Faded Paper Project

The poetry of dog-ears.

Thanks to the tweeting of Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök, I came across this wonderful concept for producing poetry that I had to share. Erica Baum’s new book Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) consists of dog-eared corners of paperback books, photographed into new life as poems. Like this:

Not To Wear Stockings, 2010

Baum’s work with Dog Ear challenges multiple poetic traditions at once. First off, it denies unidirectional reading. You can’t simply read these poems left-to-right like the snoozefest paperback novels from which they’re born. You have to go right-to-left and top-to-bottom. On top of that (kind of literally), you have the multiple tactile layers of the poem. With the page folded from the top left to the bottom right, the horizontal section of the poem is created by the page underneath (e.g. page 54), while the vertical section is created by the opposite side of the page on top (e.g. page 55). Both pages hide the page facing the viewer (e.g. page 56). The result is a multifaceted poem composed both of full words and unfinished morphemes.

Which is as much of a mindfuck as this, and in pretty much the same ways.

So how do you read this stuff?

In her essay “In moveme/braces,” Kaegan Sparks (who is much smarter than I’ll probably ever be) posits that you read each line as a continuous left-to-right-to-bottom sequence. So this:

Enclosing, 2010

translates to this:

I’m enclosing me here, or remain
you can also do now this,
I’m turned with you if I
answering no tiniest
Yes so it is
last me

The pleat/crease/fold is the site of new meaning-making in Baum’s poems, which are simple concepts, but frustrating as all hell to execute with any kind of success.

Like baking cake.

Try folding some pages and see how many of the resulting poems are worth putting in a book. Probably not many. Kudos to Erica Baum for this idea, and for doing it so freaking well. Check out a gallery of her dog-ear poems here. And for laughs, here are some of my poems attempts.