Simulacrum #15: ‘translating translating apollinaire’ by Gary Barwin

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Gary Barwin’s translating translating apollinaire is an 8.5″ x 11″ chapbook of 12 pages printed in an edition of 50 numbered copies.

The title translating translating apollinaire should be a little bit too familiar. Of course, bpNichol published his translation experiments, focusing on a single poem of Guillaume Apollinaire, with just this title in 1979. In fact, bpNichol’s first published poem was titled Translating Apollinaire.
Gary Barwin is one of those people lucky enough to have had the opportunity to study under Nichol. It is no surprise then that Barwin has, without masking it in any way, continued Nichol’s project of translating Apollinaire, a project which Nichol himself said was “an open-ended, probably unpublishable in its entirety, piece“. This seems about right. It is as if the concept in and of itself is a seed to an infinite number of books. Here is one of them–a great one.

SOLD OUT

Simulacrum Press #10: ‘The Penman, a Serious Writer’ by Dawn Nelson Wardrope

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Dawn Nelson Wardrope’s chapbook, The Penman, a Serious Writer is a 13 page, perfect bound chapbook of visual poems. The second of two full colour chapbooks which were printed in Tianjin, China while editor Sacha Archer was “on vacation” (the first being Jaap Blonk’s on tractatus one), Wardrope’s chapbook has been printed in an edition of 50 numbered copies.

Within the pages of The Penman, a Serious Writer, Dawn Nelson Wardrope has crafted a series of visual poems which take the form of vortexes and organic movements. Juxtaposed with these are poems which echo the traditional line in their linear layout, but which, anchored resolutely in the visual, radiate a pulse and aura where punctuation and the letter, dislodged from the sentence and the word, do all the heavy lifting.

Dawn Nelson Wardrope, ‘The Penman, A Serious Writer’, [Domestic/Canada]

Price includes shipping

C$18.50

Dawn Nelson Wardrope, ‘The Penman, A Serious Writer’, [International]

Price includes shipping

C$20.50

Simulacrum Press #9: ‘on tractatus one’ by Jaap Blonk

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Simulacrum Press presents on tractatus one, by Jaap Blonk. A 7×7″ perfect bound chapbook of 24 pages in full colour, on tractatus one has been printed in an edition of 55 numbered copies.

Looking back to his days as a young student, Jaap Blonk, in his on tractatus one, revisits Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in a series of visual meditations which focus on the first statement of that text. Within on tractatus one the reader finds that much debated statement, “The world is all that is the case” in a number of permutations from which Blonk has produced stunning visual translations via mathematical sequences.

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Simulacrum Press #8: ‘Tanka, Vol. 1’ by Eileen R. Tabios

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Tanka Vol. 1, by Eileen R. Tabios, is Simulacrum Press’s second March chapbook publication. Tabios’s Tanka, Vol. 1 is a tall, slender chapbook of 20 pages, saddle stitched and printed in an edition of 75 numbered copies.

In Tanka, Vol. 1, prolific poet and reader, Eileen R. Tabios, investigates the classical Japanese tanka. Presenting a scope of work, from her early engagements with the form to increasingly stylized experiments, a progression of possibility opens in the arena of stricture. Where in the initial section we find the poems following the traditional form (as it manifests when romanized), for the following sections Tabios utilizes her MDR (Murder Death Resurrection) Poetry Generator to set the stage for reconfiguration, then excavation.

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‘Tanka, Vol.1’ by Eileen R Tabios (Domestic/ Canada)

Price includes shipping

C$12.50

 

‘Tanka, Vol. 1’ by Eileen R. Tabios (International)

Price includes shipping

C$13.50

SIMULACRUM

Simulacrum Press is now! Be… be… be… beginning! And welcome, all who somehow find yourselves at this press.

Simulacrum Press is run solely by Sacha Archer (sachaarcher.wordpress.ca). So, yes, it is a (very) small outfit and will do what it can with the means it has. I am extremely excited to see what this little experiment is to become–as it is an experiment–I am proceeding through the dark. Simulacrum will be publishing chapbooks, broadsides and ‘special projects’–and likely, a little later on, I’ll begin full-length print-on-demand collections–but not at this time.

What kind of work will Simulacrum publish? I’m looking generally for experimental, avant-garde works of POETRY POETRY and only POETRY. But what poetry is exactly… In theory I’m looking for works of poetry which do not really resemble poetry–and that that is vague is, perhaps, good.

Obviously, as time moves forward, the works published through Simulacrum will serve as more and more of a guide for the kind of work I’m looking for–hopefully never arriving at an overtly clear definition.

Who knows what will happen.

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