A study in folios: The signature:: The Literary Pocket Book by Edric Mesmer
-1-
Now and then I’m revisited by Rob MacKenzie’s essay on macaronic verse from The Gig—
MacKenzie, recognizing the resurgence of Gaelic, found that a purity around presentation (i.e. trying to learn an entire language to compose in it) led to rather empty—if not also culturally irrelevant—results; perhaps too tied up in “voice.”
Macaronics, or poetry written in more than one language,[1] opens possibilities for a varied and authentic Gaelic inclusion: “Such a poetry would participate confidently to enact a national change, not programmatically, but through the efficacy of its engagement with the everyday.”[2]
I’m reminded of this “macaronic poetics” while cataloging the exquisitely fashioned books from Welsh publisher Steven Hitchins, who operates under the imprint The Literary Pocket Book; it is perhaps their everyday engagement with the form of the book that recalls MacKenzie’s “mongrel” essay.
-2-
What about the design of these books speaks to a “macaronic poetics” of a Wales-based poetry?
If macaronic verse can exist on three levels, “intra-word, inter-word and inter-line,”[3] how would we talk about this on the level of bookmaking, by analogy? I hazard that The Literary Pocket Book does this through challenges to our reading modalities that question the reader’s acceptance of the language of a book as a language of own’s own, in English.
Only a few of these miniature books feature (i) Welsh language, (ii) translations from the Welsh, or (iii) specifically Welsh-influenced poetry—
- Y Zidydd: Ephemeris by Rhys Trimble, bound together with Alban Arthan by Steven Hitchins.
- The Penis (Dafydd ap Gwilym) and The Sweet Sour Grove (Gwerful Mechain), loosely translated (in the spirit of the originals) by John Goodby.
- NONglyns, englyns by Harry Gilonis and Rhys Trimble, under the sign of Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr.
…so it isn’t a matter of the linguistic presence (or absence) that my mind drifts toward.
I’m thinking about Hitchins’s sense of the signature; how each book is the quotient of materials meeting in the binding of the book that present new ways of reading each text, sometimes in ways that challenge the comfort of the reader encountering these books.
This binding of materials seems to take on the poetics of macaronics, where the “Welshness” of these poetries (mostly) in English must be read through the form the book: with an unease, distrust, or false symmetry. The reader must be made aware—by the physicality of the book—of the uneven meeting of cultural significances.
-3-
“False symmetry” is a term I feel immediately too close to; let’s lay it aside for now…
I’m wondering if I can borrow from Rob MacKenzie’s categorical diagnosis of intra-word, inter-word, and inter-line in sorting the publications at hand into: intra-[leaf], inter-[leaf], and inter-[signature]—and an added stratum, the intra-[signature].
The Literary Pocket Book takes the form of the intra-[leaf] where the page itself could be said to have an interiority that the reader encounters as an obstacle to the poem as static on the page. In Key Blank by Nia Davies (2017), an accordion signature of translucent pages requires the reader to distill different pages one from the other, with some stitched closed; of course, the reader is likewise encouraged to see these pages in layers, where words (and visual images) accumulate deeper registers…there is even an actual metal key sewn into a closed pocket of pages! The book presents itself in metallic covers of silver, forever looking outward; and what does that say of what’s hidden within?
Another example comes from Winter Texts by John Maher and Steven Hitchins (2016). This is a volume of text messages between the two authors—but with texts printed on small, square sheets, tucked into “pockets” of an accordion signature. The pages (printed back and front and time-stamped) are thus potentially able to “migrate” within the physicality of the book, challenging the book’s need to order, while also presenting born-digital content transcribed in a non-static folio.
-4-
Of inter-[leaf] examples, The Literary Pocket Book has many: Who by Stephen Emmerson and Chris Stephenson (2018); Drawn Rooms by Allen Fisher (2012); Text Me, Ishmael by Caroline Goodwin (2012); and Festival Cuisine by David Greenslade (c. 2012). In each of these, leaves are “fixed,” but open in surprising ways—from the adjacent panels of Greenslade’s Festival Cuisine to the falling-forward accordion panes of the Emmersons’ Who.
Goodwin’s and Fisher’s texts offer further hither-thither dances for the reader to partake in: in Text Me, Ishmael, every page is a leaf that folds out like a fortune-teller, each needing to be refolded to progress through the poem; in Drawn Rooms, the volume opens as a concertina, printed on either side, which twists in the reader’s hands with the sonic of resonance of, well, an accordion!
For inter-[signature] examples, one need only turn to Y Zidydd: Ephemeris by Rhys Trimble and Alban Arthan by Steven Hitchins, two signatures bound back-to-back. A further complication of the inter-signature is John Goodby’s loose translations of The Penis from Dafydd ap Gwilym and The Sweet Sour Grove from Gwerful Mechain. Not only are the texts interconnected (in that Gwerful Mechain’s poem is a riposte to Dafydd ap Gwilym’s), the signatures of the two are “unbound” from one another but entwined in a twisting fold—allowing each poem to stand alone, as it were, even as the reader must negotiate both together in reading this volume.
-5-
Perhaps the most astounding productions are those that fit the criteria of what I’m calling the intra-[signature]. These books “implode” the signature, via bookmaking, in complicated ways.
Many of these examples can be found “demonstratively” read in videos on The Literary Pocket Book blog.[4] (I send the link for one, Frances Presley’s Black Fens Viral, to my friend Lisa—“like a Jacob’s Ladder,” she reminds me.) Hitchins deploys this Jacob’s Ladder binding to varying degrees.
In Black Fens Viral (2021)—which Hitchins calls a “Tetra-tetraflexagon”—the page itself is the Jacob’s Ladder fold, while the title and author, at top and bottom respectively, remain static. Folding at center, the text keeps revealing further layers… Similarly, NONglyns by Harry Gilonis and Rhys Trimble, shaped like the Frances Presley title with fixedness of top and bottom; here, however, the signature flips to reveal two distinct accordion folds, one by each author.
With Studies in Violence Too Terrible for the Ear (2020) by the enigmatic “mjb,” the signature bindings are crisscrossed strips, each bearing lines of poem; underneath these—as they reopen, revealing further lines of the poem—are visual images by the author, obscured in stripes, as in the woven act of reading.
Lastly, there is sHumbert sHumbert by Rhea Seren Phillips (2020)—a book as lyrical in its binding as by its words… Here, stanzaic strips, bound horizontally (top, middle, bottom), form a theoretical signature, presenting as two poems over four “pages”; in actuality, the strips are anchored in an accordion fold that—when extended—allows these leaves to interlace, lap, and echo the “supratidal and intertidal zone’s veering” of the poems.[5]
[1] Early macaronic verse examples (per MacKenzie) might include poems written in Latin and Scots. A later one, I imagine, would be the poetry of Eugene Jolas.
[2] MacKenzie, Rob. “Macaronic verse: last refuge of the mongrel.” The Gig 11, June 2002, 54.
[3] Ibid., 46.
[4] https://literarypocketblog.wordpress.com.
[5] From Phillips’s poem.
literarypocketblog 