Sloppy "Scholarship" (1997, 2006)

I’ve never before had the occasion to review a book mostly in terms of what it says (or in this case doesn’t say) about my work; but I find no better way to reveal the limitations of Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books(1996) and would rather not resort to the ruse of getting someone else to elaborate my objections, more superficially “acceptable” though that subterfuge might be. At least in discussing my own efforts in this medium, Drucker’s book appears to be an inadvertent illustration of my suggestion in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993) that, “When a professor writes three words about an avant-garde subject, one of them is likely to be superficial and a second to reveal ignorance, even if the writing comes accompanied, as it usually is, by encomia from other academics.”

Drucker’s definition of “concrete poetry” speaks of “forging a unity between the visual and verbal aspects of a work.” This definition does not accurately summarize the initial “concrete” manifestoes, which she seems not to know, although it does describe many examples opportunistically anthologized under the “concrete” label. Drucker continues, “Concrete poets take the concept of materiality of language farther than earlier experimenters, trying to forge inseparable bonds of meaning and presentation through visual form.” Once again, the first part of this sentence (“materiality of language”) reflects concrete theory; the second, about visual form, does not. Elsewhere my Dictionary says that, “[C.P.] aims to reduce language to its concrete essentials, free not only of semantic but syntactical necessities. The true Concrete Poem is simply letters scattered abstractly across the page or a succession of aurally nonrepresentational (and linguistically incomprehensible) sounds.”

Drucker’s critical fuzziness accounts for why my own poems are initially classified as “concrete,” right after Eugen Gomringer (one of the original concrete theorists), Ernesto M. de Melo e Castro, and John Furnival, though I’ve never used that epithet to define my own work, clearly preferring “Visual Poetry” in essays reprinted in Twenties in the Sixties (1979), The Old Poetries and the New (1981), and Wordworks: Poems New and Selected (1993), among many other places. (One general moral of this story is that you can’t reprint something often enough if you want academics to see it, contrary to the bias against “multiple submissions.”) Needless to say perhaps, Furnival’s work is likewise more visual than concrete. Were Drucker to reinterpret my poetry, she might find the “concrete” epithet applicable to my book Solos, Duets, Trios & Choruses (1991), but it isn’t mentioned.

“Kostelanetz,” she writes, “characterized these ‘concrete’ works as ‘emphasizing the fragmentation of language,’“ but that last phrase sounds unfamiliar to me as well as untrue. (Drucker didn’t locate it, when I asked about its source.) She sees in my poetry a “seemingly endless number of approaches to the deconstruction of language,” which I don’t think true either, flattering though it might be. It would be more correct to identify formal variety, perhaps unparalleled (except by Dieter Rot), as one principle behind the sum of my many book-art books, most of which she appears not to know. Whereas most book artists have favored one or another format (honoring the visual-art marketing principle of instantly identifiable signature), I’ve made spine-bound books (both perfectbound and saddle-stitched), ladderbooks, looseleaf books, both 2 3/4”-by-2” books and 17”-by-11” books, newsprint books, and Lord knows what else, whose contents have been primarily either words, numerals, lines, or photographs.

Under this heading of “Concrete Poetry,” Drucker discusses my minimal narrative One Night Stood (1977), which she finds reflects my “‘concrete’ agenda.” This is likewise news to me, as the paragraphs in this last book, each no more than two words long and syntactically conventional, document events in a distinctly linear and thus fictional sexual affair. While acknowledging the “small and thick, hand-sized” paperback edition, which has one event to a page, she seems not to know the tabloid-sized newsprint version, whose pages contain many of the same events (in the same sequence). What makes this omission disappointing is that the ontological purpose of the two-edition One Night Stood is discovering if the same precise text in radically different formats can generate different reading experiences.

Were Drucker more familiar with book-art books of mine published in the 1980s and 1990s, she might have noticed that the short entries in One Night Stood foreshadow my later, more developed interest in scrupulously minimal fictions that have been published in many magazines since the early 1980s and collected in a 1994 book of that title. On page 352 Drucker cites the “Edizioni Amodulo, n.d.” edition of my Accounting without acknowledging that I have long identified that edition as defectively incomplete (e.g., in any list of my “Book-Art Books” or “Archae Editions” for the last decades), instead certifying the correct 1973 edition published by PN Books. She seems not to know other books of mine containing only numerals arrayed in expressive shapes, such as Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979), which is incidentally featured in a Robert C. Morgan essay acknowledged in its entirety on p. 332 of her footnotes. (This reflects a scholarly failure to seek out examples evidently known to her. Thorough research is not among Dr. Drucker’s developed skills.) She seems not to know my photograph book Reincarnations (1984), my loose-leaf books Rain Rains Rain (1976) and And So Forth (1979), or the narratives collected in Short Fictions (1974) and More Short Fictions (1980), all of which are still in print, even though the first could have been acknowledged around her page 213 and the last pair around her page 270.

