SHRINKRAP

LITANY IN QUADRAPHONY

ANDRÉ SPEARS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

SHRINKRAP, Litany in Quadraphony
by André Spears
Copyright © 2020

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Anne Rosēn

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-371-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940821

BlazeVOX [books]
131 Euclid Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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 Preface

[The Preface is adapted from a paper presented on the occasion of the Boog City Festival in Brooklyn
NY, August 2016.]

When I was first approached by Geoffrey Gatza by email to join his panel on poetry
and art (“The Exhilaration Of Upheaval”), I was reluctant to accept the invitation, not
simply because I had never written on the relation of poetry to the visual arts, but more
problematically because, at the moment of my reply, my feeling was that I didn’t really
have much interest in the topic.

Geoffrey wrote back:

“I thought you would be a great panelist after recalling our talks on art and seeing your
Android poems, they have a very visual feel to them that is, to my eye, related to many
arts movements… By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, your poetry plays
with the idea of the mortality of language confronted with the power of a transitory
appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense than mainstream
poetics.”

That sounded great and I figured he must understand something about my work that
I didn’t, or at least that was the hope.

Later, I was confronted with a simple truth to which I had been inexplicably blind: of
the eight short “books” I had managed to publish up until that time (nine, if I include
the collaborative “matchbook” Para Walter Benjamin), five were artist’s books produced
in collaboration with artists; three of the others had cover photographs taken by my
photographer wife, Anne Rosēn; and my first, self-published book (1983, republished
as a virtual chapbook by Dispatches Editions in 2019) presented on its cover, as a sort
of visual cue, a prominent glyph: the capitalized letters “X” and “O” (spelling the proper
name “Xo”). Indeed, it occurred to me that virtually all of my work, up to and including
Shrinkrap—which Geoffrey alludes to as the “Android poems”—can be said to
represent a deep and pervasive engagement with the field of visual art. This would also

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include the two-columned, face-to-face text of my ongoing “epic without organs” (the
latest installment of which was published in 2019 under the title XIII: Ship of State),
and even the recent collaborative project of “The Ralph Maud Collection of Charles
Olson’s Books,” the replicated library in Gloucester (MA), which can also be
understood as a conceptual art installation (cf. my essay “Maud / Olson and Me,” 2016).
So, looking back, the question I had been forced to face, given my reluctance to accept
Geoffrey’s invitation, was: why had I been blind to this truth about my own work? Why
didn’t I recognize myself as a writer for whom visual art seems key?

Speaking as one writer among others whose work does not fall under the rubric of what
Geoffrey calls the “mainstream poetics,” at a time when alternatives to the poetic
establishment are generally disregarded, I think my initial puzzled reaction to
Geoffrey’s invitation had to do with my assumption that it was simply the reality of
marginalization that led me to work with artists. I found a venue for my work where
the opportunity presented itself.

In other words, I dismissed the importance of my engagement with visual art because,
in my blindness, I remembered it as a convenient way to get my work into the public
sphere, i.e. “published.”

My friendship with the French artist Richard Meier of Voix Editions, who I had
known for a long time, first set me on my path. Since the mid-1970s, when he adopted
the artist’s book as his chosen medium, he has produced hundreds of limited-edition
artist’s books. During a visit to New York, he offered to publish my Letters from Mu:
Part I, which was the first installment from an epistolary work in progress. I knew from
experience with American publishers of poetry that it was Unpublishable: not only was
I unknown, but my work was eccentric, since it was essentially premised on a hybrid
“archaic” form combining fiction and poetry. As a result of that conversation with
Richard Meier, I collaborated in 1999 with my good friend, the Swiss abstract artist
Gilgian Gelzer, in Paris. In response to my work he produced a series of some 55
drawings that were subsequently interspersed between the pages of the book’s twelve
chapters. After that, in short order, through a network of associates in France, I
collaborated with the French artist Scanreigh on two small artist’s books (Lost in Space
and United States) and a series of woodblock prints.

