John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse. Seismosis..1913 Press, 2006.

Shin Yu Pai. Sightings: Selected Works (2000-2005). 1913 Press, 2007.

Review by Karla Kelsey

For readers interested in contemporary poetry of text and image, Apollinaire’s calligrams offer a point of departure par excellance. In his own words (and we cannot help but agree after engaging with such works as “Coup d’éventail” or “L’Oiseau et le bouquet”) “the relations between the juxtaposed figures” of one of his poems “are as expressive as the words that compose it. And this at least, I think, is a new invention.”[1] The calligrams stand out not only as new inventions foregrounding the role of relation, but as emblems of a turning point—so essential to the poetics of today—in the way we have come to consider language and image. As Johanna Drucker fully explores in The Visible Word, visual poetry of the early twentieth century experiments with typography in a way that, just as Ferdinand de Saussure was showing in the field of linguistics at the same time, deconstructs the word-as-sign, divorcing the signifier from the signified to reveal that the word itself is a visual thing that can be considered and manipulated on its own.[2] John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse’s collaboration, Seismosis, and Shin Yu Pai’s Sightings, books recently published by 1913 Press through the Rozanova Prize, an annual contest that publishes collaborative and/or visual books, are works that, each in its own fashion, extend this tradition of visual poetry born of the breaking of signs into the twenty-first century.

It is fitting for a book named Seismosis after the charting of earthquake rifts and interior vibrations to have, always in its background, this historical break of signifier from signified, an earthquake in the foundation of any discipline concerning itself with signs. Although such rifts in representation are easiest to think of in terms of shifting the way we think of noun and image (the word “tree” does not equal a particular and actual tree; an apple tree in a painting is not, itself, an apple tree, etcetera) the same rifts, of course, apply to the language of abstract concepts. It is upon such abstract concepts as identity, presence, physical space, metaphysics, and process that Keene (text) and Stackhouse’s (drawing) work focuses. Rather than embodying abstract concepts in concrete images, Seismosis hones in on the relationships between signifier and signified, text and image.

One of the principle relationships at work in this project is that between the act of writing and the act of drawing. Seismosis deals with these concepts explicitly in poems such as “Condensation I” and “Condensation II,” both of which are about the process of art-making. Working linearly though the book the reader meets “Condensation I” first, on page 4, and the prose poem reads as an artist’s personal narrative of his relationship to drawing. The poem is enclosed in quotes and begins: “‘ For a long time I was drawing regularly. I’ve drawn since I was small, even before I uttered a word or penned my own name...’” and takes up such topics as his reasons for drawing and the role it has played in his life.

Although the piece maps a straightforward connection between the artist and his creation on the surface, the poem simultaneously complicates the very notion of this relationship. On a surface level this poem is about the process of coming to be an artist—that art is practice and is part of life, a function of an artist’s relationship to the world around him. Considered on the level of the book-as-collaboration, this poem complicates the relationship of text to image, author to artist. If we read this poem as the autobiography of the visual artist, can all of the poems in the book be read as statements of the visual artist voiced by the poet? In addition, the poem, we note, is given to us in quotes. Does this mean that the poem is “written” by someone other than the poet (the visual artist)? Or, does it call to mind the fact that this narrative is a representation of a larger, abstract process—that of becoming an artist—which cannot be represented by such a narrative and, so, must be set off by quote marks, foregrounding the poem as languaged statement? To further complicate all of these questions and turnings, “Condensation II,” which comes to us on page 35, is exactly the same poem, with all of its questions and turnings, except the word “writing” is substituted for the word “drawing.” In this way, drawing is writing and writing is drawing. But such a connection is not one of identity—one of “is”—but one of relationship, of comparing, narrating, questioning, acting.

In addition to addressing questions of relation through content, the style and form of the book’s pieces also investigate relationships of abstract concepts and imagery. Stackhouse’s primarily non-representational drawings are done in pencil or a mixture of pencil and ink (the reproduction of the drawings make it difficult to tell the original media) and are black on white or grayscale. The drawings consist of scribbles and lines and call to mind abstract expressionist movement: the hand of the artist and the pressures on paper of the drawing instrument as it moves in and out of shape create the drawing’s emotion. The work is always aware that it is a drawing, not a drawing pretending to be, for example, an apple tree. In a similar way, Keene’s text unfolds principally absent of the traditional poetic image. In its place are the textures of language and the curves of the mind as the poet formulates and reformulates concept and thought. For example, in “Cut,” a meditation on image and representation, Keene writes:

Unfolding images as wholes, how can I get to them?

.........................................................................................Cut

vision, image, language

so concrete, descriptive.

