Richard Kostelanetz

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Proposal for P.V.F.H.I., A Visual Retrospective

Having recently obtained a copy of E. E. Cummings' classic early retrospective of his own visual work, C.I.O.P.W. (1931), whose initials identify successively charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and water color, I thought of doing a contemporary semblance, likewise entirely of images in large pages, in my case titled P.V.F.H.I. (pronounced Fooey), implicitly echoing Cummings. This new book would reproduce images of my work in print, video, film, holography, and computer projection, now with only minimal text. In all media, it has been my theme to produce in each medium what cannot be done in others. While a book is an appropriate medium for reproducing visual poetry and visual fictions that initially appeared in print, the challenge here is discovering the best ways for reproducing in a book's pages images, mostly of words, that initially appeared in time-based media. Whereas Cummings had only one image to each large page, my book might have several from a single source. Just as Cummings was the only prominent writer of his generation to create enough visual images to fill a book, I'd like to think that I have done as well, working, however, mostly in media that were not available to Cummings nearly a century before. Implicitly, this proposed book extends AnOther E. E. Cummings (1998) that I edited for Liveright and would like to redo someday with the addition of a selection of Cummings’ images. Remember that individual entries on RICHARD KOSTELANETZ appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other selective directories. Publishers interested in supporting this book should contact me. Thanks.