Abstract
The role of small presses is not simply to publish non-commercial work but often to form it in terms of text presentation and book production. The differing versions of Bill Griffiths’ The Book of the Boat are examined, noting not just revisions in the usual sense but also serial transformations with each printing opportunity, including the whole work as a pamphlet in two different and illustrated editions. Printing and publishing is a form of writing. Allen Fisher’s Proposals is a self-published work, involving the formal interaction of poem, commentary, and image, and the open ‘imperfect fit’ of Fisher’s postmodern poetics is contrasted to Quarles’ seventeenth-century emblem books, to which Fisher alludes, to suggest that, once more, the forming activities of the reader are fundamental to its reception.
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Sheppard, R. (2016). The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher. In: The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6_10
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