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. 

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

[Various artists]

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

Madison, USA: Partial Press, 2022

180 pp., 5.83 x 8.27”, softcover

Edition size unknown

A compendium that collects a series of ‘conceptual’ or ‘unrealized’ books and moves them one step closer to realization by bounding them together and getting them into bookstores. 

Edited and published (as Partial Press) by Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman, the book’s full title is 

A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists: Possibly Undermining Their Conceptual Commitment to Dematerialization, but Also Sparking Unforeseen Juxtapositions and Insinuating the Works into New Situations.

Featuring over ninety contributors from around the world, the volume presents books that previously only existed as "verbal statements, descriptions, or provocations”. Beyond conceptual works, the book features rhetorical, impossible and implausible books.

The title can be purchased from Fungus Books, in Pittsburgh, a small but well-curated store dedicated to "Rare, new, & used books, records, printed matter.” Fungus was founded by writer Ed Steck, alongside partners Seth Glick (Concept Art Gallery) and Michael Seamans (Mind Cure Records). Seamans stocks a small display of vinyl records in the store, where one might find Sun Ra, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno, Moondog, Jandek, and Terry Riley disks. 

The bookstore carries some of my favourite contemporary publishers of artists’ books: Primary Information, Siglio Press, and New Documents. Our visit was brief, but I spotted several gems, such as 

Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine Plans, a rare Ben Vautier pamphlet, Steve McCaffery’s double volume Seven Pages Missing and Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man reprint. Other author/artists in stock included Harry Smith, Susan Howe, Luis Bunuel, Bernadette Mayer, William Burroughs, Yvonne Rainer, James Baldwin, Valie Export, Dieter Roth, Destroy All Monsters, and many others. 

The store is located at 700 & 1/2 South Trenton Avenue, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visit their site here. 

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists is also available as an ebook, for $2.00, here.  

"When Levi first envisioned the anthology, he pictured conceptual books in the vein of 1960s and ‘70s Conceptual art, and we did receive such books. Like many Fluxus publications, these conceptual books build a frame through which to view everyday experiences in a new light. An Index of Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Bruex makes this explicit: “Instructions: Move through your days with awareness of new beginnings and final endings.” Some instruction pieces lend themselves to execution, relying on chance to produce novel outcomes. Random Color Generated Instant Book by Esther K Smith & Susan Happersett exemplifies this approach with detailed, plainspoken instructions and everyday materials. Other instructions are more poignant as mental exercises. In this category, we would place Who Has Seen the Wind by Cathryn Miller of Byopia Press. One could feasibly print her ninety-nine sonograms of the wind, but it is Miller’s Duchampian declaration that these imagined prints are art, specifically asemic poems, that is so striking. Despite their variety, these works all share Conceptual art’s emphasis on the viewer/reader rather than the artist. They remind us that reading is a creative, constitutive act.”

 - Carley Gomez

Four Horsemen | Nada Canadada

Four Horsemen

Nada Canadada

Milan, Italy: Holidays Records, 2018

12" vinyl LP

Edition of 250 

Originally released in 1972 by Griffin House,  this reissue of the acclaimed collection of sound poetry by Toronto's Four Horsemen (bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery) includes a sixteen-page booklet and a printed inner sleeve with original artwork. 

"The number of words we still use in our poetry comes as somewhat of a surprise to us, especially in the light of this album. Strictly speaking we cannot call what we do sound poetry if by it is meant that poetry which has its basis in non-verbal, vocal, and sub-vocal elements of sound. Nor are we into the electronic ramifications of sound in any sense beyond doing a record. We are in fact reluctant to pin the aesthetic continuum on which we operate to the first wall available. Still, perhaps the best name for what we do is what it always has been: poetry". 

- Rafael Barreto-Rivera. 

Steve McCaffery | Ow’s Waif and Other Poems

Steve McCaffery
Ow’s Waif and Other Poems
Toronto, Canada: Coach House Press, 1975
[160 pp], 16 x 12 cm., hardcover
Edition of 500

Concrete poetry by Toronto author Steve McCaffery, in the form of a "comically abbreviated" version of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1845 collection of poems The Waif.  McCaffery aimed to create "a near to total separation of form from content, the entire 'borrowing' of content as a prepared word-supply and a creative concentration on the invention of the poems' forms as verbal fields free of presupposed or prerequisite rule structures of grammar and syntax."

