My first report on our small press fair lives here, in case you missed it. Here
are a couple more items I managed to pick up over the weekend. Are you jealous
yet?
Kingston ON: It took a
while for me to pick up a copy, but I finally collected Phil Hall’s limited-edition letterpress sequence, X (Thee Hellbox Press, 2013), a meditative breath-take constructed out of fragments, pauses and
a steady, staggered cadence, much as any regular or irregular reader would come
to expect from Hall. There is always such delight that comes from reading a new poem by Hall, watching his lines and language bounce and gyrate across patterns
and the page, reveling in unusual sounds, shocks and digressions, even has he
explores a particular series of dark moments from without and within. As he
writes on the first page: “arcs
letters curls of let / wait
wit wait a song // grows a nail from a moo— [.]”
Few poems worth knowing
worth suspect knowing
suspect / few suspect
seeing double hearing less out of one ear
to have had to be 60 to
say in a poem the abuser’s name
is this success or failure both
neither
my tongue’s
baloney-smell articulating adios
Hall’s
poem is beautifully designed and printed by Hugh Barclay in a numbered edition
of 106 copies, with artwork throughout by Michèle LaRose and signed by all
three (mine is #87). This is the 47th book produced by Barclays’
Thee Hellbox Press.
LaFarge WI: It was good
to see Montreal’s Billy Mavreas [pictured] make his first ever appearance at our Ottawa
fair, especially with publications such as his HOOCH POP TYPOS (Xexoxial editions, 2013), published as “xerolage
57,” a collection of concrete poems/visual images. As Mavreas writes at the
back of the small collection:
Hooch Pop Typos
collects individual works spanning approx. 3 years that seek to mimic the
aesthetic of degenerated photocopies using the tools of Adobe Photoshop.
[…]
With exception of 3
pieces, these works saw their beginning as images found via random internet
image searches. An image, representing the search ‘document’, for example,
would be downloaded, colour removed, high contrast black and white implemented
and then filter, copy, paste, crop, repeat until finished. The 3 remaining
pieces saw their start on the photocopy machines’ glass and then were brought
in for alteration.
[…]
This publication, whose
title is an anagram of the three words: Photo, Copy & Shop, is a welcome
real world manifestation of these digital impulses.
Part
of what I’ve always found curious about Mavreas’ work is the fact that he
appears to have come into concrete and visual poetry via his work as a visual
artist, as opposed to from a more traditional text-based writing practice. Working
very much in the “dirty concrete” realm of concrete/visual poetry, his bio
informs that: “His foray into concrete poetry and asemic writing started early
via a love for mysterious symbols, rocknroll lettering and SF&F. Xerox
manipulations and mail-art sealed the deal in the late 1980s as he entered and
participated in the network as EHEL. His art practice is based on accumulation
and accretion, consisting of various personal collections, made and found, that
resonate with him on an aesthetic and spiritual level.” As part of an interview
forthcoming at Touch the Donkey, he
writes:
Many artists I’ve seen
who explore visual poetry and comics tend to stay closer to the realm of
abstract or experimental comics. In my case my comics have been experimental
and I still make abstract comic work but I’ve been tending towards more direct
narrative, straight up comic work so to speak, which is a great challenge,
whereas my poetry tends way more towards abstraction, conceptual writing and
visual poetics. My poetry that isn’t visual is usually rock lyrics, bumper
stickers, band names and other stuff that remains more or less private,
unpublished or juvenile.
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