The Mexican conceptual poet Ulises Carrión’s project SONNET(S) was recently published in a re-edition by Ugly Duckling Presse, accompanied by critical essays.
Here is a text I wrote about Carrión’s poetics, from an essay that can be read here.
Ulises Carrión and the Bookwork
Born in the small tropical city of San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz, Ulises Carrión moved to Mexico City to study at UNAM’s Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, following in the footsteps of many young Mexican writers. It was not until he relocated to Amsterdam, however, that his experimental poetics began to take shape. In 1972, together with Raul Marroquin, Carrión founded In-Out Center, the first independent art space in Amsterdam. Casting aside his native Spanish, Carrión began to experiment in other languages, primarily English. In a letter to his sometimes-friend Octavio Paz dated October 22, 1972, he writes:
I am in Amsterdam because it seems more feasible for me to realize the practical consequences of [my ideas] here. For instance, now I can (anyone can) work in many languages at once. It is not even necessary to master the language. A writer can now manufacture his own books (Sonnet(s) 59).
The adoption (appropriation) of other languages (mainly English) seems to have served a conceptual function for Carrión’s experimentation with text. The alienated quality of English may have helped to form the new semantic role of text that Carrión championed in his work. By 1975, Carrión had developed his seminal manifesto “The New Art of Making Books,” which elaborated the distinctions between the traditional book and the “bookwork,” the latter of which he described as a work that takes account of the book’s material properties and integrates these into the execution of the artwork. As Heriberto Yépez writes in his essay “Ulises Carrión’s Early Poetics,” which accompanies Ugly Duckling Presse’s reprint of Carrión’s Sonnet(s),
From his very experimental start to his final definition of ‘bookworks’ in the late 1970s, Carrión maintained a post-concrete poetics closer to Wlademir Dias-Pino than to Noigandrez––a poetics in which writing tends to become image, composing yields to variation, and meaning is derived not from the explicitly or implicitly signified but from the synesthetic interplay of curated signifiers (Sonnet(s) 54).
In direct opposition to semantic meaning unfolding in the traditional way in a traditional book, the meaning of the “bookwork,” per Carrión, reveals itself in a sequence of space and time contingent on the physical book-object. This is achieved by the artists’ manipulation of the material dimensions of the book, which Carrión’s later works do through asemic signs, color, format, stamps, and other interventions into the book-space. To quote from the manifesto:
Books existed originally as containers of (literary) texts.
But books, seen as autonomous realities, can contain any (written) language, not only literary language,
or even any other system of signs.
Among languages, literary language (prose and poetry) is not the best fitted to the nature of books.
A book may be the accidental container of a text, the structure of which is irrelevant to the book: these
are the books of bookshops and libraries.
A book can also exist as an autonomous and self-sufficient form, including perhaps a text that
emphasizes that form, a text that is an organic part of that form: here begins the new art of making books (“The New Art of Making Books,” unpaginated).
Carrión calls, in this manifesto, for a completely new sensibility surrounding the book and what form it can take. There is, according to his proposition, a burgeoning praxis of artistic book-making that privileges form and design over meaning. Or rather, the “new art of making books” derives meaning not from the content of the pages, but from their form. Thus, a book is “made” and a text is “written.”
In the “New Art,” the entire process of bookmaking plays a conceptual role in the overall meaning derived from the work. As such, text itself becomes a material such as clay to a sculptor. Mónica de la Torre writes in her critical accompaniment to Sonnet(s): “This is a poethics that enacts a shift in focus, from the sign as a semantic entity to its visual and sonic properties, until meaning evaporates and we’re left with radically open texts” (61).
In 2020, Ugly Duckling Presse (UPD) republished an early project of Carrión’s called Sonnet(s). Originally published in 1972 by In-Out Productions, Sonnet(s) appropriates a sonnet by the pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti, using it as a model and reconfiguring it in a set of 44 altered versions. Per Heriberto Yépez, one of the foremost Carrión scholars of our time: “Each version [of the original Rossetti sonnet] is derived from a simple graphic, categorical, or thematic (ironic) decision.” Carrión churned Rosetti’s sonnet through 44 permutations, some so subtle that the reading experience becomes, as Megan N. Liberty notes in her review in The Brooklyn Rail, almost like a game of “Spot the Difference.”
The playful procedures Carrión performs to Rosetti’s sonnet dislocates the meaning of the text––trained as we are to read poetry for its “deeper meaning,” the reader of Carrión’s Sonnet(s) becomes trained in a different way: to focus on the visual/conceptual elements of the text. This maneuver exemplifies the experimental nature of Carrión’s early works that he made in the early 1970s when he moved to the Netherlands from Mexico. As he reflects in his own words:
Alrededor de 1970, el año en que vine a vivir a Holanda, dejé de escribir literatura lineal para poder trabajar con las posibilidades espaciales del lenguaje. Esto resultó en la producción de lo que ahora se llama “libros de artista”. En mis libros, fuera de unas pocas excepciones, uso el lenguaje como materia prima. Tanto en mis libros y en mis obras en otros formatos, el lenguaje es un sistema abstracto y no-literario de signos orales y visuales, que no tienen otra función que ser elementos de una estructura dada. (Carrión 1982) (Yépez, unpaginated).
