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SONNET
Ulises Carrión left Mexico City for Europe in 1970 and eventually settled in Amsterdam, where, in 1975, he wrote his manifesto, “The New Art of Making Books” and founded the legendary bookshop-gallery, Other Books and So, a hub for mail art activity and one of the first venues dedicated to artists’ publications.
In 1972, Carrión took a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and churned it through 44 typographic and procedural permutations. The publication of Sonnet(s), one of the first of his influential “bookworks,” signaled a departure from Carrión’s earlier writing practice.
A pioneer in conceptualizing the artists book, mail art, and what today might be called social practice, Carrión, who died in 1989, has only recently been recognized with a retrospective exhibit at Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museo Jumex (Mexico City).
The present republication of Sonnet(s) is supplemented by new essays on Carrión’s bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe, and the US: Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, Verónica Gerber Bicecci (tr. Christina MacSweeney), Annette Gilbert (tr. Shane Anderson), India Johnson, Michalis Pichler, Heriberto Yépez.
In 1972, Carrión took a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and churned it through 44 typographic and procedural permutations. The publication of Sonnet(s), one of the first of his influential “bookworks,” signaled a departure from Carrión’s earlier writing practice.
A pioneer in conceptualizing the artists book, mail art, and what today might be called social practice, Carrión, who died in 1989, has only recently been recognized with a retrospective exhibit at Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museo Jumex (Mexico City).
The present republication of Sonnet(s) is supplemented by new essays on Carrión’s bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe, and the US: Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, Verónica Gerber Bicecci (tr. Christina MacSweeney), Annette Gilbert (tr. Shane Anderson), India Johnson, Michalis Pichler, Heriberto Yépez.
133 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2020
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About the author
Ulises Carrión
23 books11 followersUlises Carrión (Veracruz México; 1941 - Amsterdám; 1989) fue un escritor, editor y artista mexicano nacido en San Andrés Tuxtla. Celebrado inicialmente como un talentoso y joven escritor, a principios de los años 70 Carrión abandonó al mismo tiempo México y la literatura ortodoxa para iniciar en Europa una obra en el arte contemporáneo. Heriberto Yépez lo llama "el escritor post-literario más innovador que haya nacido en México".
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 25, 2021
Review Sonnet
Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing afar
Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;
Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular;—
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Even such love is; and is not thy name Love?
Yeah, by thy hand the Love-God rends apart
All gathering clouds of Night's ambiguous art;
Fling them far down, and sets thine eye above;
And simply, as some gage of flower or glove,
Stakes with a smile the world against thy heart.
Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing afar
Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;
Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular;—
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Even such love is; and is not thy name Love?
Yeah, by thy hand the Love-God rends apart
All gathering clouds of Night's ambiguous art;
Fling them far down, and sets thine eye above;
And simply, as some gage of flower or glove,
Stakes with a smile the world against thy heart.
December 24, 2020
From Felipe Becerrra's 'AMSTERDAM HAS NOT DISCOVERED THE MIMEOGRAPH YET': BOOK PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE FORGING OF COMMUNITIES:
"When it was introduced a century earlier, the typewriter began a process of mechanization that would make more uniform and efficient the production of legible texts. Consequently, this technology not only 'pushed handwriting to the realm of the personal,' but distanced the author from the text, depersonalizing the act of writing" (67-68.)
"German media theorist Friedrich Kittler claimed that the advent of the typewriter mechanized writing to the point of separating it from subjectivity. For him, the typewriter segmented the continuous line of romantic handwriting into spatially designated and discrete keyboard signs. From then on, writing would be nothing but 'a selection from a countable, spatialized supply,' making writers much more conscious of the materiality of language and communication" (68).
"In 1975, the same year he opened OBAS, Carrion published The New Art of Making Books, probably his most influential essay. There, he famously proposed to regard the book as a sequence in which form contributes as much to meaning as content. From this perspective, the text becomes one element among others in the structure of a book--such as typesetting, binding, paper, ink--and acquires its value in contrast to them" (68).
From India Johnson's "Resurrection Sonnet":
"In 1976, Ulises Carrion summed up everything I would learn in bookbinding school: 'A writer, contrary to popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts" (78).
"Reincarnation is not resurrection. To reprint a text is to reincarnate. To republish a book is to resurrect" (79).
"We too often equate translation with loss, but in the religious sense, translation trumps resurrection: to be translated is to enter into heaven alive" (84).
From Annette Gilbert's "Borrowed Sonnets":
"Not only does the CAPITAL SONNET demonstrate the way in which capitalization has an effect on reading, but it also involuntarily demonstrates the production conditions of the typewriter and its technical peculiarities. Nietzsche famous sentence from 1882--'YOU ARE RIGHT, OUR WRITING EQUIPMENT TAKES PART IN THE FORMING OF OUR THOUGHTS'--that the half-blind man hammered in capital letters into the machine because the Malling-Hansen's Writing Ball did not have any lowercase letters" (93-94).
"When it was introduced a century earlier, the typewriter began a process of mechanization that would make more uniform and efficient the production of legible texts. Consequently, this technology not only 'pushed handwriting to the realm of the personal,' but distanced the author from the text, depersonalizing the act of writing" (67-68.)
"German media theorist Friedrich Kittler claimed that the advent of the typewriter mechanized writing to the point of separating it from subjectivity. For him, the typewriter segmented the continuous line of romantic handwriting into spatially designated and discrete keyboard signs. From then on, writing would be nothing but 'a selection from a countable, spatialized supply,' making writers much more conscious of the materiality of language and communication" (68).
"In 1975, the same year he opened OBAS, Carrion published The New Art of Making Books, probably his most influential essay. There, he famously proposed to regard the book as a sequence in which form contributes as much to meaning as content. From this perspective, the text becomes one element among others in the structure of a book--such as typesetting, binding, paper, ink--and acquires its value in contrast to them" (68).
From India Johnson's "Resurrection Sonnet":
"In 1976, Ulises Carrion summed up everything I would learn in bookbinding school: 'A writer, contrary to popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts" (78).
"Reincarnation is not resurrection. To reprint a text is to reincarnate. To republish a book is to resurrect" (79).
"We too often equate translation with loss, but in the religious sense, translation trumps resurrection: to be translated is to enter into heaven alive" (84).
From Annette Gilbert's "Borrowed Sonnets":
"Not only does the CAPITAL SONNET demonstrate the way in which capitalization has an effect on reading, but it also involuntarily demonstrates the production conditions of the typewriter and its technical peculiarities. Nietzsche famous sentence from 1882--'YOU ARE RIGHT, OUR WRITING EQUIPMENT TAKES PART IN THE FORMING OF OUR THOUGHTS'--that the half-blind man hammered in capital letters into the machine because the Malling-Hansen's Writing Ball did not have any lowercase letters" (93-94).
July 24, 2023
i’m a poet-artist too!
August 20, 2024
Was very creative but also heard it was an essays book but felt too researchy to me
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews