Artists' Books at the University of Utah, Part 3



Front cover

 We turned in our second book assignment tonight and had a round robin critique session. Some of the books were absolutely amazing. All of them were creative. Mine was a little on the standard side. I am, having a bit of trouble thinking out of the traditional format. I was hard pressed to come up with a text only or image only book. I wanted to reformat some old poetry of mine, but as I read through my stuff after many years, all I can say about my poetry is that it is very bad writing and even worse poetry! The only writing that was any good, well, very good were my translations of a few poems of Lope de Vega Carpio, 1562-1613. They are free verse translations which I feel convey his thoughts and images but are not exact translations. The poems are deeply religious, but they approach the subject from a strange point of view. I have always enjoyed reading them and find them thought provoking.

I decided to transpose the form of the poems from the standard poetry form in which I had originally written them and bind the signatures together with a pamphlet stitch. I agonized over the cover for several days and decided to use gold wallpaper and a red cord for the binding. The red cord I had in mind turned out to be too fine, so I dyed some gray cording red and used an exposed spine. I left the ends of the cord long to use as a tie to secure the cover.



This shows the inside of the front cover.

 



This is the first poem in the book.

  Artists' Books blog one.   Artists' Books blog two.