A Poem Is a Material Object: Claire Van Vliet’s Artists Books and Denise Levertov’s “Batterers”

James D. Sullivan

doi:10.3390/h8030124

Abstract

A literary text is, for a book artist, like a score for a musician or a script for an actor: a basis on which to construct an artistic performance. Book artist Claire Van Vliet has, at her Janus Press, constructed dazzling broadsides and artist books based on poetry by, among others, Hayden Carruth, Galway Kinnell, and Margaret Kaufman. These works test or ignore boundaries between conventional categories such as book and broadside, two-dimensional display, and three-dimensional construction. The object she built based on Denise Levertov’s poem “Batterers” unfolds especially powerfully in time and three-dimensional space.

Highlights

A literary text is, for a book artist, like a score for a musician or a script for an actor: a basis on which to construct an artistic performance
One could just as arbitrarily say it all folds out into a single spread and count to one. Another catalogue suggests that the wooden frame on which the paper is mounted can itself be used to mount the object on a wall, presumably for a two-dimensional display (Catalogue 2005, p. 23)
Batterers is one of Van Vliet’s most spectacular objects. It includes all these elements already discussed: incorporation of multiple sheets of paper, pulp painting, non-rectilinear paper, interplays of recto and verso, unfolding as a rhetorical device, ambiguity regarding the order of the text, and options for display in either two or three dimensions

Summary

After how many pages is an object no longer a broadside?

One exhibition catalogue for a show of works from book artist and printer Claire Van Vliet’s Janus. Batterers is one of Van Vliet’s most spectacular objects It includes all these elements already discussed: incorporation of multiple sheets of paper, pulp painting, non-rectilinear paper, interplays of recto and verso, unfolding as a rhetorical device, ambiguity regarding the order of the text, and options for display in either two or three dimensions. (On the verso, there is no narrative progression, just the static fact of the wound.) Four irregularly shaped and folded sheets of paper—pulp paintings, rather than the standard uniform blank rectangle of conventional book or business paper—attached to a wooden frame backing This whole construction is removable from the black frame, but the unpainted blond wood clearly is not part of the black and red-themed paper display it supports. Moving inward (or across, depending on how the object is displayed, arbitrarily here in any case) toward the fiery heart of the mountain, the tone there shifts toward the vatic, and the scope shifts beyond the intimate and toward the planetary: EARTH, CAN WE NOT LOVE YOU

UNLESS WE THINK YOU ARE DYING?

WHAT IF SHE STOPS BREATHING?