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A Note on Grand Grimoire

Grand Grimoire is composed in a 12.5 x 10.75 inch Art Alternatives Very Big Sketch Book, available at art stores and online. The Very Big Sketch Book occupies an ambiguous position: it appeals equally to the amateur and the professional, the broke college student and the person with disposable income. Marketed as “sourced from sustainable forests,” it costs around $30, yet its heft and austere black cover give it the appearance of something more expensive.

I offer this description because the object itself—with its simultaneous possibilities for disciplined engagement and low-stakes exploration—conditioned the composition of the sequences in Grand Grimoire. Early on, I discarded several Very Big Sketch Books because sequences were not working or because I made unrecoverable errors. After making substantial progress, however, I had to treat the book as a singular object: a record of traces that could not be repeated. Nevertheless, I tried to preserve the spirit of play and irreverence made possible by the book’s modest price.

This oscillation between the sacred and the profane, the singular and the disposable, is heightened by tensions between the various genres the book draws on—illuminated manuscripts, emblematica, fine art, love notes, spycraft, doodles, graffiti, and so on. Central to the visual dynamics of the book is my handwriting, which moves between scrawl and glyph, anchoring and feeding the other elements on the page.

Reading a handwritten text asks something different of a reader than reading a printed text; the same is true of reading writing among surrounding images, or reading writing that becomes image and vice versa. Because of this, it may be tempting to treat Grand Grimoire primarily as a book of images and to read the poems in transcription. I hope, however, that the sequences will, when possible, be encountered as singular works.

Working within the constraints of the Very Big Art Book has meant, among other things, composing directly on the spot to preserve the immediacy of gesture; learning to compose within finite physical space; writing while foregrounding questions of structure—placement, readability, and visual complexity—as well as qualities such as color, texture, and layering; and keeping both semantic and visual relationships across the entire book in mind while composing.

The poems themselves draw on traditions of praise, lamentation, and critique. There is the ode “carrots” to carrots; the mournful “coca”; and the recriminatory “vrykolakas,” or “vampire” in Greek. Throughout the Grand Grimoire, questions of life—both biological and lived—remain central. For instance, the book concludes with “Anyte,” named for the ancient Greek poet known for writing about animals, which blends anatomical terms, organism names, and drug names into a hymn to life’s tangled interplay of forms, technologies, and chemicals.

Grand Grimoire is part of a body of work I call the Chimeras: poems composed using nontraditional media and supports. The Chimeras are not simply visual poems—broadly speaking, images that engage the inscriptional qualities of writing, or that solicit readers to encounter images in the manner of writing. Nor are they poems accompanied by images in which poem and image retain separate compositional histories. Rather, they use particular supports, materials, and acts of inscription as generative engines of composition, exploring how their constraints and affordances give rise to new poetic possibilities.