Embodied processes: thinking and making: material affect in Poetry of Unknown Words

This paper discusses some of the underlying poetries of page and material media, within our collaborative project Poetry of Unknown Words, using process notes to consider material affects.

As makers, it is the ‘stuff’ of our practice to be curious and open to what a poetic text could be and how it should be formed. Our interest comes from doing and making – choices of technologies, texts, cuts and pastes, plagiarism or quotation, taking a position that includes ambiguity and mistake.

In this work we appropriate the format of Iliazd’s Poésie de mots inconnus (published Paris, Le Degré 41,1949) using sheets of paper with the fold/pli as a work in movement that is read. We pay particular attention to means of production (digital, letterpress, experimental typography and hand made mark) reworking the poetics of ‘thingness’ and ‘text’. It is unbound, unnumbered - a changing set of connections or readings across sheets.

Poetry of Unknown Words is a series of ‘transcriptions’ referencing extant works by women writers and makers. Our sense of 'unknown' addresses the library, archive and feminist notions of hidden from history creating new texts.

In exposing our process in this paper, we address ways in which emotion exits within our choices – the lyric of manure notes from Sissinghurst, the reconfiguring of Constance Spry’s floral prose, etcetera.