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#18 Concrete Discourse |
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A
typographical manipulation of the word "manslaughter," is
this a piece of fiction or non-fiction? Is it a "calligram,"
a "constellation," an "ideogram," a found poem,
a cut-up? Part of the exuberant, international revival of "concrete
poetry" that began in the 1950's, it challenges the boundaries
tradition erects between discourse genres.
The
piece was invented by Kathy Schenkel. It appeared in Richard Kostelanetz's
edited collection Second Assembling: A Collection of Otherwise Unpublishable
Manuscripts (1971). "Non-edited" might be the better
word. Kostelanetz's purpose, he said, was "the publication of works
too eccentric to be accepted elsewhere": "No manuscript refused."
He invited writers and artists to send 1,000 copies of anything they
wanted to publish, and when he had enough submissions to form an anthology,
he bound them up and "published" a print run of 1,000 volumes.
Begun in 1970, Kostelanetz's "assemblings" stopped with the
eleventh in 1981.
I
can find nothing about Kathy Schenkel other than the information provided
by Second Assembling, that she was born in Ft. Wayne, Indianna,
and was studying at the University of Illinois in 1971. As far as I
know, Schenkel's piece has never been reprinted. I think it is ingenious.
My guess is that the sixth line, "ANSLAUGHTE," was not foreseen
by the author. Dictated by the formal requirements of the piece, the
line was serendipitous. Notice that the full shape of the work is also
meaningful.
My
version is a DreamWeaver transcription of a JPEG file from a Photoshop
enhancement of a Umax scanning of a photocopy of a transparency made
from a photocopy (subsequently lost) of Schenkel's mimeographed page
in a copy of Second Assembling that I found in the Washington
State University library in 1974. Sic transit gloria.
RH,
May 2003
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