The use of language as “materia prima,” or raw material, highlights the ways in which Carrión’s work can be likened to sculpture or painting rather than poetry. The raw material of language exists, for Carrión, not to be “interpreted” in the hermeneutical sense, but to be molded into something new, forging a new semantic sensibility.
Carrión’s act of appropriation in this piece is integral to the idea of treating language as a material to be worked with. Perhaps the selection of Rosetti’s sonnet was not arbitrary (surely it was not, but we can only speculate on Carrión’s reasoning behind this decision)––still, these procedures could have been done to any source text. Thus, the piece is “about” Carrión’s playful rearrangement of the sonnet, and not the language which serves only as the source text for these performative, ironic permutations to be carried out upon.
In 1973, Carrión made a Spanish counterpart to Sonnet(s) titled Soneto(s), which was never published. This version appropriated as its source text the anonymous “Soneto a cristo crucificado,” and followed almost the same structure of repeating the rule-based text with new, (de)regulatory gestural variations (Yépez 54). While Soneto(s) was never published in full, one of the versions appears in a section of a volume of Carrión’s works titled Poesías, originally from 1973 but published posthumously in 2007. The section it appears in is titled Plagios, and it contains, among other things, the alphabet and the lyrics to “La Bamba,” all “by Ulises Carrión.” Per Mónica de la Torre:
For Sonnets [sic] he borrows Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Heart’s Compass’ and subsequently performed forty-four interventions on it—akin to Situationist signature method of the détournement, defined as ‘the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble’… what the poem might actually be saying appears to matter very little to Carrión, who does not interact with the borrowed materials in terms of meaning. In this regard, his procedures are intent on actualizing the title Carrión has given them only (de la Torre 234-235).
But I would like to argue against dismissing Carrión’s Sonnet(s) as merely a clever joke about authorship and where “value” lies in a text. To do so would be to ignore the implications of Carrión’s use of repetition in this work, and what this repetitive act enables. Each artist treated in this paper works with repetition: Jen Bervin repeats Emily Dickinson’s words and markings by going over them ad infinitum with her hands during the embroidery process; Shirin Salehi repeats Lorca’s poem over and over again; Carrión repeats Rosetti’s sonnet.
As de la Torre notes, Carrión’s method in Sonnet(s) displaces the “meaning” we generally expect to derive from poetry, instead bringing our attention as readers to the playful gesture of the titles he gives the iterations of his borrowed material. Carrión’s interventions do not strip meaning from the borrowed materials but rather bring to the fore a new way of reading for meaning. Perhaps this is why he chose the sonnets “Heart’s Compass” and the anonymous “Soneto a cristo crucificado”––both of these pieces have an oversaturated aura of spiritual meaning. With his repetitions, Carrión develops a new textual spirituality. Heriberto Yépez flags Carrión’s interest in the spiritual potentialities of language:
Me atrevo a decir que el interés de [Ramón] Xirau sobre la relación entre lenguaje y mística, poesía y sacralidad, se transformó en Carrión en una pregunta permanente acerca de los límites del lenguaje. En Xirau mismo hay un constante interés en relacionar lo filosófico y religioso con la poesía de vanguardia y post-vanguardia (Yépez, unpaginated).
What force drives all three of these artists to compulsively repeat their respective prima materia? In his Introduction to Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes:
To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular… The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without concept, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart” (1-2).
Deleuze returns us to the idea of the singular and, perhaps, the sacred or revered. For Deleuze, a poem is a singular event. With repetition, perhaps, the poem’s content might begin to dissolve and become indistinguishable from its context––the “echo” at the level of the external.
References:
Carrión, Ulises. “Bookworks Revisited.” The Print collector’s newsletter 11.1 (1980): 6-9. Web.
Carrión, Ulises. Sonnet(s). Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020. Print. Lost Literature #31.
de la Torre, Monica. “Nobody there: Acousmatics and an Alternative Economy of Meaning in Latin American Poetry of the 1970s.” Ph.D. Columbia University, 2013. New York: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Web.
Liberty, Megan N. “Ulises Carrión’s Sonnet(s): First Published in 1972 as a Typewritten Staple-Bound Mimeograph Book, the Republication of this Bookwork as a Trade Paperback Gives it a New Afterlife. (Art Books).” The Brooklyn Rail. Mar 1, 2021: 74.
