Paris Talk: Writing Ideas For and About Poiesis

How do we think a work into being? Now, in the past, and in accord with considerations of format as imprint, thought forms as training, ergonomics of composition, limits and extension of human language, the tasks and charges to aesthetic activity, and the concepts and constructs of enunciative modalities and subjectivity? Working with exemplars from forty years of writing practice, and recent papers on poetics, poeisis, and other topics, this talk weaves between process and idea to demonstrate poetic work in its performative and meta-critical dimensions.

Diagrammatic and Stochastic: Two theoretical approaches to poetics   

University of Iowa presentation, 2014

Sketches two modes of poetic composition within the modern tradition and in relation to the contemporary identity of poetic language in noise culture.

Stochastic Poeticss   

University of Chicago presentation, Poetry and Poetics Workshop, November 8, 2012

Sketches two modes of poetic composition within the modern tradition and in relation to the contemporary identity of poetic language in noise cultue.

Interrupt: After Speaking in Tongues   

Interrupt event featured presentation, March 14, 2015

How do we conceive of a literary work, now, where think is a transitive verb and the conditions of production take into account certain trends of critical thought.

Calisthenics of Composition: How Some of Some Poems Get Made   

Threads Talk Series: Granary Books and Cunieform Press, 2016

A study of the physicality of writing in various media, as well as the imprint of media forms on compositional practice.

Other Others, first version: Aesthetic Activity and the Literary Realm    

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, Louisville, Keynote, February 19, 2016

This version focuses on how the category of aesthetic activity distinguishes itself from other cultural practices, with particular attention to literary production as a subset of language and discourse.

Other Others, second version: After Alterity and the Concept of Amongness   

The Contemporary, keynote, Princeton University, March 3, 2016

This version emphasizes the investigation of modes of subjectivity, enunciation, and an undoing of specificity rooted in alterity, suggesting, instead, a concept of amongness.

Interrupt Event Report   

An account of the event at Brown, March 14, 2016.

Thinking a Book (notes)    

Books and the Human, London, December 16, 2015

Notes for the London panel, articulating the ways in which a book is "thought" into being as a form and format.

Beyond Conceptualism: After the Individual Voice   

Poetry Newsletter

Thinking about poetry in relation to changes in subjectivity and enunciative modalities; much misread and misquoted.

Selected Exemplars from my books (1976 to 2016)

Twenty-six '76

Link

Diagrammatic extraction of stochastic events from a travel experience; events understood as timeslices across space projected onto the sheet of paper; snapshots from a series of events. Letterpress, using various fonts to indicate narrative, meta-commentary, found language, and reported speech.

Pages from 26 '76  

          

From A to Z

  

Link

Work using the semantics of format, using the inventory of relations among elements of text and paratext, to create a work. Letterpress, 48 drawers of type, using each letter once and only once, to make a work that made sense and is an account of the socially mediated relations of the poetry scene, 1975 to 1977, in the Bay Area.

Pages from From A to Z

         

Through Light and the Alphabet

  

Link

Typographic fugue in which each new element is integrated into every existing line and once introduced, continues throughout. Meant to proliferate meaning through multiple levels of reading.
      Pages from Through Light and the Alphabet

  

The Word Made Flesh

  

Link

Typographic scoring reinforces the difficulty of reading as both planes of reference and discourse are engaged with materiality.
       Page from The Word Made Flesh

The History of the/my Wor(l)d

  

Link

Parallel texts interrupt each other so that the large, rewritten, history is broken by smaller lines of personal memory, which erupt into it, and then captions on images tell anecdotal tales filled with puns that reinforce the visual puns and associations.       Page from The History of the/my Wor(l)d  &nbap;

  

Prove Before Laying

  

Link

Work in which the single font of type is used sequentially and combinatorially to figure forth a text from finite constraints. No letters added or subtracted, and all are used in each iteration.       
Page from Prove Before Laying

  

Stochastic Poetics

  

PDF  

Print on Demand.

Demonstration of the ways the figure of poetic composition emerges in relation to the ground of noise culture. Based on real events.       
Page from Stochastic Poetics

Diagrammatic Writing

  

Link

   Available for purchase.

A study of the ways in which texts and paratexts work diagrammatically within the format of the page and across the book space.       
Pages from Diagrammatic Writing

  

For fully digitized versions of all of my artists' books up until 2008, see http://artistsbooksonline.org   and also http://www.johannadrucker.net.

Also, see Druckworks: Forty Years of Books and Projects available on Amazon; see Columbia College Center for Book and Paper