Recorded documentation of a reading that took place in Berlin in April 2021. Jimmie Durham reads from his books Columbus Day 1983, Poems That Do Not Go Together 2012, and Particle/Word Theory 2020, as well as other, unpublished poems. The record includes an accompanying booklet with drawings by Jimmie Durham and a text by the poet Ammiel Alcalay, who locates Durham’s poetry in American literature.

Jimmie Durham was an artist, poet, essayist and political activist. In 2019 he was awarded the Golden Lion for his life’s work at the Venice Biennale.

American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

Gerard Stigter (6 November 1936–12 August 2021), known by the pseudonym K. Schippers, was a Dutch poet, prose writer and art critic. Credited with having introduced the readymade as a poetic form, his work is dedicated to looking at everyday objects and events in a new way.

The Matrix by Norman H. Pritchard (1939–1996) gathers a selection of the Concrete and Black Arts poet’s work from 1960 to 1970. The seventy-one poems collected here might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems, being tethered not only to the literature of the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York. Drawing as much from the visual arts and concrete poetry as from sound-based experimentation and music, Pritchard utilized the simple tools of spacing and typography to create syncopations, vibrations, and musical rhythms. What emerges is nothing less than a self-contained system of mimetic codes that challenge modernist modes of perception and representation. Formally innovative and anticipating what Michael Riffaterre would come to call the semiotics of “ungrammaticalities,” the book is a syntactical and visual experience in repetition, stutters, and structure.

Second volume of a two volume poem by Noelle Kocot.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

First volume of a two volume poem by Noelle Kocot.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.