http://publishersroundtable.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/publishers-roundtable-getting-started/ Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book at Yale University, March 13 and 14, 2008 Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:35:34 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://publishersroundtable.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/publishers-roundtable-getting-started/#comment-12 Buzz Spector Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:35:34 +0000 http://publishersroundtable.wordpress.com/?p=20#comment-12 Between 1975-88 I produced various editioned works, books among them, under the heading "The Press of Events." I conceived of this operation as a rubric under which the reference to publishing was joined to performative gestures. The best known of these was MEMORIES, a boxed set of 12 pencils, each embossed with a line of my poetry, but there was also PRESS, a set of nine rubber stamps with ream of paper, MEDALS, a set of six metal disks with stamped text, and two books: the first of these, published in 1987, was DOUBLE READINGS, in offset edition, containing various dustjacket photographs of authors, portions of the blurbs from their books, and installation views of my installation of found stacked books at Chicago's Randolph St. Gallery. The next year I published ON THE CAPE, a collaboration with my friend, the poet Reagan Upshaw. We were vacationing together in 1987, with our families, in Orleans, at the elbow of Cape Cod, and set ourselves the task of writing the words and drawing the pictures for a chapbook. My efforts at the time were rather desultory; I carried my paper, pencils, and bottles of ink to the bayside beach each day and drew such detritus as washed up in my immediate vicinity while watching the Upshaw daughters at play. I'm still found of my ink drawings of a dead stingray and the silhouettes of bathers against a sunset, but none of the drawings I made in Orleans appear in the published book. When Upshaw sent me his finished writing, some six months later, the eloquence and scope of the poem seemed to require something more expansive than those sketches; instead, I used collaged bits and pieces of old Cape Cod postcards, plus a single drawing in the book's center, a brushy ink on paper copy after one of Mondrian's early versions of "Pier + Ocean." I superimposed this on a found photoreproduction of a ship's wake receding toward the horizon with seagulls gliding overhead. I frequently made reference to the art of De Stijl in my studio practice of the time; visual paraphrase, in collage/paintings, from Van Doesburg, Van Der Leck, Mondrian, and, most often, Georges Vantongerloo. The historicism verging on nostalgia in that work is present, perhaps best of all, on those pages of ON THE CAPE. Between 1975-88 I produced various editioned works, books among them, under the heading “The Press of Events.” I conceived of this operation as a rubric under which the reference to publishing was joined to performative gestures. The best known of these was MEMORIES, a boxed set of 12 pencils, each embossed with a line of my poetry, but there was also PRESS, a set of nine rubber stamps with ream of paper, MEDALS, a set of six metal disks with stamped text, and two books: the first of these, published in 1987, was DOUBLE READINGS, in offset edition, containing various dustjacket photographs of authors, portions of the blurbs from their books, and installation views of my installation of found stacked books at Chicago’s Randolph St. Gallery. The next year I published ON THE CAPE, a collaboration with my friend, the poet Reagan Upshaw.
We were vacationing together in 1987, with our families, in Orleans, at the elbow of Cape Cod, and set ourselves the task of writing the words and drawing the pictures for a chapbook. My efforts at the time were rather desultory; I carried my paper, pencils, and bottles of ink to the bayside beach each day and drew such detritus as washed up in my immediate vicinity while watching the Upshaw daughters at play. I’m still found of my ink drawings of a dead stingray and the silhouettes of bathers against a sunset, but none of the drawings I made in Orleans appear in the published book. When Upshaw sent me his finished writing, some six months later, the eloquence and scope of the poem seemed to require something more expansive than those sketches; instead, I used collaged bits and pieces of old Cape Cod postcards, plus a single drawing in the book’s center, a brushy ink on paper copy after one of Mondrian’s early versions of “Pier + Ocean.” I superimposed this on a found photoreproduction of a ship’s wake receding toward the horizon with seagulls gliding overhead.
I frequently made reference to the art of De Stijl in my studio practice of the time; visual paraphrase, in collage/paintings, from Van Doesburg, Van Der Leck, Mondrian, and, most often, Georges Vantongerloo. The historicism verging on nostalgia in that work is present, perhaps best of all, on those pages of ON THE CAPE.

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