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Bern Porter (1972)

Bern Porter has been a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, a sometime printer and publisher, a long-time servant of both U.S. letters and his own very American muse. His book The Waste Maker (1972) represents an assiduous discovery of America writ large in the smallest “found” details, as Porter collects native waste into artlessly designed pages, not only reflecting his own love and bitterness, but exposing cultural insights and perspectives that are indigenously true. As haste makes waste, so patient composition, by contrast, makes art of waste; and this book realizes “junk literature” before anyone else could conceive of art, even insight, in garbage.

The Waste Maker ranks with Michel Butor’s Perimeters (1970) as print’s encompassing pastiche of modern America, but Porter’s is rougher in texture and kinkier in composition, more trivial in detail and relentless in theme, as well as more intimate and unfinished in typically American ways. A waste-preserver’s perception of his abundantly wasteful country, this book is also a book-designer’s essay about his medium. At its base is a conception that is indubitably at once book-art and poetic. In more respects than one, to be sure, has Porter found these States that have been wanting his special art.