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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS Andy Fitch SIXTY MORNING Sixty Morning Talks Copyright © 2014 by Andy Fitch ISBN 978-1-937027-20-9 TALKS Distributed to the trade by SPD / Small Press Distribution spdbooks.org First Edition, First Printing Printed and bound at McNaughton & Gunn Designed by goodutopian Some of these interviews were previously published in The Conversant. Ugly Duckling Presse The Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street #E-303 With an Afterword by Amaranth Borsuk Brooklyn, NY 11215 Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts uglyducklingpresse.org 2 3 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS 11 AFTERWORD Amaranth Borsuk 501 INDEX OF INTERVIEWEES 504 4 5 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS For the interviewees and their publishers, for Anna Moschovakis, and for Maia Spotts—champ transcriber. 6 7 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS SIXTY MORNING TALKS 8 9 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS Interview with Amaranth Borsuk INTERVIEW WITH AMARANTH BORSUK Recorded on April 30, 2012 This interview focuses on Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s book Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press). Andy Fitch: Since it probably requires a new form of physical effort from most readers, can you first describe our experience encounter- ing this book? Amaranth Borsuk: Sure. When you encounter the book, you find a square-shaped object with a patterned, red-white-and-black block printed at its center. When you open the book, you don’t find printed poems, but only more black-and-white symbols. The only text you can read provides author names, mine and Brad Bouse’s, and instruc- tions to go to betweenpageandscreen.com, where you can “hold the words in your hands.” When you arrive at the website and click on a link, you receive instructions to present one of these black-and-white markers to your webcam. When you do, a live image appears on the computer screen. You see your hands holding the open book, and, once one of those printed markers becomes visible to the webcam, a poem pops vertically off the page. This part resembles a pop-up book, but with text instead of shapes or images. This text stands ver- tically with respect to the plane of the page. As you turn the book’s pages, the projected digital text also turns, so that it seems to hover above a page like a hologram. As you flip the book’s pages, poems ex- plode and their letters fly in all directions. And in between epistolary poems (consisting of love letters between P and S) you find concrete poems, anagrammatic or paragrammatic poems, each of which pro- vides a different animation for how it disappears from view. AF: This quick description could prompt the question, why make a book at all? Digital media already provide a substantial portion of innovative poetic projects. But did you want to make us just as con- scious of the printed book as a technology—as a historically con- ditioned mode of textual interface? Is that part of why “P” sounds just as cagey as “S”? Do we encounter one techno-text talking to another? Does this project survey previous reading models as much as it anticipates future ones? AB: Brad and I thought through those questions while conceptualiz- ing the project. Our decision to produce a book came from wanting 10 11 UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE Sixty Morning Talks by Andy Fitch (2014) Digital Proof SIXTY MORNING TALKS Interview with Amaranth Borsuk to meditate on the relationship between these two technologies, at a AB: Yeah, a mirror stage in which the moment of discovery on the time when both play a huge role in our lives, as we read on both kinds reader’s part requires not only recognizing the subject in the mirror, of platforms and develop different capacities from each experience. but recognizing, in fact, that one’s movements get reversed by this By offering a physical book object, we meant to make readers con- mirror one confronts. scious of the printed book as a technology. Even a traditional print book that you pull off your shelf has all these built-in cues (visual, AF: That took a while to get used to. Then I wished I’d never gotten lexical) that tell us the order in which to read things; how to hold used to it because it had been fun. the book relative to our body; the materials from which this book has been made and, therefore, the social value placed on it. Like- AB: It does take time. I tend to forget because I’ve performed this wise, digital media, which can seem highly ephemeral, embody us as work so often, and become somewhat choreographed in my behavior readers—through our interaction with screen texts, whether touch in the mirror. Though whenever I’ve watched somebody else interact screens or computer screens connected to a mouse or track pad. All for the first time with this book, there’s that great moment when they of these physiological/technological determinants embody and trans- want to see a poem more clearly, but instead push the image off- form us as readers, and really dictate how we interact with texts. So screen. Then they’ll learn to play the role of intermediary. They learn Between Page and Screen reminds the reader of our relationships with to navigate that “between” space. This again demonstrates that our both kinds of reading devices, here by putting an image of the reader book, or all books, construct behavior and teach us ways of reading. on-screen the whole time. You never can escape this vision of your- AF: As I got better at handling the book (placing it at an appropri- self interacting with two types of texts. You see your hands, the book ate angle, manipulating projected letters, etcetera), I considered object, reflections of yourself (with words flying before your face), this project’s fourth dimension—its projection into time. I realized all further confirming the materiality of multiple kinds of reading. extended concentration always had been my primary role in con- AF: That helps to explain why Page and Screen could serve as partners structing literary meaning, and wondered if you had assigned me this in a love story, rather than Oedipal rivals in some conflict where one consistent manual labor in order to prompt reflection on reading’s replaces the other. But I recall seeing my own reflection interposed temporal obligations. between them, feeling like an interloper, a voyeur on the processes of AB: I like that. Would we call that a synecdoche—for the type of meaning getting shaped. I never had a clear, fixed sense of my own meaning-making labor in which readers constantly engage? Because identity in relation to the text. certainly, as you say, this book’s meaning takes shape in the reader. AB: This aspect of the book did not occur to me until I first per- On a very literal level, in order for the text even to appear requires formed from it. The first time I gave a reading and found myself a reader’s physical effort. So watching the time pass, watching these vocalizing both Page and Screen, reading their respective parts aloud, textual transformations, does alert you to your situated perspective. holding the book before me, encountering a projected image of my AF: In terms of projecting oneself onto or between the interfaces: a face—finally I realized the awkwardness of that situation. But yes, I deliberate alternation between Amaranth’s text-emphasizing pages, feel that the reader’s position should stay somewhat voyeuristic. In and Brad’s design-emphasizing pages, seemed to play out. But was any epistolary work, you peek in on people’s personal letters. this pure imaginary construct on my part? Did you both engage in AF: I liked thinking about your title’s “Between” as suggesting both unsuspected ways for every component of the compositional process? some sort of policed division and some illicit correspondence be- AB: Yes, we did both engage throughout, but I find it intriguing that tween Page and Screen. But I also appreciated that between the page a reader might assume I wrote the parts that look like poems, while and the screen appeared blank space, an absence in which the reader Brad designed the pages that seem more visual.