The work is a collaboration of sorts, designed and illustrated with innovative typography and ‘Instant Lettering collages’ by Robert Macdonald. Macdonald was then a prolific freelance designer (50 titles a year, reportedly) and later ran the The Banff Publishing Workshop.


"Artist's Book may not seem like quite the right term for the resultant productions. Illustrations, for example the reproductions of old engravings underlying the text in In England Now that Spring and the anatomical drawings in Panopticon, are sparse, and the innovative typography, used in the early works like Ow's Waif, gives way, in the recent Black Debt, to a long, continuous block of large type with justified left and right margins. Compared to, say, John Baldessari's or Martha Rosler's artists' books, McCaffery's look amateurish and a shade drab. One would not expect to see them in art galleries or at "book art" exhibitions.

But as Johanna Drucker has shown in her recent The Century of Artists' Books, the only distinguishing feature of "artists' books," a genre that has come into its own only in the twentieth century, is that "they call attention to the specific character of a book's identity while they embody the expressive complexity of the book as a communicative form." Drucker places McCaffery's work in the chapter "Books as Verbal Exploration," and more specifically under "Typewriter Works." Her emphasis on the book qua book, with its tension between the apparent conventionality of the codex form and and the "inexhaustible possibilities" of its composition, echoes an earlier discussion of artists' books by Richard Kostelanetz. "[An] essential distinction," he writes, "separates imaginative books from conventional books. In the latter, syntactically familiar sentences are set in rectangular blocks of uniform type (resembling soldiers in a parade), and these are then "designed" into pages that look like each other (and like pages we have previously seen).

An imaginative book, by definition, attempts to realize something else with syntax, with format, with pages, with covers, with size, with shapes, with sequence, with structure, with binding--with any or all of these elements." In this sense, McCaffery's are certainly exemplars of book art, pages functioning as "trellises" upon which lettrist and verbal experiments are hung, the whole giving a very different impression from the individual page on the one hand and the conventional illustrated book on the other.

[...]

These "supply texts"--the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the works of Shakespeare, the I Ching, various newspapers, magazines and abandoned drafts of earlier poems--were subjected to "numerous chance and random techniques to assist me in word selection and partial syntactic structuring to a degree such as would keep me excluded from the content part of the compositions." The reader will recognize this as a technique similar to Jackson Mac Low*'s chance-generated poems and especially to John Cage's "writings through" texts from the Bible to Finnegans Wake."

- Marjorie Perloff

* Note: the copy of the Ow’s Waif and Other Poems above (from The Idea of the Book site) is inscribed to Fluxus artist and concrete poet Jackson Mac Low, November '75.

To Steve McCaffery from Dick Higgins

A February 1977 postcard from Dick Higgins to Steve McCaffery, from the Granary Books Steve McCaffery Archive.

The card reads:

"Dear Steve -

Karl Young wants to look at the Filliou/bpN/SMcC/dh book when it's ready for his Membrane Press - okay?

Love to you and Maggie, & to bp,

Dick"

The book Higgins refers to is called Six Fillious, and is co-authored by Filliou, Higgins, McCaffery, bpNichol, George Brecht and Dieter Roth. See earlier post, here, for details.

To Steve McCaffery from bpNichol

From bpNichol to Steve McCaffery, April 27, 1977, from the Granary Books archive:

"From the hand of bpNichol, "his left hand knows what his right hand is doing"

Steve,

worth noting in regard to the CONTINUITY QUESTION is our long discussions about whether to put out an album (i.e. frozen state when what we deal with is shifting — our preference then for LIVE IN THE WEST as more obviously documentary of an occasion & time) & our ongoing discussion of electronic elements as it relates to this question of energy interface. i.e. its human energy not electric we’re dealing with[.]

bp”

To Steve McCaffery from Bob Cobbing

Bob Cobbing to Steve McCaffery, October 13, 1990, from the Granary Books archive:

“Unexpectedly printed your The Entrift for a Writers Forum launch last weekend...It makes a nice little book. I read it at the launch and it went down well with the audience. Because I did it in a hurry, I didn’t check for errors, apart from correcting the ones you already marked — there are a few, I think, so I’ll ask you to do a proof read and let me know what to correct, in time for the second edition. (I did only 60 copies of the first edition, and they'll soon go."

To Steve McCaffery from Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins to Steve McCaffery, April 17, 1976: 

“Dear Steve McCaffery, 

Curious as to what you do. I hear your name from people and places I respect - and would like to know the work. 

Separately, I'm sending some of my writings: hope you will enjoy them. If you could send me something of yours, I would be very interested. 

