Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory

 

The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resist assimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way, poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’ (Charles Bernstein)”)

I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?”

Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stop looking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipher in its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

The more I write, the more meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountain rising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)

Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, ed. Amanda Earl

 

The challenge of reception remains. How to make such work – by women in particular – visible within the general clutter of literary publishing and the larger field of cultural noise. But as gender politics in publishing meets the fertile graphical-poetic imagination of so many talented and engaging writers, these issues will resolve themselves. The terms ‘visual’ or ‘concrete’ seem less and less necessary as identifiers that separate one category of works from the larger field. All works of written poetry are graphical, but only some take advantage of that in interesting ways. The wonder is that such a varied and prolific outpouring is taking place – and being given the kind of notice signalled by this anthology. For someone of my generation, whose work was systematically denigrated, or, alternately, merely ignored, this is an excellent development to witness. Perhaps it will also serve to remind women of what is at stake in being in control of our own language – since that is where the political efficacy of our subjectivity resides. The politics of gender are not diminished in these days, only transformed, and the polymorphous approach to authority is intimately bound to questions of self-determination. If I cannot speak myself in terms appropriate to the symbolic presentation of my being, then how am I to act with the full warrant of citizenship in the linguistic world? The question can only be answered across the broad spectrum of gendered positions, beyond binarisms and oppositions, but also, cannot ignore the legacies structured into our language and the visual presentation of our selves. (Johanna Drucker, “(In)Visible Women or Gender in Concrete”)

It would be hard not to be amazed by Ottawa poet, editor, critic and publisher Amanda Earl’s incredibly expansive, inclusive and long-awaited anthology Judith:Women Making Visual Poetry (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2021), a book funded, in part, through an impressive crowdfunding campaign earlier this spring. Subtitled “A 21^st century anthology,” Judith is named for Vancouver poet Judith Copithorne, who is known as the first woman in Canada to engage (in a sustained, ongoing way) with visual and concrete poetry, appearing in such important early Canadian concrete/visual poetry anthologies as the four author Four Parts Sand (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1972), John Robert Colombo’s New Directions in Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), bpNichol’s The Cosmic Chef (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1970) and bill bissett’s THE LAST BLEWOINTMENT ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 1 (Toronto ON: Nightwood Editions, 1985), as well as in more recent volumes such as The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (Fantagraphics, 2012) and The New Concrete, Visual Poetry in the 21^st Century (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2015). For years now, Ottawa writer/publisher/bookseller jwcurry has been referring to Copithorne as “our first lady of concrete,” and Copithorne has actively been producing and publishing since the late 1950s. Earl’s acknowledgment of Copithorne is wonderfully appropriate, although it is curious to note that the first volume of concrete and visual works produced in Canada was actually (as jwcurry once offered) Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things (London ON: Alphabet Press, 1965) by poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012), a title that appeared mere months prior to the first publications by bpNichol himself, who spent an entire career working, among other forms, concrete and visual poetry. In the context of Thibaudeau’s own work, her experimentation with visual forms through Lozenges, published by her husband, the poet James Reaney, appears to have been an outlier; a line of experimentation set aside for her eventual and lengthy career focusing on more narrative forms of poetry.

Judith includes a foreword by Johanna Drucker, “(In)Visible Women or Gender in Concrete,” and introduction by Earl, “This Book Is an Action,” and the two trace the reasonings and arguments for examining these kinds of works, and theories for why so much of this has been historically overlooked. As Earl writes: “Over the years, I have been told numerous times by male publishers, editors, and visual poets that few women make visual poetry. And judging from visual poetry anthologies published in the twenty-first century, this appears to be true, with representation of women between 12-21% except for Women in Concrete Poetry and Poesia Visiva both of which publish works from the twentieth century.” As a response to that repeated assertion, Earl offers a comprehensive list of “1181 Women Making Visual Poetry” (a list that has grown since to more than 1200 names in her ongoing Google doc). The list of so many historical and practicing artists simply add to the heft and very essence of this collection: how could so many artists be overlooked, and for so long? As Earl introduces the list of names:

Beginning in April, 2019, Joakim Norling and I began to record the names of women making visual poetry in a shared spreadsheet in order to select potential contributors for the anthology. We easily reached 100 names and began inviting contributors to the book by the summer. The list kept growing. I asked for more names from our contributors and through social media. This list is the work of a community, many communities, with a shared goal to increase the visibility of women making visual poetry. we received names from editors, publishers and visual poets. Our list expanded to include Arabic calligraphers, Native American Ledger artists, quilters, word painters, photographers, sculptors and more. I found even more women sharing their visual poetry in the form of embroidered texts, collages, wearable art. We have included only the names here, but many of the women listed are easy to find on Google.

