Morphology
The era of “colored hearing” is now awash with Morphology’s
dreamlaps. Poems sense aside photos while photos press lines to
logos - a “double joy” that explodes the “fortune
cookie” approach to dream talk. “Awake” is now
“Aquake”, and we are more sensible souls for the “light
tablets” this collaboration tones us.
- Tina Darragh
In the first image of Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump’s Morphology,
the eye follows train tracks into a distant background of earth-meets-sky,
the sky a near circle of light, presenting at the same time an
enclosure and an eternity. The first text suggests a linkage of
thinking and seeing: if I think it, it appears. Magic. The magic
here concerns the relationship of verbal to visual, a relationship
always lively, never predictable. The text is no less visual than
the photographs, and at times even the letters take one’s
attention (and one’s breath away); in the section in which
it is stated that all men are pencils, two times the letter “y”
(why? Y chromosome? a leaning “v” standing on one
leaning leg? all these & more) is separated from its word
and enlarged to become a visual presence, an occupier of space
on the page, in the eye, in the mind. One complete page of the
book states that “my brain is a tablet of light.”
In this book, this fine work of art, this perfect interplay of
writing and photography (both graphic in their own ways), “the
sentence is turning into a person.” If you read and see
carefully, you will be that person. If you’re looking for
something, you will find it here. If you’re not looking
for something, you will find it here, where “someone else
is standing at the other end of that sentence,” a thought
you hear while looking at a dimmed and timeless photograph of
water meeting earth meeting clouds, and you gain a sense that
the sentence is ongoing and connects everything that you are with
everything you have seen, and that it will go on for miles and
miles and miles without ending. This book is magic. I want to
read it a thousand times.
- Charles Alexander
In Lepson and Crump’s collaborative improvisations, language
becomes a playful substance in which we find ourselves furtively
embodied, “camped out near a shoulder” or “standing
in the middle of a paragraph.” Acts of renaming and comparing
create a flux of metamorphoses both ominously curious and sweetly
surprised. These exuberant, synesthetic leaps between the visual
and the verbal bypass unlikeness, pursuing instead a kind of social
dreaming in which everyone is included.
- Tim Peterson
Trained as a painter, printmaker and photographer, Walter
Crump is primarily known for his pinhole work and painterly
uniquely toned & bleached prints. His work has been widely
exhibited both nationally and internationally and collected in
major museum collections including Philadelphia Museum, Smithsonian,
Fogg Art Museum, National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi, Vietnam
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England
Conservatory of Music in Boston. Her book Dreaming in Color was
published by Alice James Books. She edited an anthology, Poetry
from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, published by U of Illinois
Press in 2004. In recent years she has been collaborating with
musicians, artists and other poets. She has had poems in Carve,
Shampoo, Agni, Shuffle Boil and many other periodicals and has
given many readings, including one on National Public Radio’s
“All Things Considered” and one at LaMama Galleria
in NYC. She lives in Cambridge, MA..
Book Information:
· Paperback: 288 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (March 2007)
· ISBN: 1-934289-19-1
$16
