Assistant Editor Andy Sia: As readers, we inhabit pages. We move between pages: we riff through sheaves bound along a spine, we scroll through webpages. We hear the corresponding chimes words make. We mouth along. We scan a text with our hands, with our eyes, ears, noses, tongues.
These ubiquitous and physical gestures structure space and time, giving meaning to our experience. Our habit is our habitation: “The pages of the book turn, the days fold into one another and stack up”: Aaron Cohick writes and enacts this in his book, Clerestory (NewLights Press with The Journal of Artists’ Books, 2012), in which the vertically mirrored orientation of text compels the literal turning of the book again and again, with one’s hands in concert with, always, new horizons.
So, books and their pages are a calibrating device. As much as reading may induce a metronomic rhythm, it may also break from established rhythms, when reading snags on the page, in our body: when our attention, drawn close to max capacity, slows to a crawl and trawls along a page; when our pulse quickens encountering that on the page which anticipates us before we do ourselves. These synchronies and asynchronies between our body and the book-body is the crux of our reading lives. Or, in short, reading is an embodied activity, or an exercise in embodiment.
As a reader and writer, I’m especially curious about books that foreground their materiality and teach me how to move through them literally and figuratively. I think: the book choreographs meaning between reader, writer, text, book! In my meanders through the Elliston Poetry Room, I am struck of late by three possibilities for the page exemplified by three books:
Pages can create a haunting. Curb (The Press at Colorado College, 2019), written by Divya Victor, and designed and printed by Aaron Cohick, documents the murders of and violence against South Asians in public sites in the United States. Keeping with the book’s accordion form, I stand and open the book across its entire length along its folds. I’m especially interested in “Frequency (Alka’s Testimony),” which spans the length of one side of the double-sided book. The poem filters out the verbal contents of Alka Sinha’s testimony on the loss and the murder of Divyendu Sinha, her husband, documenting the ambient sounds around the courtroom for the duration of the testimony instead. While the transcription of noises follow a linear progression, my eyes dart frequently across the page, to other pages, ahead and back.
Broadly, the accordion form of the book facilitates reading ahead and back, as does the logic of the catalog—the sense that things are interchangeable in order. I read back because I remember, or think I remember, a sound or a quality of sound. When I glance ahead, and then arrive at what I have read anticipatorily, sound recurs. Curb, then, stages a time that is uneven, recursive, and haunting. This sense of suspended, haunted time, I think, matches the book’s sense of the ongoingness of loss and, amid a white supremacist state, the ongoingness of witness and refusal.
Pages can enact correspondences across space and time. The Other World (Center for Book Arts, 2019), written by Miriam Bird Greenberg, and designed and printed by Keith Graham, uses the form of a map, comprised of two sheets of paper folded up and tucked inside a jacket. Blocky stanzas of poems are interspersed with art from screen printing, within grids along the folds of each sheet. Additionally, each sheet is double-sided and flipped along the vertical plane. The breadth of poems in The Other World is astonishing, concerned with, and deeply rooted in, both spirituality and the material world. Additionally, the poems document a range of environmental and social conditions mired in injustice, including the experiences of asylum seekers, the 2018 California wildfires, economic and labor exploitation, and more.
While the table of contents printed on the jacket suggests a reading order, the poems are more dispersed on the page than this order would suggest: I go between the two maps often, turning each over and over, scanning across the page to locate a respective poem. Even when reading more loosely—without relying on the table of contents or a set order—I’m compelled to interact with the form of the book, to turn it over and over again. In effect, these physical gestures metonymize the correspondences across space and time happening on the page. Ultimately, by inviting lively and systematic cross-readings between injustices, The Other World contests the very form of the map: it doesn’t enact so much as dissolve borders.
Pages can dissolve the membrane between the external world and self. Plant Thought (Center for Book Arts, 2022)—written by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, illustrated by Kiki Smith, designed by Richard Tuttle, and printed by Sarah Moody—describes the experience of perceiving plants while taking walks in a wetland preserve. Drawing is an essential component of this work: throughout her walks, the speaker draws the plants that she’s seen. Each of the four sections of Plant Thought, including the book cover, is accompanied by a drawing of a wetland plant—plants observed in these walks—by Kiki Smith, Berssenbrugge’s frequent collaborator. Smith’s drawings, therefore, provide a visual articulation of Berssenbrugge’s narrated acts of drawing, where drawing is “a template for all that needs to happen in one person’s receptivity for world to resonate.” I note the preposition “for,” which undergirds Berssenbrugge’s poetics of perception, a relational activity that blurs subject and object: plants receive the speaker, as she receives them. Smith’s delicate drawings are printed on smaller translucent sheets of paper pasted onto the pages of Plant Thought. Against the translucency of the drawing surface, these images take on the diffuse quality of a projected image. These images, then, diffuse into my mind,; dissolving, too, the membrane between book and reader.
In a broad sense, engaging with the physical dimensions of books as a reader has also opened up writing possibilities for me. For one, I ask myself how I might write in tandem to the materiality of the page and the page as a construct. I’m used to writing on my laptop and more occasionally my notebook, but what if I focus on my notebook? Write on a landscape orientation? Write across an expansive surface, or within a small space? Make a habit out of other writing surfaces—receipts, movie stubs, paper bowls? How would the interplay of surfaces shape writing?