At the core of the collection sits works by a selection of artists from around the world working in visual and concrete forms: Rosaire Appel (USA), Viviane Rombaldi Seppey (Switzerland/USA), Kimberly Campanello (USA/Ireland/UK), Iris Colomb (London, UK), Amanda Earl (Canada), Judith Copithorne (Canada), Cinzia Farina (Enna, Italy), Ankie van Dijk (Netherlands), Satu Kaikkonen (Finland), Mara Patricia Hernandez (Mexico/USA), Dona Mayoora (aka Don May and Donmay Donamayoora, USA), Terri Witek (USA), Astra Papachristodoulou (UK), Karenjit Sandhu (UK), Mado Reznik (Argentina), Lenora de Barros (São Paulo, Brazil), Petra Schulze-Wollgast (pws) (Rostock, Germany), Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (Germany), Kate Siklosi (Tkaronto/Dish with One Spoon Territory/Toronto, Canada), Ines Seidel (Munich, Germany), Hiromi Suzuki (Japan), Erica Baum (USA) and Audra Wolowiec (New York, USA). The large format, as well as so many stunning, full-colour images give the collection the physical sense of a coffee table book, and each author’s section includes artist’s statements, a note on another artist that influenced their work, and a recent discovery, all of which provide context and further information on these artists and their works. As part of such, it is interesting to see the cross-influence between contributors: Kate Siklosi offers Ines Seidel’s work, for example, as her influence, and Astra Papachristodoulou as her discovery. As Siklosi writes on Seidel:

Ines Seidel’s work further instills in me a poethics of care, and of finding strength in fragility, that carries me through my poetic practice and beyond. In her work, she painstakingly sews paper and other materials together into wonderfully intricate sculptures – and in this delicate practice, she has taught me the creative value of patience and of ‘staying with the trouble’ while creating work that commands such acute attentiveness and care. This care-ful mindset toward the work has also been an incredibly sustaining ethos for me personally – and throughout 2020, it has been a critical tool for me in terms of working through and responding to the complexities of the world. Her work also informs my object work in terms of illuminating the constructed fabric of our reality, and the powerful and necessary role of creative intervention in that fabric to showcase both the resilience, transience, and beauty inherent in our being.

One of the elements interesting through this list, and this anthology, is the way in which Earl has really provided an expansion of the term “concrete and visual poetry” to include such forms as “embroidered texts, collages, wearable art” and multiple other ways in which artists explore text, a number of which were long dismissed, I might suspect, as merely being “women’s work” and not as any serious, sustained form. There are examples of more traditional considerations of visual and asemic writings in the collection, but Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, for example, works three-dimensional pieces with source materials including maps and phonebooks, and Kate Siklosi works with images of print on leaves and bark. Astra Papachristodoulou works with three-dimensional pieces, and her works in the collection include a puzzle, test tubes and candles. Her statement reads: “My work explores the confluence of poetry and art through a range of diverse sculptures that hopefully outgrow their minimalist bounds. I mainly use ecologically friendly materials such as bio-resin, beeswax and wood to respond to the urgent ecological challenges we face today. My object poems often have an interactive element and present alternate ways for poetry that is not fixed to the page. Extrapolating from my work is a set of techniques and values characterized by the layering of meanings and materials.” Through Judith, Earl’s sense of concrete and visual opens wide to include elements that had already appeared on the periphery of a peripheral form, now set in an accumulated centre of an expanded form that connects not only to literary writing but to larger and multiple considerations of conceptual art (I suspect a fraction of this comes from the fact that the publisher was open to including works, including photographs, in full colour). This collection not only expands the conversation of concrete and visual works, but connects those conversations to multiple other conversations already in-progress. As London, England-based contributor, Iris Colomb, writes for her included statement:

I am interested in the materiality of language and the ways in which text can exist both visually and performatively. Most of my projects involve building different relationships between these two states and exploring possibilities beyond linear written and spoken text. My visual poems are usually the starting points or the results of performances; they either function as performance scores or as the alternative spatial outcomes of time-based works. I enjoy producing textual objects that allow poems to adopt independent and changing structures. Their delivery is often affected by aleatoric or material elements developing through a physical engagement with the text as a three-dimensional thing to be manipulated. The material and visual elements of these objects create a space for additional layers of meaning, which cannot be dissociated from their linguistic content. When a performative piece becomes the starting point for a visual poem the process involves both a form of translation between media and a second state of poetic composition. My projects can therefore be led to take on multiple forms, both visual and performative. This aspect resonates strongly with both my conceptual and aesthetic concerns.

