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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
Book 2.0 - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
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Blackrock Sequence: A creative dialogue between an artist and a poet
By Jim ButlerIn 2016, my brother David1 was awarded a grant from Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown Council in Ireland, to write a sequence of poems. He invited me to collaborate with him to make a book of poems and images. I had never collaborated with my brother before, so it was important for me to establish my role and how the project would work in practical and financial terms. There was no formal agreement but just discussions over drinks in the Harbour Bar, near where my brother lives outside Dublin. David had received a grant of €11,000 to write the poems and he would keep all of this – he would see if he could get some additional funding to cover art materials and the cost of an exhibition. The book, however, would be my project – I would design and print the book and all money from sales would be mine. My practice as a printmaker and book artist meant that I have a particular ambition for the material aspects of a book, for example the way ink interacts with different papers, and this would not be compromised. I had previously printed and bound a number of my artist’s books in small editions, and these had been acquired by many public collections including the Tate.2 I had also written about the financial challenges involved, so I was going into this project with my eyes open. In terms of the book itself, David had initially suggested a chapbook but was happy to respect my judgement, creative independence and expertise. We also agreed that if we ended up in a situation in which either of us felt there was a significant mismatch between his intentions for the suite of poems, my images and the book I had designed, then I would not publish the book. In deciding what I wanted to achieve with the book, two texts were fundamental to my thinking: Ulises Carrión’s essay The New Art of Making Books and Yves Peyré’s study of artists’ books Peinture et Poésie (‘Painting and poetry’). This article explores the relationship that we established between poems and images and how the book’s structure developed to allow this relationship to be realized.
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From Whitman to Hugo: An interview with Brian Selznick
By Tom Ue‘Walt Whitman loved words’. So begins Barbara Kerley’s and Brian Selznick’s Walt Whitman: Words for America (2004), a biography of the American poet for young readers that has been recognized as a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book. Kerley and Selznick trace the poet from his beginnings as a printer’s apprentice to his volunteer work as a nurse during the American Civil War; and from the young Walt poring over the pages of Arabian Nights and Ivanhoe to his own creative output being interpreted as the voice of his nation. Like all of Selznick’s books, Walt Whitman is illustrated with precise, evocative drawings for all ages. The New York Times bestselling author and illustrator returns to the poet with his latest, Live Oak, with Moss (2019). Among Selznick’s many other popular books for children are The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and Wonderstruck (2011) (covers available at https://www.thebrianselznick.com/books.htm). These two works have now been adapted into award-winning films by Martin Scorsese (2011) and Todd Haynes (2017), respectively.
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‘A singular gesture’: Zachary Thomas Dodson on the potential of design in fiction
More LessZachary Thomas Dodson is an American book designer who is particularly interested in exploring the visual possibilities of narrative. He is the co-founder of the Chicago-based press Featherproof Books (2005) and the author of Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel (2015) in addition to an earlier novel, Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring (2008), under the pseudonym Zach Plague. In this interview, Dodson discusses the role of design in literary production and highlights the potential of typography, page layout and non-verbal elements such as maps to constitute integral parts of a literary narrative. Relating his work to earlier as well as to contemporary instances of visual experimentation with narrative, Dodson comments on his inspirations and influences while manifesting promising paths for literary production and the publishing industry. In the second part of the interview, Dodson discusses the intricacies and challenges of working on Bats of the Republic as both author and designer, and reveals his intentions with regard to his next book project.
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Bruder und Schwester wie Wort und Bild?1
More LessThroughout my writing life, I have collaborated with many visual artists − painters, etchers, wood-engravers, lino-cutters, watercolourists, photographers, even a stone carver; 37, I believe, not including occasional exchanges with illustrators of foreign editions of my books. For this article, I’ve chosen six artists to represent very different ways of working together. It hasn’t been easy to set aside such superb and eminent artists as Brian Wildsmith, who illustrated my first novel, Havelok the Dane (1964) and whose spirited, meticulous line drawings, with their replacement characters and glue and whiteout still hang on my walls at home. It was difficult, too, to omit Margaret Gordon: she and I made three picture books together, one of which, The Green Children, won the Arts Council Award for the Best Book for Young Children 1966–68. And John Hedgecoe – cussed, determined, imaginative, immensely talented, generous and a great photographer, with whom I worked on my Norfolk Poems (1970) – who persuaded me to wade fully clothed up and down muddy back-creeks, with strings of seaweed around my neck. But after some deliberation, the six visual artists I’ve chosen to write about are: Charles Keeping, John Lawrence, Andrew Rafferty, Norman Ackroyd, Jane Ray and Jeffrey Alan Love.
