The Brooklyn Rail

In the legacy of “books on books,” Granary Books is one of the most prolific. Founded by Steve Clay, Granary began publishing books in 1985. Since then, they have published a number of artists’ books, such as Jen Bervin’s boxed research project, 7S [Seven Silks] (2018), Cecilia Vicuña’s knotted wool Chanccani Quipu (2012), and Carolee Schneemann’s Vulva’s Morphia (1998). This is in addition to their library’s worth of titles that anthologize the history of the field of artists’ publishing such as Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books (1995, expanded 2004), Stefan Klima’s Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature (1998), Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert’s The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books (1999), and Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger’s Threads Talk Series (2016). The latest book, After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025, is also accompanied by an exhibition at the Grolier Club (through July 26). The anthology and exhibition focus on one of Granary’s (and by extension, Clay’s) strongest genres: visual and concrete poetry. It includes over a hundred illustrated examples of visual poetry works, each with explanatory texts, often including quotes from the makers or contemporary reviews. It is an important addition to a growing body of research on the visual poetry of the sixties to the present.

While the book openly builds on Clay’s own collection, it is co-edited by M.C. Kinniburgh and Clay. In their introduction, they sketch out a rough definition of the kinds of materials the project hoped to capture, citing Dick Higgins’s notion of “intermedia” and Rosmarie Waldrop’s push against the “transparency of the word.” The works gathered in this hefty softcover all share an interest in pushing language into a purely visual form, at which point it can freshly make meaning. There is an interesting interplay between “media” and “mediate,” which requires a slower, different kind of reading than other books or poetry. Kinniburgh and Clay make use of this linguistic slippage between these terms and the ways in which visual poetry requires different forms of reading: “forms of visual, experimental, and sound poetry often make vivid the relationship of the body, performance, and experience to language.” Do we rotate our bodies around in an attempt to read the twisted words of Ian Hamilton Finlay? Do we sound out loud the word puzzles filled with odd spacing by Dom Sylvester Houédard or Emmett Williams?

With paginated visual works, there is always the challenge in catalogues to illustrate enough of the book. The sheer number of examples here makes it impossible to show them all in detail, and I found myself yearning for more images, even of well-known examples such as Emmett Williams’s sweethearts (of which only the cover is illustrated). But the tradeoff is the depth of research, evidenced in part by one of the final images in the book, also used for the endpapers, a sketched timeline of intersecting movements in this field Clay made as part of his research.

Another reason perhaps not to overly illustrate is that this book certainly does not exist in a vacuum. As the editors acknowledge, it builds on a growing body of similar anthologies, including Primary Information’s necessary reprint of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, first published by Something Else Press in 1967, and their new addition, Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre (2020). It even pays direct homage to previous collections in the opening images, which show the covers of some of these books: Sound Poetry: A Catalogue edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol (1978), Text–Sound Texts edited by Richard Kostelanetz (1980), and Concrete Poetry: A World View edited by Mary Ellen Solt (1971).

After Words is organized thematically rather than chronologically or by author. The groupings highlight asemic writing, experimental typography, assemblage publications, Xerox, and glyphs, putting the works in a visual context, as well as a historical one. “We’ve attempted to gently and non-prescriptively impose additional categories of meaning-making on these publications,” the editors note, while acknowledging still that “all of the items in this exhibition could be re-arranged with a completely valid new schema.” The deep research also acts as an invitation—especially considering this is drawn from one person’s collection. If you see something missing, begin your own.