Paul Dutton | The Plastic Typewriter

Paul Dutton

The Plastic Typewriter

Toronto, Canada: Writer's Forum, 1993

[22 pp], 27 x 21 x .5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Completed in 1977, this collection of typewriter poems was made with a disassembled plastic typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons, carbon paper, a metal file and white bond paper.

Dutton died late last month, when I was traveling. I’m a little dismayed at the lack of obituaries, given the breadth of his work. He was in two very significant performing collectives: CCMC (alongside Michael Snow, Jon Oswald and others) and The Four Horsemen (with bp Nichol, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera). He fronted the former (an avant-garde free jazz band) and was one of four vocalists in the latter, a sound poetry group. Dutton was also an accomplished writer and poet, and has produced many books, as both author and publisher.

I met Paul at Toronto’s City Hall, when CCMC were performing. Afterwards we went to dinner on Yonge Street with Michael Snow, Christian Bok and an actor from Les Miserable or some other big blockbuster theatre work from the time. We stayed in touch and subsequently I volunteered to help collate some of the publications he produced under his imprint Underwhich Editions (which co-produced The Plastic Typewriter). 

I later worked with him professionally when I helped produce a concert of CCMC and Christian Marclay, and later a compact disk recording of the event. 

I was too young to witness the Four Horsemen live, but I saw CCMC perform many times. Perhaps most notably when they opened up for Sonic Youth at the Warehouse, in 1998. I was worried that indie rock audiences would have little patience for the improvised jazz noodlings and Dutton’s odd vocalizations, but before the show Thurston Moore walked to the mic and announced that they were hand-picked to perform and that he hoped the audience would give them their full attention. Such was the sway of Moore at the time that the audience stood and watched silently and respectfully.