in something which was a version of the real as the represented.’ [1]

But what makes Drucker even more remarkable is that she is also a scholar-critic-theorist, a Yale art history professor who has produced the three books under review here as well as Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (New York: Columbia, 1994)–all of them published by major presses within the two-year span 1994-95, although, as Drucker points out, The Visible Word was originally written some ten years earlier as an outgrowth of her Berkeley dissertation. Considering that Drucker also edits (with Brad Freeman) the Journal of Artist’s Books, continues to publish her own artist’s books (the most recent I have seen is The Current Line of 1996), and writes frequently for various art publications on visual poetics and related topics, she might be considered a one-woman growth industry: the verbal / visual text of the nineties: c’est elle.

Such staggering industry (one wonders how Drucker managed so much as to proofread her four scholarly books, let alone write them, in such a short period!) is not without its risks. As a theorist, Drucker is, by her own account, derivative. The Visible Word, the earliest of the three books to be discussed here, tries to ground avant-garde visual poetics in post-structuralist theory, tracing the line from Saussure and Jakobson to Derrida and Kristeva. Central as Derrida is for the theory of signification, Drucker argues, his notion of trace structure as différance leaves no room ‘for the apprehension of materiality’ (VW 39). Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, on the other hand, allowing as it does for the extralinguistic, ‘reincorporates into the system of signification elements which had been eliminated or neglected by classical semiotics’ (VW 42). But Kristeva was thinking of the extralinguistic within language rather than of the insertion of visual elements into the intermedia text, and the fact is, that when Drucker turns to the discussion of specific avant-garde texts, she relies less on Kristeva (or any other theorist) than on the theories and manifestos of the poets themselves.

Chapter 1 might thus be skipped: the real argument begins in Chapter 2, in which Drucker outlines the history of experimental typography, its origins in late nineteenth-century poster design, advertising graphics, and lithography, coupled with such ‘high art’ forerunners as William Blake’s illuminated plates and William Morris’s Kelmscott Press book designs. The ‘visible word’, Drucker argues, was part of the larger subversive attack on art as representation of external reality; by the end of the century, she suggests, the technology of letterpress typography had produced a distinction between two kinds of texts, ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’– a distinction that roughly corresponds to the split between commercial and literary uses of typography. The ‘unmarked’ text is the normal ‘undisturbed block’ of uniform print, the text as vehicle for the straightforward conveyance of meaning. ‘All interference, resistance, must be minimized in order to allow the reader a smooth reading of the unfolding linear sequence’ (VW 95). The ‘marked’ text, on the other hand, uses varieties of type faces, ‘the breakup of the page into various zones of activity,’ the use of diagonal and vertical lines, and so on, to call attention to its materiality; it the text one cannot ‘read through’.

This is a useful distinction because even today, when advertising relies on increasingly sophisticated use of ‘marked’ texts, discussion of ‘serious’ literature rarely pays attention to the ‘look’ of the page rather than what that page ‘says’. But it is also a simplification: the marked / unmarked distinction could just as well apply to purely linguistic texts: George Eliot, say, versus Gertrude Stein, whose print blocks, uniform as they may look, can hardly be ‘read through’. Still, if we give Drucker her donnée here, we need not worry the case, for her real concern, which she now goes on to detail, is the development of experimental typography and layout from Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés to the Dada configurations of Tristan Tzara, and beyond. Her discussion of Marinetti’s parole in libertà (pp. 105-40) is perhaps the best analysis of these controversial works we have to date. Admiring Italian Futurist technique, its inventiveness, its genuine breakthrough, Drucker nevertheless recognizes the limitations of what she refers to as Marinetti’s ‘linguistic mimesis’, its faith in the visual representation of specific referents, as in Marinetti’s rollcalls of nouns connected by mathematical symbols (e.g., ‘baisers + – x + + caresses + fraicheur’) in Chair, or in his onomatopoeic sound effects (‘Karazouc-zouc-zouc / nadI-nadI AAAAaaaaaa’) in Dunes (VW 121-22). Marinetti’s poetics, she suggests, ‘was predicated on a faith in the capacity of typography to produce adequate analogies’ (VW 117), a ‘mechanistic insistence on the rapport between the look of a page with the sensation it recorded’ (VW 140).

Apollinaire’s experiments are judged to be less literal, less iconic: among the Calligrammes, often criticized for their obvious mimesis as in the figuration of words as raindrops in ‘Pluie’, there are collages like ‘Lettre-Océan’ and ‘Visées’ that create a highly complex visual / verbal field that requires complex deciphering. And in Ilia Zdanevich’s hermetic cycle of plays called Ledentu (1923), avant-garde typography, here based on the concept of the letter rather than the onomatopoeic word or the visualized referent, creates a ‘performance on the page’ even more striking. Zhdanevich’s astonishing zaum texts, Drucker suggests, defy all attempts at linear reading; morphemes and words interact in intricate patterns. Although Drucker relies on others for the meaning of the Russian words and phrases, her readings of Zdanevich strike me as more valuable than those of a more conventional art historian like Susan Compton (see Worldbackwards: Russian Futurist Books [British Museum, 1978]), who writes well on Russian avant-garde visual forms but slights their linguistic play.

