The Space of Poetics

woodcut, letterpress, hand coloring | 10-5/8″ x 12-1/4″ x 1/4″ | edition of 20 | 2015

The Space of Poetics

This book explores the relationship of space, memory, and language in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. The excerpt used here is a meditation on the importance of place and seclusion in one’s life and on the enduring mark left by a time of solitude. Through the use of architectural plans as a model for syntactic diagrams, The Space of Poetics juxtaposes the ways we speak about creative solitude with the ways we orient ourselves in space. Accompanying each portion of text is a woodcut of an architectural grid plan overlaid with a diagram of the structure of the text. The overlays, inspired by wiring diagrams, are numbered and color-coded so that the reader may decipher the grammatical connections hidden within the text. The repeated woodcut and changing overlays suggests how individual uses of language relate to more universal, shared experiences.

Please click here to view the sequence of the book.

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