O, O, O

Abstract

O, O, O Charles Alexander (bio) William Blake, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Leslie Scalapino, Allan Kornblum, Karl Young, Douglass Messerli, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Nathaniel Tarn, Tom Raworth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Johanna Drucker, Kyle Schlesinger, Susan Schultz, Barbara Henning, Ann Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Rosmarie Waldrop, Alan Loney, Mary Laird, Jonathan Greene, Annabel Lee, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis. All are poets and/or other sorts of writers who also have been or continue to be publishers or printers or editors of books, journals, or a myriad of kinds of publications. They are individuals who understand, in some cases, the smell of ink, the feel of a lead-alloy individual letter in the hand, the weight of a press cylinder as they turn its handle. In some cases they know the difference between a Coptic stitch and a side stitch, a deckled edge from a faux deckled edge. They may have bled on books as they slightly punctured themselves with a bookbinding needle without realizing and then dripped blood onto 100 percent rag paper. They know what a quarto or an octavo is in book terms, and know what to most people are rather odd words, like quoins and ems and ascenders and descenders and ligatures. Many of them have had ink on their fingers, the kind of ink that is thick like fudge sauce and requires more than soap and water to remove. Printers & publishers & editors & poets are what this column is about. I'm one of them, and the shape of pages of books has had a structural impact on how I think about writing. How I think about the odd mix of materiality and immateriality in writing has had a impact on how I think about making books in a way that transcends their materiality, all the while knowing that there's not anything much more material than paper, ink, type, thread, and other components that go to make the book. Of course, I did begin with William Blake, who transforms inks and paints into diaphanous spiritual entry points of color. Maybe that's what I want all printing & bookmaking & [End Page 187] writing to do. I'm drawn to those who share a vision in writing and publishing that explores just what and where that liminal line may be between the material and the spiritual, between the known and the unknown, between what we touch and what we intuit, between phenomenon and perception and thought about perception. I am drawn to those who explore that territory in writing and in publishing or printing or book making. I am drawn to the work of Leslie Scalapino and O Books. O because O man, O Sunflower, O as a space to enter the letter and go right through it, O as a kinship with Molly Bloom's YES!, O as a way, a practice, a chant, a song, a light or a space for light to enter and exit at the same time. To live in the O. Scalapino O. O Books is the press Scalapino began in 1986 and directed for the next twenty-five years, while also writing some of the finest, and most challenging, works of that period, before she passed away in 2010. During that period I met with her several times, including her Chax Press residency in Tucson, other appearances here that included organizing and rehearsing performances (not full scale, though one was something more than a staged reading) of her plays, and meetings in Berkeley or San Francisco, including a heady day contemplating all those Os and the poetry that fills them while meeting Leslie, walking with her, meeting Norman Fischer, and the three of us having lunch near the ocean twenty miles or so north of San Francisco. I don't remember Leslie talking much about O Books or even about "poetry" in terms of finished and published works, but I do remember talking about how words and letters inhabit texts, texts inhabit pages, pages inhabit books. I remember talking about vast distance, which happens in microseconds, between perception and thought. I remember thinking that this poet makes little or...