In the SFCB Gallery
Jan 25-Apr 25, 2008
Curators: Mary Austin & Kathleen Burch
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 Repair
Bill Kelly, poet and typographer Inspired by a conservator's notes on an Italian Herbal, circa 1500, housed at the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont; bandaged stone figures at the twelfth-century Cloister of Saint Trophime in Arles, France; photographs of Warsaw, Poland, after the World War II bombings there; and visits to the sites of forest fires and firestorms in the western United States. The difference Brighton Press incorporates experimental printmaking, poetry and fine printing. The physical work of putting together their books - the craft - is conjoined with continuous conversation exploring ideas of what they might want in each book that they undertake. The publishers have noted that "as Mallarme once compared the typographical arrangement of a poem to a musical score, for we hear it as we read. Just as words become sounds, so too do they become images, and the images, sensations. Aspiring toward an art that engages hand, eye, and mind with equal fervor, Brighton Press encourages the components of a book to shift and share roles freely. Words and images transcend their presumed boundaries to spawn verbal sculpture, visual poetry, 'syllables that are rattles that are seeds' (Octavio Paz, Convergences), images that echo sounds, pages that embrace as they are embraced." After working with the press on >How It Is, poet Peter Everwine commented: "Sending a manuscript to a commercial publisher usually ends a process that begins with the solitary but intimate act of writing poems . . . poems move off into the opacity of the publisher's house; they become invisible and no longer "at hand." . . . What was once solitary becomes rich with the continual give and take of shared work; what was intimate grows deeper in the mutual desire to envision the whole. The book we produced together belongs equally to both of us." | |||
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