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The point is: I did not necessarily see these initial collaborations with artists as
representing any particular interest in the visual arts. But when I consider the trajectory
of my writing since then—the way in which it continues to gravitate, however remotely,
toward the field of visual art—I begin to ask myself whether I’m not bringing into my
work a vision that is determined in large part by that field.

A visual element began to insinuate itself into my own texts at the same time that I
continued to collaborate with artists on the making of artist’s books: namely, with Anne
Rosēn—on the book Translation (2010), as well as on the aforementioned “matchbook”
Para Walter Benjamin (2011)—and again with Gilgian Gelzer on En Terre Perdue
(2013), my translation into French of Letters from Mu: Part I, for which he produced
22 new color drawings in the “Addendum.”

The artist’s book Translation presents highly torqued “translations”—homophonic

translations, a “flash” translation, the translation of a forgery—from Baudelaire,
Lautréamont, Mallarmé and Rimbaud. In her series of photographs accompanying the
texts, Anne Rosēn uses a variety of techniques—overlay, double exposure, composites,
HDR, collage, imitation silkscreen—to play, like the texts themselves, with the idea
that translation from one language to another can also function as an image for the
translation of one art form (in this case, photography) into another, i.e. for a process in
which the passage from one form to another both preserves and renews the art itself.

When I consider the aforementioned translation of Letters from Mu (Part I) , I find that
I have to question another assumption. I had thought that the reason I chose to
translate my own work-in-progress into another language was simply for the purpose
of re-gathering in my mind the threads of a fictional narrative begun decades ago, and
that I was trying to advance my narrative (while literally translating one artist’s book
into another artist’s book). I was stepping back in order to jump further ahead—as in
the French expression, il faut reculer pour mieux sauter—but in so doing I was also
renewing a process in which the engagement with visual art continued to function as a
source of inspiration. The translation from English into French renewed the
translatability of my text into an abstract visual field.

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In a nutshell, when I consider the visual element in Shrinkrap—the four vertical
columns of text, which are meant to suggest the flowing lines of code on the computer
screens in the film The Matrix; or the two columns of text in XIII: Ship of State, whose
central outline is meant to evoke the banks of a river or the trace of a current on the
ocean’s surface—what I’ve come to see is that they represent an engagement with visual
art that was not only there from the beginning, but that also determined the path I have
followed.

To describe that path, and to square it away with “the exhilaration of upheaval,” I find
it useful to fall back on Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which I am still re-
reading. In their parlance, my first artist’s book marked the opening of a line-of-flight,
and set me on the path of becoming-imperceptible. Alone in the wilderness, I had been
called to join a wolf pack, and leave my desire to be part of the herd back in the dust of
its own de-territorialization. Of interest to me, in other words, is the way in which
terms such as “line-of-flight,” “becoming-imperceptible,” “wolf pack,” “de-
territorialization”… like “becoming-animal,” “plane of consistency,” “smooth space,”
“faciality, “war-machine” or “nomad thought” all belong to a conceptual apparatus
dedicated to the process of becoming in the field of immanence of a here-and-now.
When I look to my own work, I think the inherent possibility of poetry becoming art,
art becoming poetry—the process of the one’s potential translation into the other—
serves a kindred conceptual vision to the one that animates A Thousand Plateaus.

It should therefore not be surprising, in retrospect, that when Geoffrey in his email to
me referred to our “talks on art,” what we were in effect talking about was the work of
Marcel Duchamp, the high priest of conceptual art, in whom Geoffrey and I share a
marked common interest. No artist casts as long a shadow on the process by which art
might become pure poetry, and poetry serve as threshold to the pure here-and-now
within a visual field, as does Duchamp. So perhaps I could sum up by saying that the
problem for me on the “plane of consistency,” for which my writing would articulate a
solution, is how to work with that shadow.

