 | Pages from "Led Almost by My Tie," featuring poems by Jeremy Sigler with images and a poem by School of Art professor Jessica Stockholder. Printmaker Ruth Lingen also collaborated on the 2007 book. |
The ways in which poetry and art have been united in books is celebrated in
two companion exhibitions now on view at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library and the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library.
T H I S
IN MEMORIAM
Poetry and visual arts are united
in library exhibitions’ featured books
Titled “Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art and the Book” and “The
Publishers’ Roundtable: Book Artists in Dialogue,” the exhibitions
consider the ways poetry and book arts interact, their intersections and connections,
their shared context and their potentially conflicting functions. Both exhibitions
run through March 31.
The books in “Metaphor Taking Shape” and “The Publishers’ Roundtable” demonstrate
a variety of ways that poets, artists and publishers have explored the book — its
intimacy, portability and physicality — as well as its role as a cultural
object and its position as a multifaceted historical and contemporary method
of communication. Both exhibits examine questions of textuality, verbal and
visual metaphor making, tensions between language and image, and the physicality
of texts and books. Exhibition items are drawn from the Yale Collection of
American Literature, the Arts of the Book Collection and the Modern Books and
Manuscripts Collection, as well as from the Yale University Art Gallery.
“Metaphor Taking Shape” shows some of the ways poetry and art have
been united in books since the turn of the last century. The exhibition also
draws attention to themes that have influenced poets, book artists and publishers
over time. “The Publishers’ Roundtable” features the work of
six contemporary small presses that have worked variously with poetry and the
visual arts, combining the two forms in both traditional and innovative ways.
The exhibition includes mission statements from each press, describing their
goals, challenges and accomplishments.
Among the items featured in the exhibit are:
• The artist book “Parallèlement,” with poetry by Paul
Verlaine and drawings by Pierre Bonnard, published in 1900 by French art dealer
Ambroise Vollard.
• The modernist masterpiece “La Prose du Transsibérien et de
La Petite Jehanne de France” by poet Blaise Cendrars, with watercolor pochoir
by Sonia Delaunay, published in Paris in 1913. This accordion-folded book reaches
nearly seven feet when fully opened.
• The 1927 book “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” featuring
poems by Harlem Renaissance poet James Weldon Johnson and images by Aaron Douglas.
• The 1948 “Pismo/Escrito,” a collaboration between Pablo Picasso
and Illiazd, a prominent Russian writer, designer and typographer. This interactive
book features text and images printed on papers of various sizes, folded in different
ways so that the text may be visible while an image hides behind a fold. Reading
the book is a process of discovery and encounter as the poem, a kind of love
letter, unfolds revealing images of the beloved.
• “Led Almost by My Tie,” featuring poems by Jeremy Sigler and
images and a poem by Yale School of Art professor Jessica Stockholder, published
in 2007. Sigler’s poems are deconstructed and reassembled by Stockholder
to create both the book’s images and an additional poem that threads throughout
the book. Stockholder’s text underlines and emphasizes aspects of Sigler’s
poems and adds an additional layer to the text, a scrim through which Sigler’s
poems can be re-read. The idea of layering is accentuated by the use of a wide
array of materials and printing techniques. The book includes translucent and
transparent Mylar and plastic as well as paper pages, and is printed using letterpress,
lithography, digital printing and hand coloring.
Both exhibitions are co-curated by Nancy Kuhl, curator of the Yale Collection
of American Literature, and Jae Jennifer Rossman, special collections librarian
at the Arts Library.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, located at 121 Wall St., is
open for exhibition viewing Monday-Thursday, 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m., Friday, 8:30
a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, visit http://www.library.yale.edu:80/beinecke/
or call (203) 432-2977.
The Arts of the Book Collection, located in Sterling Memorial Library, 120
High St., is open Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-noon and 1-4 p.m. It is closed Friday,
Saturday and Sunday. 
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