Read Me: Selected Works

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Their relationship is forged in charismatic, darting, and deep correspondence: dishy gossip, shop talk, and the auditioning of ideas and shaping of artistic practices." 
—Nate Lippens

When Scott Burton (1939–1989) and Eduardo Costa (b. 1940) met in New York City in 1968, they developed a close friendship that lasted until Burton’s death. In letters from the 1970s, they gossiped and shared thoughts about the rapid changes taking place in the art world, queer life, and their work as writers and artists. Burton and Costa’s letters show a vibrant transnational queer artistic friendship and offer a new perspective on the struggle to establish conceptual, critical artistic practices in the Americas. As Costa moved from New York to Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, he and Burton discussed the art communities of North and South America, including Costa’s friend Hélio Oiticica and the lasting influence of Marcel Duchamp. Both artists found the letters to be a source of emotional and intellectual nourishment—as will their readers.

Don Mee Choi is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid essays, and an award-winning translator of contemporary Korean women’s poetry. In this pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, she explores translation and language in the context of US imperialism—through the eyes of a “foreigner;” a translator; a child in Timoka, the made-up city of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence; a child from a neocolony.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

A cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

Wound Building is a volume of essays, with digressions, on one group of contemporary poets active in a self-organizing political poetry scene in the UK, most of whom have little to no audience outside of the little magazines that they publish and the reading series they put on. The book is a front-line report on the rapid development of this poetry in the period between 2015 and 2020, with a particular focus on the relationship of poetry to violence and its representation. The poets discussed here write violent love poems and violent elegies as well as violent fantasies composed in stabs of violent verse and violet prose. The poems themselves comprise fantasies of killing David Cameron, dreams of being split open along a seam, basement songs, hundreds of pages of notes on working life in a privatized care home in Hove, East Sussex, a four-line slogan about the Cologne groping scandal of New Year 2016, variations on the Refugees Medical Phrasebook, a life wasted in a factory in Guangzhou, an autobiographical sci-fi internet fever dream, an anarchist elegy, and a refusal to argue. Ultimately, Hayward argues that the lessons this poetry teaches is never to write a "worthy" narrative when a fucked up collage will do. Rather than a cohesive "account" of a "school" of poets, or a "contribution" to the boring tittle-tattle of aesthetic debates over British poetry as an institution, Wound Building is a front-line report on the local disasters of a contemporary UK poetry caught in the grip of the historical cataclysm of capitalist culture.

Wound Building is further concerned with aesthetic problems related to Marxism, anarchism, contemporary trans politics, and class, though its "theoretical" preoccupations are subordinated to its desire to provide a ground-level view on the writing itself, its production, its intellectual aporia, and the ways it finds itself outstripped by the ongoing "march of events." The book will be of interest not only for those concerned with contemporary British political and experimental poetry, but also more generally for anyone who wishes to think carefully about what it means to make art about present-day history and its many horrible enormities.

The book's title is derived from the idea of sublime woundedness that subtends the context of the poets discussed here: the impressions of wounds opening up like LED-lit shopfronts in the night, in a parallel universe in which injury is intoxicatingly impersonal and structural, and which forms the environment in which the poems fight to absolutize the value of every last breath, or face into the reality of extravagantly violent wish fulfillment, or dissolve themselves in a search for new ways of professing love, or transform into a kind of expressionism of vomiting up medical-diagnostic categories found in abstract social labor, or pump their verses full of the convulsive rhythms of surprise and sudden relief, without any guarantee that this is the right thing to do or that anyone will even fucking hear. Wound Building does not historicize this state of affairs as much as it attempts to live alongside the immediacy of this work, in order to see what is still possible for poetry, and criticism, to make and do.

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.