A final note. Most recently, the process of becoming-imperceptible—say, within the

larger global movement of “the minoritarian becoming-everything of everybody”—led
me to the work of Cy Twombly. Subsequent to the release, in March 2016, of a

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facsimile of Duchamp’s Green Box, about which Geoffrey and I exchanged a few
emails, I went with my son to visit the Duchamp room at the Philadelphia Museum,
specifically to see Duchamp’s two masterworks Le Grand Verre and Etant Donnés.
What I did not expect to see, and didn’t know about, was the addition to the
museum, in a nearby room, of Twombly’s extraordinary series of paintings inspired by
the Trojan war, Fifty Days at Iliam. Indeed, the bottom line of what I have to say is: if
you haven’t been there, go. The passage from the Duchamp room to the room that
contains Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam is like a Mobius strip on which the end of art
forever meets the beginning of poetry in a present moment that is ours.

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 SHRINKRAP

who
where
you you
mother what vertical
you migration when
father what levitation
rock-a-dollar watt not intuition then
brother sister oracular sensation zen
TU-MOR Pol Pot stoned threat zone
blister Delphic rot chromosome towing rope
the heart E-Z bridge to bone mutilated
or Yanqui Archon muon boat
the feather quartz, farts syphon stone’s
the black- qw-erty… hard-on throw
and …az-erty oink! E-book
-white Normandie Kora of clone
pebbles Taboo the Delta Mu-sic
whizz boom $ helta skelta Mu-sic
crash to sonar stillbirth Mu-sic
ashes solar spear- business cry
unto grass head hybrid Abyssinian u.n.c.l.e.
for the Fool modem Christmas aunt
out of school Boogaloo no CHANCE
Latin mouse thru 2 Christian dance
in the house not now tradition in pants
tweak too loud missionary from
the Greek pow- position France
freak wow science- at

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 tweet tweet know-how fiction the
beep-beep genital Dreamtime
Virgo neurosis Slug’s
in the maze —gnosis— the Bhopal
oh! Pax from thugs
these the Bronx weird hugs
are Om drugs! drugs!
the days Konx glory glory
the rhyme & jettatore
beautiful reason don’t worry
end my friend Eve ’n Steven you BE th’aer
00 hypo-manic down
Segway at ACK the stairs
dream text on the Red in
Rem Rem & the Black sitcom bardo
vortex where invisible pasta gestapo
random procession from
clusters what Mysterions’ Rothschild
trust funders the obsession to
when moon’s what Oddjob
tusks on
who Ram where Sumitomo’s
rhizomatic The Bull kitty’s Makedonia
Mong on fire rotten who
Sun-Ship’s feed-back bones
Song spiral Dr. Go Go when
they all got MEDOUSSAS home Salamander’s
ECRASARAT
“alibis” LES RATS Acosmia Son
on Tit- for- Tat can’t cure came-
the off the bat you and-went
Panel Kleenex- alone to run
of the Signs caress test pay the toll for fun
dis- best to son-of-a-gun
mem- in the West the throne for
ber- you of business
ed text next Zozimos undone
tapestries earth the Troll blood
angelic of iron of old in the skull
flattery skies drones Dial

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 of the tears of bronze screaming M
and physical U for Mum
the fears graffiti & upraised
the cheers on the Dark mi arms
the beers Side from squatting
the gears of the moon out of gods
the clear sous rature rounded eons gone
ideas Song rainbows terebinth
the sneers of freedom-fried tamarisk
the smears Songs potatoes rhizome ruins
for strike $$ Looney
your ears The Gong info-tainment Eye-Tunes
failed please Tang station-
nailed please containment to-
jailed please the Streets station
at Yale mise-en- of toward
S-hook abyme San the swarm
Scriabin knot Francisco in
last tango in- Left Behind the storm
La Parisienne between never pill after pill
de-hiscent en famille mind chain-smoke
kitsch with mono-culture thrills
mystic fluff Levi-Strauss margin’s lotto
in the buff Mickey Mouse Other longing for
with Heisenberg Tintin The
Woodsy and pasha Cauldron
McGruff Dr. Faust litmus casbah on the White
shave @PoetsHouse green House Phones
and seafarin’ felt belt zodiac
a haircut the Aegean Tourette’s zingers
mis-fit for dot.net X-tian rivers
Goddess tits deconstructed £ ¥
one-inch prick meaning happy salami waves
arithmetic from a bet of illusion
hey hey hey the monster is resolution
a dollar a day of a bet eternal return
a Glousta don’t forgive oblation
million to don’t forget creation
dollars the “E” always / sacrificial

