“For Harvest
The year turns to its rest.
Up from the earth, the fields, the early-fallen dew,
Moves the large star at evening, Arcturus low with autumn,
And summer calls in her many voices upon the frost.
I who have not seen for weeping
The plum ripen and fall, or the yellowing sheaf,
Am not unmindful now of the season that came and went,
The hours that told off freshness,
The bud and the rich leaf.
Though I turned aside before the summer
And weathered but a season of the mind,
Let me sit among you when the husk is stripped,
Let me tell by the bright grain,
Those labours in an acre of cloud and the reap of the wind.”
—Léonie Adams
On Tom Phillips: I have a paperback edition of his treated work. I don’t open it very often, but i keep it close at hand. When i first started making books, i instinctively knew i wanted to have as much image as text, but i didn’t know how to do it. The problem, in fact, is to balance, so to speak, the centrifugal & the centripetal, which is identical to the epic poet’s task. On one end of a continuum, there’s the regular text with square windows cut out (i used this for Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds); on the other, is making a landscape in which words appear, in a constant flow (perhaps this can be said to stem from “Un Coup de Dés”), & the trick is to avoid actually illustrating the text literally (as a children’s book would). A Humument, being composed by covering up all the words but a few that are then used in that order, introduces both a random element & a forward impetus. Phillips turns the latter into sheer lyricism. –Then it becomes necessary to avoid copying his solution (as in my second edition of Star Grope)…
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