The Book Is in the World

In the last two years, Granary Books has published four books that are each a collaboration between a poet and artist: Oaths? Questions? (2009) by Marjorie Welish and James Siena, Faster Than Birds Can Fly (2009) by John Ashbery and Trevor Winkfield, Alcuni Telefonini (2008) by Vincent Katz and Francesco Clemente, and The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water (2010) by Leslie Scalapino and Kiki Smith. These books are complex, sumptuous affairs, which announce their craft, reveling in the materiality of the object. Each book is priced between $2,000 and $4,500 and has been issued in editions of between forty and seventy copies.

There is the assumption that in books of this price, form determines (or even excuses) conservatism in its content. As Kyle Schlesinger has noted, "the finest of private press publishers…have a tendency to shy away from esoteric writers, generally preferring to invest in the safeguards of the mainstream literary milieu or reprint texts…." Yet Granary Books is not concerned with this kind of canon. Indeed, its publisher, Steve Clay, chooses to commission collaborative works by artists and writers who are well known within their milieu, but not necessarily outside it. And if, like John Ashbery, they are more widely known, their legacy is far from agreed upon. They are, to use a predictable phrase, esoterically "avant-garde."

Furthermore, Clay isn't swapping out one canon and replacing it with another. All four of these books demonstrate a far more pressing concern with the book as an ontological object. In commissioning these collaborations, Clay invites poets and artists to not only respond to each other but to the book as a form, to the general concept of codex that emphasizes a sequential experience of art. There is a narrative singularity to the path of reading through a book that these writers and artists get to play around with, each person benefiting from the different ways in which a reader examines text and visual image. Clay's achievement is to rethink the book each time he makes one. These books contain a careful questioning of collaborative practice and the book arts.

For instance, both Welish and Siena contributed words and images to Oaths? Questions? Their text is printed on transparent Mylar so that the words hover above their vibrant and abstract prints; for example, in Siena's text we are "seeing through / a line" to Welish's image. As we literally read between the lines, the reader's everyday distinction between text and image is defamiliarized, and for a few vertiginous moments, it all becomes figure. Much like language, the prints are explicitly iterative, and as visual components are added page by page, the complexity of the design expands, and then contracts again as a new design form is begun and Welish and Siena swap roles. More than any other book reviewed here, Oaths? Questions? explicitly considers the symbolic weight of a gesture, of signatures and lines, and if this seems a little artificially "clever," a book that takes too much delight in deconstruction for the reader to delight in its construction, then that uneasy balance is precisely the point. This is a tome, a thick volume bound in printed cloth over boards, but the book's heft is balanced by the unsettling contrast of a bright red titling face against aquamarine cloth and a binding so beautifully designed and executed (by Daniel E. Kelm and Kylin Lee) that it threatens to upstage its contents. When we turn the first page of the...