Saturday, February 13, 2010

David Hart on Leafe's "1,000 Views of Girl Singing":

"When I received [the Laâbi] in the post, I saw at its endpaper an advertisement for Leafe Press's 1,000 Views of "Girl Singing", edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman, which caught my imagination strongly enough for me to send a cheque for it. It was money very well spent, it's a unique book, if in uneasily small print, of many invited responses, by way of poetry or visually, to a poem by Eileen Tabios.

It has led me to speculate about early modern, say 15th-16th centuries or earlier, whether there were, along with circulation of poems by hand, also response-poems and perhaps drawings: exchanges and additions verbally and visually. The book implements a fertile present and suggests a future for such intermingled new work. A delight."

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