Adding even further to the heft of this collection, Judith concludes with a handful of essays: “A World of Signs: Women of Asemic Writing” by Natalie Ferris, “Handle with Care: A Study in (Poetic) Fragility” by Kate Siklosi, “Interview: The Thread Between Craft and Language” by Amanda Earl, and “Light and Code: Digital Ecologies of Poetic Form” by Fiona Beckett. Judith explores far more than the ways in which individual artists have chosen to work, but the real nuts and bolts of literary creation in a wide range of possibilities, from sewing leaves and gallery space to digital creation. Judith explores creation, and the shifts within the form and the ways in which form opens, in ways not traditionally approached by male writers. This really is a remarkable collection, and deserves to remain in print for as long as possible. As Ferris offers as part of her essay:

            However, for women the gestural, indecipherable or encoded offered not only the opportunity to challenge language’s monopoly on expression, but to challenge the patriarchy’s monopoly on meaning. Throughout history and across cultures and continents, women developed writing systems for their own use; often excluded from educational regimes designed for men, women turned to expressive registers to devise their own, individual or collection, and often secret, means of communication.

This collection is masterfully put together, both in form and in concept, and even includes, at the very end, an “In Memoriam,” a list “to honour and remember women visual poets and artists who died in the 21^st century.” What is lovely about this collection is the sheer expansiveness of it, allowing anyone interested in the form further information on the potential handful of names they might already be aware of, as well as a series of worthy introductions to an incredible array of artists, providing a spring-board for an incredible amount of potential further study, research and creation. The approach to this collection is reminiscent of the ways in which Canadian women were working to carve out a space for a different kind of writing, in terms of content, form and possibility, throughout the 1960s and 70s. One could point to writers such as Daphne Marlatt, Nicole Brossard and Betsy Warland, and publishers such as Women’s Press, Ragweed Press and Room of One’s Own (since evolved into Room magazine), although one wonders why it took so long for visual poetry by women to be acknowledged. Perhaps it couldn’t happen until someone as driven and articulate as Amanda Earl (who also happens to have become one of the most engaged and exciting contemporary practitioners of the form) to come along and finally put it together.

 

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Broc Rossell and Jordan Scott on The Elephants

The Elephants are an independent, open-genre press publishing heterodox materials as acts of love and solidarity with the communities in which they’re created, especially those underrepresented in the literary arts. We’re with the underdogs

Broc Rossell is the author of Festival (Cleveland State 2015) and with W. Scott Howard co-editor of the forthcoming anthology 'After' Objectivism (University of Iowa Press). He teaches in the Critical and Cultural Studies Program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), and from Coach House Books: blert (2008), Decomp (2013, a collaboration with Stephen Collis and the ecosphere of British Columbia) and Night & Ox (2016). Scott’s chapbooks include Clearance Process (SMALL CAPS 2016), and Lanterns at Guantánamo (Simon Fraser University), which treat his experience after being allowed access to Guantanamo Bay in April 2015. Scott was the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University .

1 – When did The Elephants first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Broc Rossell: We’re a little more than a year old. I was the senior poetry editor at Brooklyn Arts Press for about six years (I owe Joe at BAP a lot what I learned there, esp. about working with writers on their manuscripts; Caryl Pagel at Cleveland State is my editorial role model, she’s the best). I’ve long had the goal of starting my own press and when I got the chance to work with Jordan Scott I took it.

Jordan Scott: Broc first approached me with his idea for The Elephants on a drive to Mount Baker in late 2016. I learn so much from Broc about poetry, poetics and editing that I knew being a part of The Elephants would be a necessary education.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

BR: I’ve wanted to do something that isn’t about my work for a while, I like working on projects that aren’t my own, and I like the idea of building something over a long period of time. (I’m a new parent, too.) Writers sharing their work with each other is a pretty basic definition of the lyric, and so of literature. And without small presses (at least in North America) literature would be a shit.

JS: I like that idea too. I also like the idea of giving back some of the energy, love and support that I’ve benefited from as a poet over the years. 

