Rare Books is a regular column on the Poetry Center Blog showcasing items from the L.R. Benes Rare Book Room. The L.R. Benes Rare Book Room features artist books, first editions, chapbooks, and broadsides, among many other treasures of literary significance. These holdings are searchable in the Poetry Center catalog and may be viewed by the public upon request during our open hours, Monday through Friday.
Today the poet and instructor of The Art of the Chapbook, Joni Wallace selects Very Different Animals, by Frank Sherlock, Fact-Simile Editions, 2012.
Invited by the Poetry Center to write about a chapbook in the L.R. Benes Rare Book Collection, I jumped at the chance. First of all, it’s cool, even slightly humid, in the archival foyer of the Rare Book Room, which makes for a timely break from the 100 degree days of Tucson in September. And did I mention it’s really quiet? With a slightly otherworldly set of beautiful above-lit, glass viewing boxes? Mostly, though, there is just so much to see and love in this gorgeous collection of rare books.
Suffice it to say, cross-genre chapbooks (also called art books or book objects) interrogate the margins between text, visual art, and book architecture, and have been around for a long time. Blake’s The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience were both chapbooks and art books, illuminated by Blake, published in 1780 and 1794. Both originated as short sequences, small in number of pages and in size, and were hand-printed and hand-colored by Blake. He made only a few copies, these works of art unlike anything anyone else had produced.
The Poetry Center’s Collection shows us just how vibrant the visual and literary art of the little book remains. From Crane Giamo’s breath-taking Pocalpystic Editions, to artist Alice Vinson’s sometimes hand-sewn, tactile word-wonders, it’s clear that text, visual arts, and book architectures combine in surprising and satisfying ways.
Which brings me to the focus of this piece, the book object Very Different Animals, published by Fact-Simile Editions (Travis Macdonald and JenMarie Davis), a small wonder combining text by poet Frank Sherlock and miniature paintings by visual artist Nicole Donnelly.
Fully enacted. Elegant play. Very Different Animals amounts to a written and unwritten conversation between poet and painter. While Donnelly’s original paintings (she created a different one for each of 100 copies produced by Fact-Simile) employ earth tones, animal and mineral textures, dreamy sequences), Sherlock’s poem, bookended by two shorter fragments, summons the human legacy of war, domination over nature, and environmental loss.
Both describe their collaboration as one where each completed or continued the thoughts of the other, and the book’s design incorporates this process, allowing the whole to be read in the structure of a double helix, Donnelly’s visual work perpetually ending or beginning the sequence. And it echoes Sherlock’s opening (or closing) lines, these panels at one (or the other) end of the spiral:
Reconfigure
a strand of DNA
& you might
understand
Me & I
are very different animals
And,
Insist on continuance
because we
could be in love w/
lives & this doesn’t
have to be over
It is, however, Donnelly’s work which houses the text, folded and tucked inside each of her miniature canvasses. Hung on a wall, each painting houses Sherlock’s text like a secret, so that if discovered, unlocked and unfolded, it is as Sherlock writes, “the gaze is gazing back.”
Because the text is printed on accordion-folded paper, once unhinged, it bleeds out in bellows. And brings to mind, both physically and sonically, that very instrument: accordion or concertina. Here the Anthropocene plays out in an eerie off-kilter polka. Hear it accompany and echo in lines like:
What was I doing
that was so important
the day the water
died Was I just
thinking could it have
been that deep
And,
Who can see the faces
in the forest
for all the books of dead trees
And,
Who knew the animals would
kill me back the day
they disappeared
Very Different Animals is an amazing, complex, and yes, tiny, chapbook. One which offers an articulate, shimmery conversation you can hold in your head and your hand, like the very best kind of imagined thing.
For the reader interested in more on the history of chapbooks in general, I recommend Noah Eli Gordon’s “A Brief History of the Little Book."
Joni Wallace is the author of three books of poetry: Kingdom Come Radio Show (forthcoming, Barrow Street, 2016); Blinking Ephemeral Valentine (Four Way Books, 2011), selected by Mary Jo Bang as winner of the Levis Prize; and Red Shift (Kore Press, 2001). Her 8-week workshop The Art of the Chapbook begins Tuesday, September 27. Registration is still possible.