Cirrus@Austlit

(Introduction)

'This issue’s callout asked for explorations and interactions of page and art in a digital format, and used a quote from Australian poet and art critic Gary Catalano (1947–2002):

If the fact that many visual artists now make books can be taken as a sign that the visual arts are becoming more literary in their forms, and, perhaps, in their aspirations, then the converse could also be said of much advanced and ambitious literature in the past twenty years. Just as visual artists have added words and discursive texts to their repertory of forms, so many writers have come to use visual devices as an essential element of their work. (1983).' (Introduction)

'Hello, I'm a book! Thank you for opening me. Will you turn my pages? This is a beautifully illustrated book for 4-8 year old readers. Proceeds from this sale benefit nonprofit organisation Library For All, helping children around the world learn to read.' (Publication summary)

'Listen, bitch’, he says. ‘Listen, bitch’. That’s what they all say. And we have been. Listening.

'Poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance are back with another excursion into the linguistic and visual pleasures of found text, a joint practice which brought us 2017’s Members Only. With this book, Listen, bitch, they turn their attention to misogynist language, working with a corpus of several decades’ worth of statements by powerful Australian public figures (and other blokes with big platforms). By listening very closely to the snarlings of what Kate Manne calls the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy, these poems attempt to map the lines women are still not supposed to cross in contemporary Australia, and to document the consequences suffered when they do. The results are sometimes harrowing, sometimes ridiculous, and always thought-provoking.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. "Are you feeling helpless and angry? I am. I'm having a quiet rage against the material and immaterial machine. Thank you for holding me. This book is a shard of frustration. It's a place to process emotion. Angry and curious, I recently dived into some dark online spaces that I hope one day will be lost, and documented words and phrases used about and against women. I'm working with the concept of printing itself: its terminology and actions are historically drawn from the human body. As an experimental letterpress printer, I often use words to give paper a hard time, and the audience can usually witness the marks left by my processes. In this physical book I have had to think flatter, within the restrictions of contemporary digital print processes." Caren Florance' (Publication summary)

'5 years of experiential materiality.

'For five years, colleagues from the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research have held an annual letterpress workshop, to which they bring their own writing to set and print. Initial expectations about ideal presentation shifted ground when faced with the intricacies and possibilities of the process. This is an account of their experiences that combines insights from participants with framing observations from my own experience with letterpress, typographic layout and its relationship with creative writing.'  (Publication abstract)

'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries of creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.' (Introduction)

'This paper presents a cross-disciplinary collaborative project between a poet and a book artist. A site-specific residency project in 2014 for MoAD in Old Parliament House, Canberra, gave rise to two other publishing artifacts: a chapbook (for a poetry audience) and an artists’ book (for a visual arts audience). The collaboration produced original poems, ‘cut-ups’ composed from in situ sources, poems composed of key-word anagrams, and erasure poems sourced from Hansard speeches and newspaper articles from the year 1962. 

Each mode of publication offers different affordances for the source texts, offering them variable states of print-performance. The project also explores poetry’s relationship to public culture and institutions and the language these use. The poetic component in the project is an exercise in re-voicing and speaking back to the concept of a parliament, while the artistic component of the project is an exercise in close reading, both of the space itself and of the words inside it.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2015 poet Angela Gardner was invited to the print studio of artist Caren Florance to set some blocks of ‘random’ text using metal letter­press type. As a separate creative work, ‘The Future, Un-imagine’ was taking form in Gardner’s mind; there was also ambient sound in the studio, a radio playing and wide-ranging conversation taking place between the two as Gardner set the type. Her seven ‘key’ textblocks were then print-performed by Florance for over a year to produce multiple readings and visual patterns, reflecting the structured chaos that Gardner uses in her writing practice. The artist book that emerged, Working Papers, is impossible to reproduce ‘accurately’ without losing many of its material properties; this chapbook is an opportunity to remix some of its pages to form new arrangements around Gardner’s resolved poem. The result is an augmented presentation of the poem and a companion to the limited edition artist book.' (Publication summary)

'1962. Menzies was in power, Whitlam was deputy Opposition Leader, and the cold war was in full swing. Canberra was steadily transforming from a town in a paddock to a city with a lake. This is a year in the life of the building that held all the action: Old Parliament House. One of the outcomes of a collaborative project between poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance, this poetic work is an exercise in re-voicing the past and placing it in conversation with the present.' (Publication summary)

'Working Papers: hone/torrent is an experimental collaborative artist book project. It explores disruption, disorder and erasure as a creative methodology. Unbound, interfolded and uncut, its folded lack of logic forces the reader to unfold the pages in ways that demand extra space, time and thought. The poetic text, handset by the poet in a stream-of-consciousness composition and then repeatedly overprinted by the printer in an similarly ‘random’ manner, hints at narrative, playing with itself and the reader’s eye, allowing shallow looking and close reading.' (Publication summary)