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

BR: We’re both poets, and deeply informed by it, but not limited to publishing it. We’re not a poetry press per se so much as a press that uses poetry or the idea of poetry as a way of seeing things, and we publish work that redefines what and how we see. Deviance and heterodoxy are what we want. 

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

BR: Make them beautiful and hope for word of mouth…events…and flogging the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

BR: It’s always interesting to discover a writer’s expectations. Some writers want or require manuscript development, some have specific, pressing questions they want answered, some people give us work that doesn’t need a thing. Jordan tends to have a light touch, but it’s always on the money. On the rare occasion he offers a line edit, most people take it. 

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

BR: SPD, and directly through our website (theelephants.net). Standard small press print runs, a few hundred copies. Depends on the title.

 

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

BR: Jordan Scott’s the consulting editor, he works with me on the books with me, and he’s (I think) one of the best readers + poets working today. He reads everything I write. Anybody that gets a chance to work with him is a winner. I’m a winner!

JS: I find myself reacting often very instinctually / viscerally to work and he’s usually able to ask me the right questions so I can better articulate whatever the fuck is going on. Broc has some serious editing chops (it’s incredible to witness, actually) and we work well together. We trust each other, and that matters a great deal.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

BR: It’s more like the press reflects ways I want to grow as a writer? I guess one specific thing is that I don't write for Microsoft word anymore, I imagine book forms when I’m revising, how it’s going to look in the trim.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

BR: I can see why someone would do it (I like Ben Estes’ book a lot, for instance), but I don’t think I could. I mean I’m always grateful when someone reads something I wrote, but I don’t feel comfortable with being the one who also shares it with people. It’s not like I’m emotionally invested in the means of production and distribution; more like I don’t want to be the particle and the wave. I don’t write a blog either.

11– How do you see The Elephants evolving?

BR & JS: Evolving is kind of the goal. We've published books of theory, fiction, poetry. We did an online magazine, we do books, we’re publishing digital chapbooks this year. We have no idea what comes next, other than the two books a year, which we're committed to.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

BR: Too early to say, I reckon, but I really love our books. I don't think I could choose. The magazine and chapbooks were huge projects, no less than the printed stuff. No serious frustrations J

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

BR &; JS: There’s so many presses we’ve stolen from / been inspired by. Omnidawn’s commitment to community, same goes for Talon Books, Krupskaya’s decades-long, almost libidinously swerve-y aesthetic, Song Cave’s instant credibility, Coach House’s decades as a center of publishing the transgressive, just to name contemporaries. I mean, if we were to try to answer this question historically we’d never stop talking. Small press history is practically a history of deviant thought unto itself.  

14– How does The Elephants work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see The Elephants in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

BR & JS: We’re based in Vancouver, a border town. I’m American (now dual), Jordan is Canadian, we’ve published work from luminaries and first publications from new writers, work from folks in Ireland, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, China, Spain... Solidarity is the thing.

We read political and scientific as much or more than literary journals…we probably read the same journals you do! To answer the question directly, though there are some incredible ones out there, we don’t really publish to engage in dialogue with like-minded folks, so much as we use the press to find new directions for reading.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

BR & JS: Sure, we do local book fairs. And readings too, mostly west coast, we love seeing people. Our new authors, Johanna Drucker and Jocelyn Saidenberg, will be reading up and down the west coast in May and early June (details on our website, theelephants.net). We did the Whale Prom at AWP this year, and it was lovely.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

BR & JS: It’s a big part of what we do. We do online pubs and digital-only pubs, we sell through the website, we IG at @the_elephants__ and we’re on FB.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

BR: We hold open reading periods every May. I’m happy to say we don't know what we’re looking for! But we aren’t looking for things that confirm what we already know—we want to be turned around and see the thing we were missing.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

BR: We published our first two books last year, Joanna Ruocco’s The Week and Helen Dimos’s No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale. I think it’s Joanna’s eighth or ninth book and Helen’s first. Helen wrote hers in Athens, a center of neoliberal geopolitics, and Joanna’s book is unclassifiable prose. We just published Johanna Drucker’s daring and brilliant act of imaginative thinking, The General Theory of Social Relativity, which uses the case study of Trump and quantum physics to make an argument for radically reconfiguring the social sciences. And Jocelyn Saidenberg’s kith & kin, is a book-length durational elegy that floored Jordan and I when it came in. So smart and so deeply felt, what she can do with a line…quiet fireworks on every page.

12or 20 (small press) questions;