Axon: Creative Explorations

Content warning: colonisation, appropriation, exploitation & violence.

This article contains two files: an introduction and sequenced work by the artist and another version as a downloadable zine, to print in booklet imposition. 

This essay defines the poetic form of the calligramme (also known as the pattern poem, or technopaignia), provides a micro-history of the form in Western literature, before exploring how, with reference to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) and Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe, the poems in Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press 2022) took shape. It also explores how, via Goethe, the calligrammes use colour, and why, via Piaget, their taking shape is a kind of poetic object permanence.

Sarah Bodman reflects on 13 years of Bookarts at UWE Bristol’s World Book Night (WBN) project; a text and image / artists’ books-based event which has evolved from an initial collaboration with the artist and poet Nancy Campbell into an annual, international, participatory celebration of reading and creative making. Inspired by our shared interests in literature, poetry, artists’ books and mail art, WBN introduces ourselves and other artists/writers to particular books and ways of working together.