the craft
craft practice
in 1977, esteban valdés published, likely my favourite book of poetry, fuera de trabajo in río piedras, puerto rico. the mimeograph he used to print it had been stolen from the universidad de puerto rico. the same machine was also used to print clandestine political bulletins for the unión de socialistas libertarios, the partido socialista revolucionario, and the feminist group alianza humana. the editors of the 2020 reedition put it plainly: publications at this scale resist capitalism through their economic unviability.
i have been thinking about that sentence for months. especially of this blog, my writing, and its economic unviability. and yet i presist, without economic benefits, to write and craft.
i write poems, i print zines, build small personalised digital tools, and i keep this blog. dang, none of these things are economically viable. none of them are legible to the attention economy as things worth measuring. i have been trying to figure out what connects them, what the common gesture is across all of it, and i think it is this: the act of making something by hand, at small scale, outside the logic of production that wants everything to have a market, a user base, and a growth curve.
in my last post i was looking for a language for the small, tended, and insurgent things i create (the plot{s}), and in this post i am looking for the connection between them. the poem, the zine, the script, and the weblog. what do they share? what runs underneath all of them? the craft is the physical and productive process. it comes to this: facio ergo sum. i make therefore i am.
william morris called it joy in labour. he argued that you can read the conditions of production in the thing produced, that an unartistic society is one in which labour has been stripped of its joyful and creative qualities, and that the handmade object carries within it the conditions of its making. i feel this when i make a letterpress print: the physical act of setting type, inking the block, and running the press is not separate from the poem, poster, or book. it is inside it. the form and the content arrive together, pressed into the same sheet.
bpNichol spent his career exploring what he called the borderblur between image and text, sound, prose, and poetry. the martyrology, his lifelong open-ended poem that began in 1967, never resolved. it just continues, accumulating, and beginning again, refusing the logic of completion or death. it is not a product with a finished state. it is a practice, like a garden, like a webblog, or like a lifelong meditation.
gertrude stein said that the business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete and actual present, and to completely express that actual present through art. she called it the continuous present: not writing about the present, but writing in it. i keep beginning again and again, each log or poem or print run another entry into the same ongoing act of composition. i think about this every time i open a new file or set up a new stencil or form. the webblog post is not a document, it becomes the present tense.
what connects valdés's stolen mimeograph, morris's homage to craft, bpNichol's lifelong poem, and stein's continuous present is that they all operate outside the logic of the institution that would like to contain them. the university that owned valdés's machine didn't know what it was to make was possible (especially as it was a simple office tool). the publishing industry that completely ignored the mimeo revolution didn't know what it was missing out on. stein's modernism wasn't ahead of her time. the time just couldn't keep up with her compositional challenges and consistent subversion of her present's cultural norms.
i am not making any grand claims for this webblog, or for my zines, or for my little poems or shell scripts. but i do think that the small, handmade, economically unviable thing is doing something that the scalable, platform-mediated, analytics-tracked thing cannot do. it is living in the present. it is pressing the conditions of its making into itself. it is beginning again and again.
the mimeograph was stolen. the poem was never finished. the business of art is the actual present.
i keep printing, making, and crafting. this is craft practice, and it has value in and of itself.