Guiding Principles is a 24-page single edition hand-bound book (6.5” x 9”) holding a collection of assemblage poetry as collage — or is it collaged poetry assemblage?
I began making the book in February 2023 while in Miami for the inaugural edition of Tropic Bound Artist Book Fair. I finished it in Montreal a month later.
Sometimes a formal challenge is good, so I decided to set a creative boundary for production: one source for the book content …
The one source for content was Miami’s Design District Magazine, a heady high-gloss publication handed out for free as you stroll the sidewalks of the neighborhood. I used the edition available concurrent to Tropic Bound: Issue 1 2023. The typography is fantastic. The pages a chromacopia of splashy visuals. (I’m quite allergic to black as a design element in virtually every form — clothing, decor, my own creative works — so the magazine’s 145 pages hit the mark). The magazine included a feature on Tropic Bound, auspicious and on-point.
With a cut-out panoply laid out, I ended up with this word assemblage. The first. But not my last.
I began making the book in February 2023 while in Miami for the inaugural edition of Tropic Bound Artist Book Fair. I finished it in Montreal a month later.
Sometimes a formal challenge is good, so I decided to set a creative boundary for production: one source for the book content …
The one source for content was Miami’s Design District Magazine, a heady high-gloss publication handed out for free as you stroll the sidewalks of the neighborhood. I used the edition available concurrent to Tropic Bound: Issue 1 2023. The typography is fantastic. The pages a chromacopia of splashy visuals. (I’m quite allergic to black as a design element in virtually every form — clothing, decor, my own creative works — so the magazine’s 145 pages hit the mark). The magazine included a feature on Tropic Bound, auspicious and on-point.
With a cut-out panoply laid out, I ended up with this word assemblage. The first. But not my last.
The piece is about pressing forward — if not always with optimism — with persistence, another form of optimism. It’s about trying, and trying, and trying again. About re-making, re-moving, re-turning, re-telling.
Each page of the assembled poem is made with a UPS packing slip, the poem piece sealed under the cello casing. I love the shipping element — the promise of elsewhere, of going somewhere, going from here to there, wherever those two places are.
I made most of the poem lines in Miami. These are a few excepts before the book was bound.
In Montreal, I completed the assemblage of the poem, finding the right sequence for the poem lines. Before this moment, each poem line stood on its own as a distinct work, visual and textual. In the book, they merged, one with the other, to make one poem, Guiding Principles.
I bound the book using a hole-punch and 2 simple O-Ring clips. Pink, for Miami.
I bound the book using a hole-punch and 2 simple O-Ring clips. Pink, for Miami.