Drucker next turns to Tzara’s particular incorporation of public discourse into Dada typography (the beginning of the rapprochement between ‘high’ and ‘low’), and she concludes with what she takes to be the end of first-stage avant-garde visual poetics that occurred with the coming of Surrealism, and its ‘repression of typographic enunciation.’ (VW 225). André Breton ‘feared the material pollution of writing, fearing that its voluptuous appeal might interfere with the purity of language’. His own poems and fictions marked a return ‘to the authority of logocentric discourse’ (VW 225). I find the suggestion that there is something ‘retro’ about Surrealism very provocative and fruitful and wish Drucker had developed it more fully. Strictly speaking, however, the notion that the non-visualized verbal text is necessarily logocentric is one that few critics would accept. Was Rimbaud, whose typography is fairly conventional, less ‘innovative’ than Mallarmé? Kafka, whose texts are visually ‘unmarked’ less revolutionary than Marinetti? Or can, as in the case of Beckett, language itself embody the ‘making strange’ Drucker takes to be the property of the verbal / visual text? [2]

Related questions may arise from a reading of The Century of Artist’s Books. As the history and anthropology of an important modern and especially postmodern genre, this beautifully produced book could hardly be improved upon. In the Introduction, Drucker carefully distinguishes the twentieth-century genre from its forerunners, from the ‘editorially controlled’ deluxe livre d’artiste, often the commissioned collaboration between an artist and a writer who have little in common, and from the book made by an artist that is still not quite an ‘artist’s book’, its ‘bookness’ not being of primary concern. ‘Artists’ books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form’ (CAB 29). In subsequent chapters, Drucker studies, in minute and telling detail, the subgenres of artist’s books: the ‘democratic multiple’ (as in Isidore Isou and Ed Ruscha), the ‘rare and/or auratic object’ (Marcel Duchamp, Christian Boltanski), the Codex (Michael Snow, Lucas Samaras), the ‘self-reflexive’ book (Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Michael Goodman), the book as ‘visual form’ (Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt), as ‘verbal exploration’ (Steve McCaffery, Madeline Gins, Bernard Heidsieck), as ‘sequence, narrative and non-narrative’ (Janet Zweig, Holly Anderson, Ida Appelbroog), as ‘agent of social change’ (Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy), and finally as ‘conceptual space’ (Bill Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner) and as ‘document’ (Daniel Buren, Alison Knowles, Bill Burke). Drucker admits that these are not hard and fast categories: indeed, her own work is discussed under the rubric of Codex (Bookscape), self-reflexive book (From A to Z), and book as verbal exploration (The Word Made Flesh and Through Light and the Alphabet). Similarly, the Ed Ruscha artist’s book, a primary exemplar of the ‘democratic multiple’, also figures prominently as ‘narrative’ and, in the case of Stains, as ‘document’.

Given this fluidity, the concluding chapter, ‘Metaphor and Form’ may strike us as slightly over the top. The artist’s book, Drucker twice claims, no doubt theorizing her own brilliant art practice, is ‘the quintessential 20th-century artform’ (CAB 1, 362). The ‘critical tension between the apparent conventionality of the book and its capacity to be reinvented anew through creative practice’ is unique, as is the ‘tension between the seeming simplicity of [its] conventional form and the unlimited complexity produced through the relation of elements to each other in a finite arrangement’ (CAB 359). The artist’s book, Drucker concludes ‘is unparalleled for its richness of detail, variety, and repleteness’.

Such specific characterization of a genre seems out of sync with the very postmodern spirit that produced the books in question, including Drucker’s own. Unlike such basic modes as painting and sculpture, the ‘artist’s book’ is a hybrid, a genre largely used by artists and poets as ancillary to their other work–witness Duchamp and Boltanski, Max Ernst and Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt. Dick Higgins’ Of Celebration of Morning (1980), for example, (see CAB 271) is one of a series of the artist’s Fluxus works, perhaps more appropriately grouped with other Fluxus works–postcards, installations, manifestos, broadsides– than with, say, the feminist political artists’ books of Suzanne Lacy or Martha Rosler. Genre, in such instances, may well be subordinate to larger stylistic and ideological choices.

What artists’ books do share–and more might have been said about this aspect of book production –is an economic imperative. The artist’s book can be (though it isn’t always) inexpensive to make, it can be produced from limited materials, it does not depend on the dealer-system and gallery system as do other kinds of art and so it is especially appealing in today’s harsh market environment where dissemination of an artist’s work becomes ever more problematic. Artists’ books can be made in multiples, they can be owned by more than one museum; yet they retain the aura of the unique art object. And certainly Drucker’s superb descriptions of actual printing and computer techniques, materials and bindings, make The Century of Books a reference book anyone interested in contemporary art practices must read. Indeed, the author’s knowledge and expertise are dazzling: she seems to have personally examined every significant artist’s book made over the last few decades and is able describe the minutiae of their respective modes of production.

Considerations of production brings me finally to The Alphabetic Labyrinth, which is my favorite of Drucker’s scholarly books. Beautifully produced by Thames and Hudson and lavishly illustrated, The Alphabetic Labyrinth is a pure pleasure. It takes the most familiar of materials, the alphabet we use every day, and traces its 4,000-year history as a set of visual symbols that have been ‘construed as indices of the most profound mysteries of the universe’ (AL12). The all but universal drive to visualize the alphabet is especially startling given the fact that the alphabet is, by definition, a phonetic series: each letter represents a single sound of a spoken language. Further, ‘in spite of the vast variety in contemporary visual appearance which is the result of centuries of specialized adaptation, all alphabetic forms share the same origin and possess structural properties: they consist of about twenty-four to thirty signs used to represent the sounds of spoken language’ (AL 13). All the more fascinating, then, the elaborate encoding of cosmological and philosophical truths attributed to these basic signs.

The Alphabetical Labyrinth makes no claim to being a work of original scholarship; it is dependent on the researches of archeologists, paleontologists, sinologists, as well as Hebrew, Classical and Renaissance scholars. But Drucker uses her eagle artist’s eye to rethink the findings of these scholars on everything from Pythagorean assimilations of letter-forms to number theories, to Gnostic doctrines of the word as emanation of the Divine Light, to the Runic alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons and the Merovignian miniscules of the eight century, right down to the typography of advertising and various alphabet myths in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Since I cannot possibly do justice to the wealth of material in The Alphabetic Labyrinth, let me give just one example, the discussion of the Kabbalah in Chapter VI. The last few decades have seen countless treatments of Kabbalistic mysteries, doctrines, symbolisms, and yet Drucker’s treatment is remarkably fresh. ‘In the Kabbalah,’ she reminds us, ‘the contemplation and manipulation of the letters is considered a means of approaching God through meditation and esoteric interpretation; the alphabet is granted a high degree of sanctity since the twenty-two letters are considered to be the very elements by which God brings the world into being’ (129). A discussion of various Sephirotic trees from various sixteenth and seventeenth century sources (gorgeously illustrated) is followed by a detailed account of the esoteric alphabet symbolism of the Sefir Yetzirah or Book of Creation, adding, where relevant, the more common, exoteric meanings ascribed to each letter by later Kabbalistic writers like Aryeh Kaplan, Perle Epstein, Johann Reuchlin and Carlo Suares. Here is Vau ( ):

Vau is associated with Taurus, with thought, the right kidney, property, and the tribe of Simeon. Exoterically, Vau represents a nail, which reflects the light from its polished head. Nailheads were used as a system of divination in which the figures made in these reflections of light were interpreted. Vau can also signify a doorknob, thus a means of opening a door of understanding or insight. In its visual form it resembles an impregnating, fertilizing agent. (AL 149)

A seemingly simple ideogram with complex symbolic possibilities. Drucker now studies these in relation to the gematria (the numerical values of the letters assigned to the alphabet according to their sequence) and then to the making of the golem.

Like the Kabbalistic letters, The Alphabetical Labyrinth participates in more than one sequence. As an accessible, marvelously illustrated history of the alphabet’s visual symbolism and a compendium of hermetic and esoteric lore, it should have enormous appeal for the lay reader. But for artists, poets, and students of postmodern culture, the book has a rather different interest. Read against Johanna Drucker’s own artists’ books, particularly the ‘lettrist’ books like Through Light and the Alphabet, as well as her critical studies, it shows us how powerful the tradition of the ‘visible word’ really is and how great a potential it has for poetics today. Although Drucker never says so (and she may not even have been aware of it when she began work on The Visible Word some ten years ago), it now appears that it is the ‘unmarked’ text– the standard novel, critical essay, biography, autobiography, and so on– that is exceptional. The visualization of the letter and the word, the reliance on the page rather than the line or stanza or the gray block of text with justified margins as unit, this ‘new’ phenomenon, still treated with enormous suspicion in the discourses of literary and cultural criticism, is really quite ancient. One needn’t mount elaborate semiotic theories of verbal / visual relationships to conclude that the materiality of language–the way a given text looks on the page or, more recently, on the computer screen– should be, as it was for many centuries, intrinsic to its meaning. As these ‘Druckwerks’ compellingly show, not word and image but word is image.