Drucker seems likewise unaware of my oft-reprinted manifesto on “Constructivist Fictions” and thus of the several books (1974-1991) exemplifying this aesthetic principle. This accounts for why she can suggest in her first footnote on page 332 that the epithet “Suprematist” might be more appropriate to Inexistences: Constructivist Fictions (1978), whose square pages beyond the initial two are all wholly blank. Though superficially persuasive within the limited evidence she presents, this caveat depends upon her ignoring those other “Constructivist” books that likewise have square imagery and/or format. With this larger context for Inexistences in mind, she might have accounted for how a resonant verbal frame, printed on the cover and opening pages, can give meaning, in the tradition of Conceptual Art, to the absence of ostensible content. Perhaps this last theme would have become more apparent if Drucker had known the likewise nearly-all-blank companion to Inexistences, a larger and thicker book also published in 1978, Tabula Rasa, which clearly is sub-titled “A Constructivist Novel.” Precisely because subsequent critical books often cite the authority of previous criticism, rather than firsthand research, one feels obliged to correct errors before they are repeated forever. If I don’t, who will?

Need I say that I didn’t intend for Professor Drucker (then Yale, now SUNY-Purchase) to illustrate so vividly my characterization of academic avant-garde criticism or to inadvertently waste more words about her mistakes and ignorance than she wrote about me (!). I wanted to like The Century of Artists’ Books, because I agree with her general emphasis on book-art, rather than illustrated books, painter-writer collaborations, “livres d’artistes,” or other bastardized forms. Her commentary does introduce a large number of practitioners, though omitting, at times conspicuously, John Cage, Alain Arias-Misson, Jean-François Bory, Manfred Mohr, Don Celender, Paul Laffoley, Wally Depew, M. Vaughn-James, Claes Oldenberg, Susan Barron, Michael Kasper, Marshall McLuhan, Allan Kaprow, Barbara Rosenthal, R. Murray Schafer, Carol Stetser, and Merce Cunningham and Frances Starr, all of whom I’ve discussed in either my Dictionary and/or essays that appear in this book. “Definitive” Professor Drucker’s book surely isn’t.

More than once Drucker’s text reminded me of anthologies of mine that she seems not to know—Imaged Words & Worded Images (1970), Future’s Fictions (1973), or Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973)—all of which are still in print and perhaps available in better university libraries. Wishing her ignorance and illiteracy might be limited to my books, I nonetheless noticed on page 106 her reference to a Dutch book based upon “John Dos Passos’s text from his novel Metropolis,” which sounds like an illiterate translation purportedly back into English of his Manhattan Transfer, and Drucker’s recurring insecurity about commas that are both inserted and omitted to excess. My predispositions notwithstanding, the level of error and ignorance here does become provocative, especially to anyone familiar and concerned with the subject. Perhaps Drucker did better in her discussions of other book artists and that the next book on this needlessly neglected subject will do better, at least by me. Perhaps her ultimate mistake was publishing her scholarship too early, before I was too old or dead to notice her deviance.

Having produced book art (along with more conventional volumes) since the late 1960s, I eagerly opened Betty Bright’s handsomely produced No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980 (2005), wishing that it would be definitive, only to discover that it wasn’t. Told by its publisher that my essays on the subject were respectfully acknowledged, as indeed they were, thanks, I was surprised that none of the book-art books I produced before 1980 were mentioned—not my first collection of visual poetry, Visible Language (1970); not Come Here (1974) in which very few words are visually enhanced sequentially into an erotic narrative; not my ladderbooks Modulations and Extrapolate (both 1975); not my binding two complimentary books back to back—Short Fictions/I Articulations (1974) and “The End” Appendix/“The End” Essentials (1979); not One Night Stood (1977), which publishes the same text in two radically different formats; not Inexistences and Tabula (1978), which have blank pages behind their opening frame; not my loose-leaf books Obliterate (1974) and And So Forth (1979); not the stack of large cards I titled Rain Rains Rain (1976); not the three books composed entirely of numerals; nor the Assemblings that I co-produced annually during the 1970s. Nothing, nada, zilch. How infuriated I become (justifiably?) as I remember all these titles.

Then I discovered that the major book-art books of other authors were similarly slighted: Marshall McLuhan, whose classic Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (1967) and Medium Is The Message (1967) aren’t even mentioned; nor is Dick Higgins’s great F oew&ombwhnw (1969) mentioned. Claes Oldenberg’s superlative Store Days (1967), Emmett Williams’ Sweethearts (1967), Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (which arrived periodically in the mail before appearing in 1999 as a spine-bound book), Lucas Samaras’s Album (1971), John Cage’s Notations (1969), and Alan Kaprow’s Assemblage Environments Happenings (1965) likewise are not acknowledged either, even though all their authors are mentioned in Bright’s book and thus were surely known to her, as was I (who emerges from the rubble of this book amidst the Best Company).

Given the omissions noted so far, it is scarcely surprising that other major North American book artists not mentioned at all: Jesse Reichek, Alain Arias-Misson, Paul Zelevansky, J. Marks, Duane Michals, Don Celender, Bern Porter, Wally Depew, Merce Cunningham and Frances Starr, Michael Kasper, R. Murray Schafer, Lou Harrison, Fred Truck, and Warren Lehrer, even though all of them produced admirable book art between 1960 and 1980, (and Celender taught for many years near Minneapolis, where Bright’s book was apparently written). Indeed, works by these artists & authors have been mentioned by me in books and essays published over the past three-plus decades [and reprinted here]. Need I note that nearly all of these masters also escaped the “scholarship” of Joanna Drucker in her The Century of Artists’ Books [1997], as I noted in a review at the time, making me wonder, needless to say perhaps, whether the blind are misleading the blind and I’ll need to mention them yet again and again.

Richard Kostelanetz

Sloppy "Scholarship" (1997, 2006)