Simon Cutts | Beyond Reading

Simon Cutts
Beyond Reading
London, UK: Coracle Press/workfortheeyetodo, [1993]
16 pp., 22 x 15.2 cm., staple-bound


The tenth Little Critic Pamphlet opens with a quote Stéphane Mallarmé from his 1895 essay Crise de Vers:

"The pure work implies the elocutory disappearance of the poet, who abandons the initiative to words mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical blast of the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase."

followed by Cutts' text (a line per page):

The unit of the work cannot be the sentence

or the phrase

or the line

the linear syntax structure causes

the line

the phrase

the sentence

to be systematic, sequential

the unit of the work is the

word


and lastly, a section called Notes, in which Cutts expands on the above:

"The work is its own continuous accumulative impression, varying and differing not only for each reader, but each time it is read. For this continuous structure to be effective, it must to be the antithesis of a sequential reading…to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity."