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Volume 14, Issue 1-2, 2024
- Editorial
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Editorial
More LessBy Mick GowarThis editorial is a brief summary of the articles, interviews and reviews contained in the double issue of Volume 14 of Book 2.0 (BTWO), an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal primarily concerned with book creation and publication, including writing, illustration and design and the theoretical and practical study of books, literature, creative writing, storytelling, languages and cultures. Contents for this issue include articles, interviews and reviews mainly focusing on collaboration and cooperation between creative practitioners, scholars and in publishing.
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- Article
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Finding ‘Crow’: A case study of the musical setting of recent poetry
More LessOne of Ted Hughes’s most remarkable works is one that he never completed; and yet the parts of it that he did publish became one of his most enduring poetry collections: Crow. This book, From the Life and Songs of the Crow, to give it its full title, is a vibrant collection in which the eponymous protagonist appears in multifarious forms, in a multitude of situations; a trickster, exploring the world about it and trying to find meaning and its own place and purpose within that world. In The Laughter of Foxes, Keith Sagar presents a synopsis of what Hughes first intended to be the shape for Crow, a prose narrative within which the songs and poems were to be set. With Crow being so full of its own vigorous poetical music, it is perhaps foolhardy to have even considered trying to set some of the poems to music – an act of butchery, even. Sagar’s expounding of the narrative of Hughes’s unfinished epic lead to the thought of possibly recreating by creative means something of Hughes’s intentions, in the form of a song cycle, drawing on poems from Crow and Cave Birds. The nature of the poetry dictates that this is no lyrically romantic journey, but a more expressionist telling of Crow, with a darkly austere ensemble of just two voices: a ’cello, and a baritone. It is a work in progress at the time of writing, but it has been a long journey to get this far, inhabiting the world of Hughes’s Crow and trying to find ways to express and give life to these extraordinary poems, respecting and honouring the words. This article tells something of the hopes for the project, the process and of some of the thinking behind the work being created.
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- Interview
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‘Singing with wonder’: An interview between Sherryl Sewepagaham and Mark Turin
More LessAuthors: Sherryl Sewepagaham and Mark TurinThis interview between Cree scholar and songmaker Sherryl Sewepagaham and Book 2.0 board member Mark Turin explores the role of music and song in language revitalization and cultural traditions. Through their dialogue, Sewepagaham and Turin address complex issues of continuity and change, ethics and access, orality and textuality as well as translation and knowledge mobilization.
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- Articles
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Collaborations with composers
More LessThe following article is reprinted from Kevin’s New Leaves on an Old Tree (Propolis Books, 2023) which is a collection of essays, articles, lectures and reviews. The collection focuses on the various facets of story and storytelling which have been at the heart of all Kevin’s literary achievements: his poetry; his many translations from Old English; his retellings of British folk tales, Anglo-Saxon riddles and Norse myths; and his fiction – in particular his Arthur novels, and his prize-winning novella Storm. This article, however, is Kevin’s recollections of his many collaborators with composers and musicians and his long and distinguished career as a lyricist and librettist, beginning with the setting of some of his translations of Anglo-Saxon riddles by Sir Arthur Bliss when Kevin had just graduated from university and concluding with his most recent collaboration with Cecilia McDowall.
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Making video poems from poems made from diary entries made from dreams
More LessThis is a discussion of how a poet, largely unskilled and untrained in videography, immersed himself in the process of make video poems and how he understands their function as reading performances. For those interested, samples of his work are available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxSJdULph-jtcE__WGQqbu5kJ-J93EtR6. Accessed 15 November 2024.
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Terry Gifford: A green voice
More LessPoet and scholar Terry Gifford looks back on his life as a teacher – firstly in English secondary schools and then in higher education – and on his work as a critic, an ecocritic, a scholar of pastoral and post-pastoral literature, and as a poet who has written nine collections of poetry. He also reflects on his work as a leading authority on the poetry of Ted Hughes, and on his collaborations with fellow Hughes scholar Neil Roberts. This article ends with a selection of Gifford’s poetry from his eighth collection, A Feast of Fools (2018) and his ninth collection, unpublished at the time of writing. This article is based on a recorded conversation with Mick Gowar.
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- Poetry
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- Articles
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Silence, sound, rhythm, performance and storytelling: The lyricism of Chile’s Violeta Parra
More LessVioleta Parra (1917–67) was a Chilean cantora (‘a female singer of the people’), folclorista (‘folklorist’), cantautora (‘singer-songwriter’) and compositora (‘composer’), who promoted and performed rural practices of music, poetry and visual crafts as a portrait of self and a mirror of society. The focus of this article is threefold (1) to analyse Violeta Parra’s translating poetics approach to messaging by exploring her different art forms from sound-text to stage performance; (2) to highlight her significance as a social voice of the working class and Indigenous people as well as the folkloric aspects of her work using both textual and non-verbal modes of vernacular expression and (3) to explore the complementary nature of music, poetry and dance as different languages to represent Parra’s world-view, culture, experience and life in general, as these different artistic expressions inform one another and converge in new perspectives by their messaging format.
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Finding your own voice
More LessAuthors: George Hajian and Caroline PowleyE koekoe te tūī, e ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te kererū.
(The tūī chatters, the kākā cackles, the kererū coos.)
