INTRODUCTION

In an interview conducted by Tyler Gobble and published at Vouched Books on 04 November 2013, the poet Joe Hall mentions (and links to a blog post about) his “book destroying project.” Hall’s destruction of material artifacts is, to his mind, a “precious” act, an engagement with time, a way in which to remember, a challenge to the concept of permanence, as well as instances of appropriation and enactment. Yes, Hall understands that destruction, perhaps, should not be placed in binary opposition to creation; rather, he views creation and destruction as similar concepts.

When I initially read the Hall-Gobble interview, their discussion reminded me of a rather chaotic piece of correspondence I sent to the poet Lilly Brown in April 2013. In March 2013, we exchanged manuscripts which we each had recently completed. Specifically, she sent me a .doc file of The Haptic Cold, which Ugly Duckling Presse eventually released in November 2013. I can’t say how, exactly, I came up with the idea to interact with her poems in such a manner, but I felt compelled to print a hard copy of her chapbook and feed the individual sheets of paper through my typewriter. As I did, I recorded my immediate impressions of the poem without reservation. As the manuscript progressed, I began including re-writes and erasures of her poem, as well as visual collages.

Hall and Gobble's interview, as well as the memory of my engagement with Brown's manuscript, provided me with the inspiration to begin a more systematic approach to radical reading practices of which I was much in need of at the time. Having spent a considerable portion of the previous four years writing reviews, annotations, and synopses of collections of contemporary poetry, I was eager to engage books in different manner, transforming my readings into immersive/intensive experiences.

And what is an immersive/intensive experience? To my mind, it is an engagement with a text that asks the reader to become more than a reader, at least when conceptualizing a “reader” in the traditional sense. Immersive/intensive experiences (or readings), rather, require an individual to become a creator, an active responder, and a collaborator who is highly attuned to the materiality of the artifact in addition to the book’s content. In fact, the book’s content and its materiality become--if not indistinguishable--complicated, similar, and confused. Even more than simply becoming attuned to these aspects of an artifact, though, the immersive/intensive experience requires that a reader augment or subtract from the materiality/content in such a way that the act of reading becomes inscribed or marked upon the page. To this end, there is a record of reading practice.

In Hall’s interview with Gobble, the poet also notes that he had, at the time, “been doing things for people not on an exchange but a gift basis.” The act of giving also became paramount to my process of immersive/intensive reading, in that I found a way to give the altered artifacts back to the original authors. No request for reciprocity was made. None was expected. In fact, on some occasions, contact with the original author afterward has been slight or nearly nonexistent.

A final aspect of my immersive/intensive experiences was the ephemeral nature of the readings, at least to me. Outside of the following overview videos on this site, no images of these texts remain. The only people with access to the artifacts are the original authors themselves. I have as little recourse to the material as anyone else; perhaps, in some instances, even less. In many ways, I see this aspect of the project as a conceptual growl against the digital reproduction and proliferation of texts. (The D.I.Y. nature of my readings, I think, also acts similarly, in that they actively work through an aesthetic that functions antagonistically toward the precision and faux-technical mastery which most word-processing and design software enable a user to achieve.)

I have prefaced the video overviews that follow with some brief notes about each immersive/intensive experience. (You can find individual links to each "chapter" and video in the sidebar.) If you would like more information about these readings, feel free to contact me via the email address in the sidebar. For a more detailed viewing of these readings, you will need to find a way to contact the authors directly.


CHAPTER 01: The Oops