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The art of daydreaming: How Ernst Bloch and Mariette Lydis defied Freud and transformed their daydreams through writing and art
By Jack ZipesWe all dream. Even my dog dreams; he whines when he dreams, perhaps because his dreams are as filled with anxiety as my own sometimes are. Dreams – bad dreams and nightmares, particularly – can be profoundly unsettling and disturbing. They can shock and terrify us because they cannot be controlled: they are their own narrators, and the only way we can resolve their penetrating stories is by attempting to interrupt them. Only by jolting ourselves and waking up, we can enlighten ourselves and come to light, and only by generating daydreams, we can counteract the malign influences of bad dreams and nightmares and take charge of our lives. Bad dreams and nightmares can bring dread and devastating realizations: they can leave us marooned in our past. Daydreams, by contrast, can generate options, and perhaps a renewed joy in life as well: they demand that, despite obstacles and despair, we move onwards into the future. They are artful stories; they are the art of utopia and are filled with our wishes and anticipatory illumination. They appeal to us to become artists and narrators of our lives. Participating in the creative arts – writing, painting, acting and making music – is to envision dream-like visions of where we want to go with our lives. Without the arts, without writing especially, and without our conscious picturing the ideal other life, there is little possibility that our desires will be fulfilled. We need hope, and we need daydreams to map our destiny. I believe we need to act on our daydreams, and not slumber into nocturnal nightmares. These beliefs and ideas have been informed by studying the work of Ernst Bloch and his notions about daydreams (not nocturnal dreams). He is a neglected, iconoclastic philosopher, and I believe brilliant. In this article, I propose to discuss his theories about daydreams and then turn to the neglected, Austrian-Jewish painter Mariette Lydis, who in her various works offers proof that daydreams play an immense and important role in our creative lives. Contemporaries, both Bloch (1885–1977) and Lydis (1887–1970) wrote and/or painted during the same century as Freud (1856–1939) and Jung (1875–1961). Both were of Jewish origin. Both survived the First World War, the Nazis and the Second World War. Both kept realizing their desires for a better world through writing and picturing their writing.
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George Barker: ‘The triumph of the incommunicable’
By Andy SalmonGeorge Barker has always been a troubling poet. Lionized in the 1930s and 1940s along with fellow Apocalyptic Poets Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, by the time of Margaret Drabble’s overview of his life’s work in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, Barker is summarily dismissed as ‘characteristically rhetorical, Dionysian, and surreal, though some critics have suggested that he achieves disorder more by accident than intent’. My purpose in the next few pages is to directly challenge these assertions of bombast, overexuberance and superficiality. Both W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot regarded him as a ‘genius’. Harold Pinter praised him as ‘a love poet of the highest order’. Yet Barker is forgotten now. I want to suggest that this is actually because of the troubling depth of what he has to say, and the clarity with which he says it, rather than the reverse.
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Out loud: The experience of literature in the digital space
More LessIn the present climate of discouragement that threatens all of us who hold the Humanities dear, one of the worst threats, or so it seems, has been the dumbing down consequent on digital media and the rise of hate speech on digital platforms. I want to offer some countervailing reflections and hopes, and explore the activity and the potential of the World Wide Web as a forum for literature; in spite of the instinctive recoil and bristling horror I feel for social media as currently used, it is possible to consider and reframe the question of reading on the web. Doing so leads to the questions, what is literature and can literature be found beyond the printed book? It is my contention – perhaps my Candide-like hope – that the internet is spurring writers on to creating things with words that are not primarily aimed at silent readers but at an audience that is listening and viewing and feeling, and maybe also reading all at the same time, participating in word events channelled through electronic media.
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Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, Lissa Paul (2019)
By Tom UeReview of: Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, Lissa Paul (2019)
Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 318 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-64453-010-8, p/bk, $39.50
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Fourteen Poems by C. P. Cavafy, chosen and illustrated by David Hockney, translated by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender (1966–67)
By Jim ButlerReview of: Fourteen Poems by C. P. Cavafy, chosen and illustrated by David Hockney, translated by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender (1966–67)
London: Editions Alecto, Edition A, Folio, illustrated with 12 etchings bound and 1 loose etching, cotton silk boards and silk slipcase, limited edition item
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Seahenge: A Journey, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Andrew Rafferty (2019)
More LessReview of: Seahenge: A Journey, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Andrew Rafferty (2019)
Hemel Hempstead: Kailpot Press, 64 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-95568-604-7, h/bk, £14.99
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The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, Geoffrey Hill (2019)
By Nigel WhealeReview of: The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, Geoffrey Hill (2019)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 148 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-19882-952-2, h/bk, £20.00
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