I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)
Susan Lowdermilk
Hardback with open spine, Asahi cloth over board, debossed front cover with fitted, pastedown artwork, around folded structure with cut-outs, pop-ups and pastedowns. H236 x W182 x D20 mm. 14 pages. Edition of 30, of which this is #24. Acquired from the Abecedarian Gallery, 5 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Some book art illustrates a poem. Some converses with it. And some, like this one by Susan Lowdermilk, enact the poem.

I think that the Root of the Wind is Water—
It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product—
Airs no Oceans keep—
Mediterranean intonations—
To a Current’s Ear—
There is a maritime conviction
In the Atmosphere—

#1302, Emily Dickinson. 1960. Complete poems [1st ed.]. T. H. Johnson (ed.). New Y0rk: Little Brown.

As she frequently does, Dickinson announces her core metaphor in the poem’s first line and goes on to develop and confirm or justify it in the lines that follow. As book artist, Lowdermilk has a slight advantage over the poet in being able to use the binding and printing to express herself even before the first line arrives. Before that first breath of air is taken, the Asahi book cloth’s color and the pressure print blue-gray pattern, which peeks from the exposed spine, is embedded on the front cover and flows over the doublure, evoke water, the sea and the maritime.

With the pop-up that follows, breathing the air above the page, Lowdermilk even manages to steal a march on the first half of the poet’s “Root of the Wind” metaphor. As the airy engineering is done with the paper printed with the watery pattern, enhanced by a reflective sheet of acetate beneath, it physically performs Dickinson’s entwining of wind and water. All that before and as the poem’s first two lines appear — and it just gets better with every turn of the page.

Because the blue-gray pattern plays so significant a role in this work, I asked the artist how the pressure print process works, especially in yielding the tonality of pattern.

I learned the pressure print technique at the Minneapolis Center for Book Arts while I was on a residency there in 2015. It is more akin to a rubbing that is created using light pressure on the letterpress than a relief print from something like wood or linoleum. Here is a brief description and a video. A plate in the bed of a cylinder press is inked. A low profile image (like paper cutouts for example) is placed onto the cylinder with the paper on top. The light pressure of the press touches the paper on top of the low profile image, giving a soft impression (like a rubbing) on the paper.The ink never touches the plate itself, just the plate’s pressure through the paper. If the pressure is too much, then the non image areas of the paper get printed. So, ink layer, thickness of the image plate, thickness of the paper, and height of the inked base plate have to be just right. … I used sheets of sticky backed mailing labels for my plates. As I layered them the highest points got the most pressure and were darkest, the two lower levels of the image plates had less pressure and therefore lighter. … I like the pressure print process for this project because the softness of the images really suited the mood and feeling of the poem for me. (Correspondence, 14 January 2024)

Lowdermilk and Dickinson are at one as they move from the first two lines of the poem to the next two. Dickinson has split the sentence into two lines and knows that, after a line break, the reader’s eye swims back to the beginning of the previous line to fish out the sense of the sentence: “It would not sound so deep/ Were it a Firmamental Product”. After the line break and page turn, Lowdermilk gives us a water spout — “a Firmamental Product” — and knows that pop ups always bring out the child in the reader — turning the pages back and forth to see the action again and again — so back we go for the fun and the sense. Lowdermilk’s waterspout also puns on top of Dickinson’s pun on “Airs”; the waterspout, too, is an air the ocean won’t keep.

The shoal of fish leaping off the page is Lowdermilk’s addition, prompted no doubt by Dickinson’s “Oceans”, “Mediterranean intonations” and “maritime conviction”, although the shapes of the fish seem a bit ear-like, echoing the “Current’s Ear”.

With the next turn, the images of currents, waterspouts and fish give way to that of seaweed that undulates from the bottom of the finely horizontally sliced page, placing Dickinson’s “Root of the Wind” in the deep.

As those narrow maritime strips bend up and to the left into the atmosphere above the page, they reveal and enact Dickinson’s final lines.

