The Poetry Foundation recently posted an interview on their website with book artist Jen Bervin and poet Nancy Kuhl about small publishers producing poetry chapbooks — both the traditional form of pages sewn along a fold as well as more complicated artist’s books. It’s interesting for what they have to say about the state of the chapbook, although I spent more time exploring the links within the article to various bookworks.
The page detail to the left is from Jen Bervin’s The Desert — “a poem (she) wrote by sewing row by row, line by line, across 130 pages of John Van Dyke’s, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901).” Bervin uses sewing in many of her books — her website has good pictures and text about her editions. She talks in the interview and on her website about the small chapbooks Emily Dickinson made of her poems, as well as Dickinson’s use of punctuation and marks to indicate variants in her work. The Dickinson Fascicle is Bervin’s artist book in response to Dickinson’s work. Bervin also has an online-only artist book, A Non-Breaking Space.
Great blog; so full of useful info. Thanks for this post – you have unearthed for me another artist whose work I adore.