The appeal of printed matter extends beyond the visual to include the ability to convey voice and emotion. Much like ‘vocal inflexion’ in spoken language, type and typography imbue content with a unique tone or ‘voice’. Using the above Māori whakataukī (‘proverb’) as a metaphor to investigate typographic voice, we devised a new twelve-week course which invites students to create a multi-sectional publication responding to endemic birds. Birds are symbolic creatures in Māori mythology and hold a special place in te ao Māori (world-view). As tauiwi kaiako (‘non-Māori teachers’) entrusted with the responsibility to design resources that honour an Indigenous partnership under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the whakataukī acts as a catalyst to develop an inclusive curriculum. The syllabus for this introductory article is pedagogically structured to scaffold students’ learning. Built as a sequence of analogue and digital exercises, students are encouraged to explore distinct compositional strategies relevant to six diverse types of content: (1) creating dynamic text forms to reflect poetry, (2) generating typographic patterns with letterforms to represent birdsong, (3) integrating letterforms with images to create expressive descriptions, (4) using hierarchy to establish structure within long-form text, (5) using expressive text to depict symbolism and significance in culture and (6) composing fluid lines of text to express rhythm within a song. The resulting multi-sectional publications also reflect the whakataukī by bringing together distinctive print and typographic formats into a cohesive publication – a collective ‘chorus’ of different typographic voices. This article unpacks examples of student work to elucidate learning and successes, highlighting practical challenges of teaching diverse students and introducing them to a conceptual framework for a communication design project through the metaphor of ‘voice’.
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Creating and sharing Companion Poems for people living with dementia, a design journey
More LessAuthors: Kate North and Cathy TreadawayThis article describes ongoing research that is investigating ways in which poetic writing can be developed into a resource to support the well-being of people living with dementia and their carers. The Companion Poems audiobook project involves the co-creation of sensory poetry books for people living with dementia. The project brings together the team’s expertise in poetic writing, design for dementia and interactive digital technology to create tactile audio poetry books. The rationale for the work, the research methodology and the creative methods used are described through an account of one Companion Poem: ‘How the Garden Grows’ and its development into a bespoke sensory audiobook.
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The vernacular of the diaspora_கோலம் (Kolam) re-imagined
More LessThis project focuses poetry and the creative practice of making and performance to express a visual dialogue in which rhythm and repetition express an imagined, sensory experiential journey. ‘The vernacular of the diaspora’ is in the form of distinct creative cultural expressions which can shift how poetry is conveyed and experienced to an audience that is being increasingly exposed to new hybrid forms of different cultural traditions. It elaborates through an example. It reveals how members of a diaspora experience places they inhabit to return to the place of their ancestors through these different creative expressions. The visual images in this project show the artist as a member of the Tamil diaspora walking in slow rhythmical progression, traversing diverse terrains in different countries, the bare feet sensing the ground. The artist wears the flowing drape of the sari that holds traces of a community’s footprints that once gathered to give acknowledgement of loss in the many decades of war through making. The artist, in the role of a migrant, is thus taking the broader community with her on the journey. The lines of poetry in English and Tamil express the journey through senses, and the images are arranged to take on the visual form of the ritual drawing of Kolam – a geometrical line drawing composed of straight lines, curves and loops, drawn around a grid pattern of dots – which is practised by Tamil women.
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The Smooth and the Striated: An exercise in micro-publishing writings on listenings
More LessBy D A CalfThis article examines the production, concept and realization of the author’s recent artist book The Smooth and the Striated (2022) which documents the process of listening whilst in the field. Intertwining affective realizations with fragments of the theoretical discourse on the listening subject and landscape, the work was produced in response to a single day of fieldwork undertaken at the Monument to the Battle for the Wounded, a post-Second World War monument in central Bosnia and Herzegovina which was partially destroyed following the Bosnian War of 1992–95. The fieldwork, consisting of audio field recording, photography and writing, took place as part of the artist’s wider project to investigate the problematics of the former Yugoslavia through its memorial heritage, but to do so by means of a speculative methodology that imagines sound as an infinitely fine but persistent presence. The artist book was completed as part of a residency at Footnote Centre for Image and Text in Belgrade, Serbia, and printed in collaboration with the DIY/not-for-profit printing house Praksa Kvaka in Belgrade. The publication’s title references Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of space in which geographies are characterized as overlaid with the imprints of power and/or resistance. This reference is echoed in the photographic reproductions of patina and the erosion of concrete forms throughout the book, together with the physical object of the work – the dense, black risograph printing process leaves a residue of its disintegration on the hands of the reader and as such the reader cannot help but be inculcated in the book’s physical presence, as well as an attempt at countering the monument’s verticality by being bound horizontally.
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- Interview
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Monotype MIDI
More LessAuthors: Edwin Pickstone, Paul Maguire and Frances RobertsonThis interview examines the creative research undertaken by Edwin Pickstone and Paul Maguire, in conversation with Frances Robertson. Edwin and Paul’s exploration of how ‘text events’ can become ‘sound events’ came from an initial starting point that considered the history of print technology and graphic design within circuits of knowledge and invention. Their collaboration started with the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), School of Design Research Cluster project The Visible Word, based in GSA’s Caseroom (Letterpress collection), and has run from June 2022. This interview offers a commentary on work in progress from June 2022 to the present. Since the Visible Word group exhibition in September 2023 their work has continued to develop independently, but it remains poised between the materials and processes of typography and sound composition, informed by both and developing new insights through cross-medium transcoding. There is ambition to realize an album of audio recordings made using the software tool created through the research partnership.
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- Reviews
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Buried Treasures, the Power of Political Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes (2023)
More LessBy Patrick RyanReview of: Buried Treasures, the Power of Political Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes (2023)
Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-69124-473-0, h/bk, $35, £30
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One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field, Carolyn Dever (ed.) (2024)
More LessReview of: One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field, Carolyn Dever (ed.) (2024)
Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 360 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-69120-811-4, h/bk, $99.95/£84.00
ISBN 978-0-69120-800-8, p/bk, $29.95/£25.00
ISBN 978-0-69125-590-3, e-book, $29.95/£25.00
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- Corrigendum
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