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 a on already burn
million the stone not yet fuel, smoke
days € warp & woof flame, coal
keep your all alone is sparks
shrink again the proof inside
well-paid on the road dawn’s your heart
$$$ Nomad fruit grilled meat
Mazda evermore BAM in
Yggdrasil nowaday thank you, Central Park
Num throw away Ma’an firestarter
in disguise what you much ado in the dark
recycle say Ubu westerly
the waste can’t publish U-U all-night
face- the rubbish Univac on Broadway
to nothing whirlwind on Broadway
-face but Jarvik-7 history’s
close your JIZZ Apache stop
eyes Crack! Bang! dance steps pimples pop
fantasize Fizz! to Heaven who
Cheyenne the keys fractal
neumes O! Jeez round-house when
for domination goes to money
flute freedom 11 walks
El control: clear kill “double-
Dorado ♫ by talk”
on mute hole-in- the asphodels talks
when the-wall of Hel event-horizon
where magic turtle transitional
who feeds on air state
Aldebaran what what counter-
Fomalhaut agitation intuitive
Regulus dilation where big mistake
default face swatting poisonous
Roseate the spiders falsehood
prevailing Amazon chapbook hard on
Kora nation writer the trail
in waiting mad cries would-be Scorpio
at the Palace hysterical insider crawls
of Columns ravings slap across

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 San Andreas Capricorn your gist the page
of the Stars rising worse- days of rage
Shangri-La Nixon sighing to-worst the magic word
for Lady Ray-Gun monster-ass was
G–a–G-a fighting curse ossifrage
in Valhalla communes cookies and haldol
five bars dying crumble or thorazine
intention’s keep swingin’ rough or stelazine
fallacy to survive ’n and mellaril
Mu-sic tumble and tofranil
piracy rumble or elavil
hand-in-hand mumble less
with Bron what don’t effects
and Bran change more
at Zoalac’s stays side-kicks
last the same for
stand you’re a squeamish
end of story the one Lithium Kid
memory chasing handcuffed
theory naked sun-tanned
glory after fun Dionysiac
why until young
the Fat Lady you’re done man-and-
seals it feeling glum a-plan
with a twist you’re who thanked
just a bum the banks
like chewing gum in
this CRASH Monte-
a little amiss trident Carlo
go tell it in the net in
to the Sphinx you bet slo-mo
on the road with failure of
to Saïs a splash nerves
don’t quit theologic psychostatic
take a hit panache swerve
with aplomb on the tablet
Isis finesse of destiny
re-mixed flair paranoid
in a savoir-faire consistency

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 Sirius beware! sensory
fix sharp nails monu-mental entropy
in the shit in despair stolen occupational
for the sons play moments therapy
of sons on confess space
of sons strings the best was
island- of fire and the place
to forgetting the rest virus*
-island Donald Duck of the mess in your face
Π in the sky Ism-s more hamstrung
do run amok or less un-sandled
-or- statues warp & weft forlorn
die wave glamorous explore
crycrycry their hands lips El
Canto 999 karmic shooting stars Rio Grande
mishmash masta plan stone’s throw no more
brouhaha on command from extension
compass in the castles of
wanderlust Errorland of Katars form
sunken for the half- the power by storm
rocks man of Sound
taboo’s arc Pan! O Pan! guitars the horn!
spilled-milk mytheme you’ll strike
syringe impact go far the unknown
un-hinged twister sovereign chord
binge resistor communi- forget
nether catheter cator the porn
alembic Hister assertiveness the re-born
furnace cyborg trainer norm
of psychometry anti- electrical
germs Nostradamus coincidence storm
as the world Deuteronomy oulipo neglect
turns oh! boy sleepwalker the
tower(s) the deed shield Ripple
of of joy no big deal Effect
power into the void excellent afterthought
cringed riot meal accident
in the wind revenge dehiscent in the name
begin referee kitsch of the

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