There are many fine illustrated books and artists’ books that pay homage to Emily Dickinson. Many of the latter achieve that inversion of ekphrasis so frequent in book art where the visual or sculptural work of art responds to and re-presents the poem. The best of them achieve a oneness. Susan Lowdermilk’s does just that.

alpha seltzer (2023)

alpha seltzer (2023)
Helen Hajnoczky
Canada balsa wood, hinged and clasped box, double-sided accordion structure attached to multicolored ribbons for vertical display. Box: H240 x W155 x D80 mm. Leporello panel: H178 x W126 mm. Open: 1041 cm. 56 panels. Acquired from the artist, 10 April 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Letters and punctuation marks fall and rise and tumble in alpha seltzer like so many tablets of Alka-Seltzer. With her use of color, technique and orientation of the images, Hajnoczky holds to and takes the concept far beyond a one-trick visual metaphor. Anyone who has observed those dissolving heart-burn relief tablets closely will recognize how the colorless effervescing bubbles spin off each tablet in upwards and downwards directions. So, on the box cover’s title plate and on the first panel, colored drips surrounded by spatters rise from the title and fall from the artist’s name.

But what is it that the characters are dissolving in, and what are they dissolving into? Of course it’s just paper, but the Kodak Moment matte photo paper has a glossy shine suggesting a solution of water. As the accordion emerges from the box, a spattered and dripping red column made of overlapping characters (brackets, question mark, exclamation mark and ampersand) appears on the first panel; then with a shift to the left, the red column widens into one made of all the lowercase letters of the alphabet; then shifting back to the center, the column widens and comes closer; and then shifting to the right, it becomes a column of all the uppercase vowels overlapping. What is going on?

Now, the originally vertical column of brackets, question mark, exclamation point and ampersand goes horizontal and black, dripping pink and gray into the next panel of horizontal uppercase vowels in black, dripping gray, pink and black into a horizontal jumble of lowercase letters.

Then the characters bend into a deep red curve spattered and dripping in gray, eventually morphing into a ball of red vowels. Beneath that, the palette goes entirely black and gray, and the characters begin to angle down the panel into a heap of letters sliding downwards from right to left across the panel and squeezed at the bottom …

… until they have to cascade down from left to right, which is when a riot of color breaks out. At the end of the accordion, you realize there’s another loop; which side is up, which is down?

On the other side of the accordion, the riot of colors continues, but each panel presents a single-color uppercase letter that seems to be dissolving like an Alka-Seltzer tablet into multicolor lowercase versions of itself.

With layout, color, technique and metaphor, Hajnockzky has coaxed an element of abstraction from the alphabet that differs from the semiotic abstraction by which letters have come to be what they are. But in the end, it’s not a confusion from which relief is wanted. Rather it’s one in which to fall, be immersed and enjoy. And to have a laugh at the expense of the Dr. Miles Medicine Company of Elkhart, Indiana and its subsequent owner Bayer AG for missing a marketing trick for Alka-Seltzer tablets.

Magyarázni (2016)

Magyarázni (2016)
Helen Hajnoczky
Perfect bound paperback. H210 x W140 mm. 104 pages. Acquired from the author, 14 December 2021. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

With all its diacritics and dipthongs, if there is an alphabet song in Hungarian, it must be operatic in length. It is fortunate, though, that it is as long as it is; otherwise we would have fewer poems in this volume by Helen Hajnoczky.

Hajnoczky is second-generation Hungarian-Canadian. These poems use the two languages to reflect on her dual roots of culture and the roots of memory. And for both, what better vehicle than an alphabet book. Even though there are 44 letters in Hungarian compared to 26 in English, Hajnoczky is a greedy poet, and taking her title literally — Magyarázni means “make it Hungarian” — she includes poems for the letters Q, W, X and Y even though Hungarian has no need of the phonemes behind them except for borrowed words.

Hajnoczky does not shy away from growing up in the English-language poetic tradition. In the poem below, she appropriates Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, turning and twisting its metaphor into one for her experience of growing up with two languages, making the letter Y and Robert Frost Hungarian.

Some of the poems might remind readers of Seamus Heaney. For the letter í (for Írástudatlanság/”ignorance, illiteracy”), Hajnoczky delves into the metaphor of the pen in a way that surely would have brought a smile to Heaney as a nod to his “Digging”; or he might have heard an echo of “Clearances” in Lyuk/”hole”) for the dipthong Ly when she hears a relative commenting on her needle-wielding: “you are/ Never going to sew anything/ as good as your grandmother”.

Hajnoczky calls the images facing the text “visual poems”. To create them, she has drawn from a difficult-to-find spiral bound book put together by Péter Czink and Lorraine Weideman. As with Alphaseltzer, the results are visually striking. Coach House Books has nicely complemented the images and type with vegetable-based ink and Zephyr Antique Laid paper.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Poetry

Books On Books Collection – Susan Lowdermilk

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

Further Reading and Viewing

Books On Books Collection – Helen Hajnoczky

alpha seltzer (2023)

Magyarázni (2016)

Further Reading