So few sound poets on this continent! I’m in touch with some of the European ones, but besides Nichol I don’t like any in North America. Seems to [sic] often to affect a false naivity [sic] (Bissett, Lurie, the Harlemans, etc.).

Seems I'll be teaching at Milwaukee next spring: will surely cover sound poetry. 

Very bests, 

Dick Higgins”

This letter seems like quintessential Dick Higgins: curious and candid (note the dig at Bill Bissett, who surely would've moved in the same circles as McCaffery at the time). I used to correspond with Higgins and he often offered blunt assessment of the work of his fellow Fluxus artists. The letters were all marked "not for publication" at the top and bottom of the page. 

For more correspondence with Steve McCaffery, visit the archive at Granary Books, here. 

To Steve McCaffery from Robert Filliou

 
A postcard from Robert Filliou dated September 2nd, 1978 that reads:

“Greetings from Iceland, Steve. Thank you for your last letter. Your definitions of FUTILITY & UTILITY show a way out of the dilemma of gay vs dismal science (utility & freedom, that’s poetical economy). As for the corkscrew I've taken, I'll use it to open new bottles, to drink the new wine therein. I do hope you'll be in Europe this spring....Unfortuntately I have no suggestions as to paid performances. I suppose that's why I've been teaching here for a month. Love RF."

Also above: a collage dating from the same time that features both Filliou and McCaffery, though it's unclear who produced it, or if it were made in collaboration.

For more examples, visit the Steve McCaffery archive at Granary Books, here.

Steve McCaffery Archive

Steve McCaffery is a Toronto poet and scholar, who taught at York University and currently holds the Gray Chair at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Born in Sheffield, England on January 24th, 1947), McCaffery lived in the UK for most of his youth. After graduating from the University of Hull, he moved to Toronto in 1968, where he sought out fellow poet bpNichol. Together with Rafael Barreto-Rivera and Paul Dutton (now in CCMC with Michael Snow and John Oswald) they formed the influential sound poetry collective The Four Horsemen. Considered the country's first sound and performance poetry ensemble, the group released two 12" vinyl records, two cassettes, and three print collections. They remained active for almost twenty years, until Nichol's death in 1988.

McCaffery and Nichol also collaborated on the Toronto Research Group, a 1973 group which “critiqued established forms, values, and meanings via exuberant performances of fragmentation and dispersal; and they applied poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to poetics to expose underlying socio/cultural assumptions.” (Pauline Bunting and Susan Rudy).

He is the author of countless books and has twice been nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award.

The Steve McCaffery archive is offered for sale by Granary Books. It comprises over sixty boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, journals, sketchbooks, address books, flyers, lecture notes and audio and video tapes.

For more information, visit Granary Books, here. The five or six posts that follow will feature examples of postcards and letters sent to McCaffery from concrete poets, Fluxus artists and others.



"When I came from England the only poet that I really wanted to meet in Canada was bp Nichol, whose concrete poetry I’d become acquainted with through little magazines. When we first met we realized we had both been working in relative vacuums, and two people interested in the same thing naturally led to collaboration.

After the Four Horsemen formed in 1969, bp and I started the Toronto Research Group, dedicated to investigating alternative forms to the standard expository or critical essay.

Later came my correspondence with Dick Higgins, which led among other things to Six Fillious—a collaboration with Filliou himself, bp, Dick Higgins, George Brecht and Diter Rot (a predominantly Fluxus gathering of poet-artists).

Later followed the collaboration with Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray Di Palma, and Ron Silliman that resulted in Legend. All of these collaborations came out of pure chance (on my coming to Canada, on bp living in Toronto rather than say Vancouver, Dick Higgins contacting me by mail, etc.). Yet they were all informed by the common, fundamental desire to get away from that romantic ideologeme of the lyric self. The sheer energy of collaborative writing exceeds isolated subjectivity, for one is always in collision and in cooperation with another; the creative primal scene here is both community and alterity. It’s interesting that the collaboration with bp Nichol involved integral destructive elements, i.e. we would freely delete each other’s words and phrases substituting are own. (I talk about the dynamics of dictation and transcription that governed so much of the TRG collaboration in the Introduction to Rational Geomancy.) By contrast, the five-way collaboration on Legend was very structured and clean; it was based on discrete accretions with a high integrity placed on distinct contributions. When I started collaborating by deleting other people’s lines and phrases it created a certain amount of opposition."

-  Steve McCaffery, to Ryan Cox, 2007

Steve McCaffery | William Tell: A Novel