Craig Douglas Dworkin

The perverse library

Nick Thurston

Simon Morris

'Remember the lessons of literary history. Don't wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.'Mixing anecdote and advocacy, the first section of this two-part polemical essay offers an introduction to the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing – as undertaken by some of the most revered writers in the modern Western literary canon, from Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) to Irma Rombauer (1882–1941) via Virginia Woolf (1871–1922) and Derek Walcott (1930–).Having looked back at some of the monuments of literary history, the second section takes its charge from the epigraph, 'Institutions cannot prevent what they cannot imagine', and looks forward to the political praxis of the twenty-first century's digital future.The essay was first commissioned by the Foreword for the London Art Book Fair 2011 catalogue. Translations will soon be available in Spanish and Italian.Accompanying an eponymous solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, April-May 2012; and the Laurence Sterne Museum, Coxwold, August 2012.Limited edition. Do or DIY is created by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston.

Dworkin, Morris, Thurston

Do Or Diy

Poetry. PARSE is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott's How To Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. First published in 1874, the book played a leading role in the pedagogic debate over whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin, and thousands of copies were printed as textbooks in the last quarter of the 19th century. When Dworkin first came across the book, he was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." And so, of course, he parsed Abbott's book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis.

Parse

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces-and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work. Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cage's and Jackson MacLow's practices of "writing-through" other texts; the intentional "cancellations" of text by book artist Ken Campbell and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers; Susan Howe's experiments in typography and cultural transmission; visual complexity in Charles Bernstein, Stan Brakhage, and Rosemarie Waldrop; the "sedimentary" texts of post-minimalist artist Robert Smithson and poets Steve McCaffery and Christopher Dewdney ; the tactics of erasure employed by the poet Ronald Johnson and book artist Tom Phillips. In his scrutiny of these works, and with reference to a rich variety of contextual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual artworks, political and cultural theories, and experimental films-Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of such unreadable texts. His method seeks to unveil what Dworkin describes as "the politics of the poem"-what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that moves beyond aesthetic considerations into the realm of politics and ideology. Thus this book asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as on the mechanics of reproduction.

Reading the Illegible

Poetry. "Craig Dworkin's MOTES is an unexpected delight of sparse poems that glitter, provoke, and beg for completeness. These pieces show Dworkin's impressive range as he travels seamlessly into the reshaping of literary minimalism. Even though many of his conceptual works have echoed minimalist ideals, MOTES shifts into a more distilled frame, where both author and reader slide over a tiny handful of words only to arrive at other ends of the world: 'BRICK / Buick.' Each parcel is as hard and unstable as the gravel under our feet"—Robert Fitterman.

Motes

Examines works of art, literature and music that have blankness as their main center point.

No Medium

Literary Nonfiction. Criticism & Theory. Poetics.Dworkin has edited a collection of amazing new essays on poetics, summarizing the variety of poetries that have arisen in innovative writing during the past 10 years. Filling the gap that has arisen in publishing writing on new poetry, there are essays on computer programs as poems by Brian Kim Stefans, flarf poetics by Gary Sullivan and Michael Gottlieb, uncreative poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith, and environmental poetry by James Sherry. There are essays on playwright Fiona Templeton and a groundbreaking piece by Sianne Ngai centered on Gertrude Stein. There is also an important group of general essays on the poetry marketplace by Steve Evans, Charles Bernstein, and Marjorie Perloff. If you buy one book this year, or next year, or the year after, buy this one.

21st Century Poetics

The Consequence of Innovation

Vito Acconci

Poems and other texts from the 1960s by a pioneering conceptual artist that show a continuity with his subsequent work in performance and video art.

Craig Douglas Dworkin

Books

Your next favorite book is out there