For more than a decade, poet and creative writing professor Susan Tichy has led a course that has students experimenting with various forms of altered or found poetry in book or book-like, anyway, form. Called Book Beasts, the course this year passed a new threshold: The Mason Library’s Special Collections Research Center has purchased work by Book Beast students Jordan Keller-Martinez and Sarah Laing for its archive of artists’ books.
“Book Beasts gathered forms, techniques and tools I otherwise would have disregarded,” said Keller-Martinez about the course’s approach, which often focuses on alterations of physical texts—specifically erasure with Keller-Martinez’s own “That Kindly Glittering Type.” “The black blotchy sharpie I first started with bothered me, so I instead began neatly cutting away words, lines, and paragraphs. Cutting vs. blotching changed how the erasure read: multiple pages visibly hollowed and read simultaneously vs. blacked-out words that create a more linear reading."
Keller-Martinez’s approach can be both academic—he cites Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes as directly influencing this piece—and less serious: “I had also just bought a sewing kit and I wanted to play.”
October 05, 2017
