Backlist Bulletin #8: Dog Ear by Erica Baum
I? I would not do that.
Yes?
Yes.
differently.
How
I hate dog ear-ing books. It’s always felt illegal to do so in a library book and immoral in a copy loaned from a known person. In my personal copies, it feels like I’m prematurely bringing on the inevitable wear-and-tear the print books will face. Yet, I can’t deny the strange and thrilling intimacy of running one’s fingers over the traces of a past reader’s dog ear — the page forever marked by another hand.
One of my first thoughts about Erica Baum’s Dog Ear (UDP, 2016) was this question of “forever.” The dog ear, “even when smoothed out and returned to its upright position, scars the page forever,” as Kenneth Goldsmith writes in the opening essay to the second edition (6). So what would happen to Baum’s Dog Ear plates (poems? images? texts?) if her purposeful, meticulous dog ear folds were smoothed out? The dog ear fold as Baum’s “writing” tool suggests a state of impermanence even in its photographed form. It’s almost as if the reader could reach out and undo or redo the dog ear, either rewinding Baum’s process or starting something else entirely. Dog Ear is about possibilities.
Before I actually started reading the Dog Ear plates, I read the Goldsmith and Béatrice Gross essays that sandwich Baum’s 25 photographs in the second edition. Perhaps, I should have dived right into reading (or is it seeing? observing? processing?) the Dog Ear plates, because I would have liked to encounter them without any prior influence.
I had read Goldsmith’s essay first, which walks through two possible ways of reading “Laceless” (Plate XXII): as “a path that begins at the upper left-hand corner working its way around the outside, while ignoring the fold” (8), or “as two separate portions of text with the fold as dividing line” (9). When I finally got to the plates, I found myself trying both of these routes with each one.
Even so, Dog Ear accomplished what I assumed would have happened if I had not received “any prior influence”: I scrambled to find my footing as the reader. Though I had arrived equipped with Goldsmith’s two possibilities of “reading” each dog ear, every single one kept me searching for a way into it. I realized this was due to the myriad possibilities beyond the two Goldsmith described.
For instance, “Mad” (Plate III) is the first plate in this collection where the page numbers are visible: 32 and 33. It also appears that a chapter or book title was printed in all caps and centered as a page heading: “MIS”/”MIS S”/“MISS.” Do the page numbers and heading then become part of the poem? Or are they meant to be ignored, nothing more than components of the original paperback that Baum just worked with(out) or around or in spite of?
“Differently” (Plate XVI) also has page numbers, but the white space on this plate is the biggest factor in creating possibilities. The lines of text do not meet at the dog ear fold, so they do not intersect at a right angle the way they do in the other plates. The space and distance between the words make it difficult to immediately determine where the words align, which made me unsure of how to “read” this plate using Goldsmith’s aforementioned two routes. The white space allowed me to come up with more ways that felt sensible in making sense of the plate. Here are a few examples:
I? I would not do that.
Yes?
Yes.
differently.
How
OR
I? I would not do that.
differently.
Yes?
Yes.
How
OR
How differently.
Yes.
I? I would not do that.
Yes?
In other plates, notably “Elegant Solution” (Plate XIII), the dog ear fold offers more options than either connecting or dividing the lines of text; it also disjoints and conjoins words and letters. The fold would cover up or cut off a portion of a word or a part of a letter, and/or the intersecting lines of text would crash into each other, creating unfamiliar or even nonsensical terms and letterforms. I was constantly unsure of whether to skip over these new (non)words or whether to treat the fold as a space between two known words. But it was interesting to test them as linguistic forms in the language we know as English. If I read “Elegant Solution” (Plate XIII) from the upper left corner to bottom right, included all the letters I could partially distinguish, and without considering the fold as a space of absence, it might read something like this:
threw his elegant solution into diround sort of cleaning. Surrounded
red tape held things up. Peopl gigantic well. Sunlight shoots
with their successors didn’t illuminating the ground at
front, concentration casit down in the sunlight
heavy snowfalls. Powa chocolate bar from
of uncertaintyach second of
At his ness I felt
His recthe sun’s
path
f
I could be going too far by embracing previously nonexistent words like “casit” or a “Peopl” clearly missing an ‘e’. But it also doesn’t feel totally right to ignore or correct these weird creations, because there are moments when they create “meaning” in intriguing ways. “At his ness” feels like a phrase that attempts to capture a person’s “something-ness”/”______-ness” — an unnameable essence. “Uncertaintyach” feels like it could be “uncertainty ache,” and couldn’t that be a very real ailment? Ending the poem with “f” feels colloquial and satisfying, as a symbolic “fuck” said under one’s breath.
Other memorable words made possible in Dog Ear include “lovediced” in “Diverting” (Plate XVII), “unsibylline” in “Medusa” (Plate IX), and “echoinsive” in “Ballets” (Plate V). “Ballets” also has the word “alles,” which does actually exist to mean “all” in German, perhaps inadvertently creating a multilingual text.
In her recent 2020 interview in BOMB Magazine, Baum describes Dog Ear as “playful… an homage to the love of reading… adjacent to appreciating the books as they were intended.” That playfulness certainly transfers from Baum as the writer/author/artist to the reader as viewer/decoder/interpreter. Each dog ear could function as a Rorschach test of some sort, revealing through its many possibilities different readers’ proclivities and prior experiences of the act of reading and meaning-making. The dog ear plates are visual objects as much as they are poetry, calling attention to a Derridian notion that the visual materiality of text is meaningful in writing and reading.
Dog Ear also calls to attention the materiality of the print book: of paper and ink. With the carefully placed dog ear fold and full-color photographs showing age and texture, Baum illustrates the dynamic materiality of ephemera texts; she’s created new poetry from old prose books, experimenting with the idea of ephemerality itself and the concept of (im)permanence. Each plate has varying levels of yellowing, touched by time and the elements, a temporal and physical impact not possible in an e-book (in which dog ear-ing pages would not be possible either). It’s fun to wonder how Baum came upon these books and how she chose these pages. How many hands and shelves did this book pass through before they landed in hers? How many pages in the book were dog eared before she created something she liked? What possibilities were already contained in the book that the simple act of folding a page could be poetry?
Baum saw more possibilities with the books she read and used than was most likely intended by the original authors, publishers, and printers. In turn, her presentation of these possibilities create other ones for her reader, expanding their act of reading into one of “writing” and inviting them to feel the traces of another’s dog eared pages.
— Ainee Jeong
Dog Ear is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here) and through our Partner Bookstores (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on Friday, January 29th, 2021 are 50% off, use discount code CORNER at checkout.
The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.