[Snipped, holed]

Lines, colors separate out and in conversation with the stringing.

The movement of the hand across paper is mirrored here in typography that uses the page as an open field, the ellipsis as a dividing line, a drawn out pause, and a physical pressure on the poet’s keyboard. The bold italics of the word “cut” places visual emphasis on the word in a manner that echoes the dark, smeared lines of the Stackhouse drawing opposite the poem. In addition to these visual elements, we notice that the poem is about poem-making, about creating the image, gathering its occasion, action, and cadences from the process of writing.

Where Stackhouse and Keene’s Seismosis focuses on the relational rather than the representational aspects of text and image, Shin Yu Pai’s[3] Sightings: Selected Works (2000-2005) is obsessed with the manufactured and commodified aspects of signification in the twenty-first century. Composed of four discrete works which are all excerpts of longer pieces Pai has elsewhere published, Sightings uses integrated image and text in critique of such contemporary topics as stereotypes of Japanese sexuality (The Love Hotel Poems), high school athletics (Unnecessary Roughness), advertising and corporate America (Concave is the Opposite of Convex), and the product-laden existence of American childhood (Nutritional Feed). Within this critique Pai operates along the trajectory set out by Baudrillard in the late twentieth century wherein signs are not only deconstructed into signifier and signified, but signifiers, instead of pointing to a deeper level of reality, only point to more signs, leaving representation to precede and determine the real. In Pai’s landscape, signs of the real substitute for the real, leading to a critique of the commodification of both language and visual image.

The work Sightings excerpts from Nutritional Feed (the full text of which is forthcoming from Tupelo Press later this year) provides a prime example of Pai’s work with the commodification of imagery. By using graphic design technology,[4] Pai reproduces, among others, the familiar icons of a Lucky Strike cigarette label, a stop sign, a computer network password prompt box, the General Foods symbols (a heart, a smiling face) and the “Nutrition Facts” label found (because required) on all prepackaged food. While reproduced in their expected and well-known—so well-known that they are familiar, almost comforting—forms, Pai twists and tweaks each icon. For example, instead of the expected text listing the percentage of the 15 required human nutrients supplied by its product, Pai has deposited her own text into the “Nutritional Facts” label. Instead of “Amount per Serving” we have “Units of Heat.” Instead of “Total Fat” we have “Raise The Temperature Within the Walls of the Heart.” These alterations allow us to re-inspect the icons of our time, realizing that we don’t properly see the images for what they are. Instead, we consult them anxiously for amount of calorie, carb, or sodium. We assume and trust in their content because they have been so often repeated. We become lulled into an acceptance not only of this repetition but of all repetitions that ask us to believe that American life can only be lead in one way—in the way set forth by commodities spread before us. Through critique, Pai shows us differently, asking us to open our eyes and really see.

From the vantage of our still quite new century that manages at the same time to feel already worn, there is very much a sense that we have a duty to look back on the previous century to inspect the evolutions of its wrongs. More than once has the breaking of signs into two (at least) theoretically separable parts been cast in dark shadow, as if it foretold or began the darknesses to come while relegating poets and artists to social irrelevance and incomprehensibility. However, books such as Sightings and Seismosis, born of this tradition of breaking, are evidence that the excitement of creation and the values of collaboration, possibility, and intellectual investigation are as strong at the beginning of this century as they were then.

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[1] Paris-Midi, July 22, 1914 in Bohn, Willard. The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

[2] Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

[3] Though Sightings lists only one author on its cover and spine, collaboration is as integral here as it is in Seismosis. In fact, it is often difficult to tell where the “author’s” work begins and artwork by others ends. The book’s last page, an Author’s Note, tells us that the texts were “written over a five-year period in response to artwork by Misty Keasler, Ferenc Suto, Larry Lee, and David Lukowski” and the copywrite page tells us that the art for two of the most visually intricate pieces was provided by Larry Lee and David Lukowski. The book’s incorporation of graphics and intricate typography also make a collaborator of the book’s designer, Rolando Murillo.

[4] Sightings and Seismosis—along with the Rozanova Prize publishing project in and of itself—are fascinating with respect to the role technology plays in representation and reproduction. As all twenty-first century texts of visual poetry are necessarily in dialogue with a tradition that arises out of a critique of realist representation, the fact that the texts themselves, unlike one-of-a-kind artist books, are themselves representations and reproductions factors into the integrity and meaning of the projects. How does the fact that we do not have Stackhouse’s drawings, but scanned in representations of his drawings, play into our reading of the text’s relation to representation? What does it mean that Sightings reproduces elements of the hand such as drawing as well as fonts that simulate handwriting?