This is a Picture of Wind

On 30 June 2020 Sheffield-based Longbarrow Press published my new poetry collection, This is a Picture of Wind. On Saturday 28 November 2020, it was named one of the best books of poetry of 2020 by The Guardian. A month later, I’m only just getting around to blogging about it. It’s been a heck of a year.

J. R. Carpenter, This is a Picture of Wind. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2020

In The Guardian, Rishi Dastidar describes This is a Picture of Wind as “title that gives shape to the ineffable […] a digitally tinged pillow book full of staccato language inspired by John Ruskin’s “sky-bottling days”, Francis Beaufort’s wind scale and Luke Howard’s observations of clouds.” And in SPAM Press’s Deep Cuts 2020 Kirsty Dunlop writes: “this collection felt like a necessary breath in the stagnant air of this year.”

This pocket-sized hardback collection is based on This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Phone for Phones, a web-app optimised for smart phones, commissioned by Iota Institute in 2018. The book features an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo and contains new material from me, some of which will be added to the web-app over the course of 2021.

There’s also a Twitterbot companion to the project, posting randomly-generated, poetic, yet plausible weather observations every six hours @apictureofwind.

J. R. CArpenter, This is a Picture of Wind. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2020

The best way to purchase This is a Picture of Wind is direct from the publisher, Longbarrow Press. On the Longbarrow website you can also view a series of short videos featuring excerpts of the work.

A General History of the Air

In the blur that was March 2020 the Ottawa-based above/ground press published some new work from me in a single-poem pamphlet called A General History of the Air. The launch was meant to coincide with my appearance at the 10th annual VERSeFest in Ottawa, March 24-29, 2020. Though the festival has been postponed due to Covid 19, the chapbook is available for order online (details below).

J. R. Carpenter, A General History of the Air. Ottawa: above/ground press, March 2020
J. R. Carpenter, A General History of the Air. Ottawa: above/ground press, March 2020
the first page of A General History of the Air
The first page of A General History of the Air, J. R. Carpenter, 2020

The cover image and all of the text comes from a book called The General History of the Air, Designed and Begun by the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq., Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, at the Black Swan in Pater-noster-Row, near Amen-Corner, June 29, 1692. I consulted a first edition held at the British Library in London, UK, Shelfmark 1651/1033.

The General History of the Air, Robert Boyle, 1692.
The General History of the Air, Robert Boyle, 1692.

After some months at sea, my author copies have now arrived in the UK and are available for order via PayPal paypal.me/jrcarp. £8 for shipping within the UK, £10 for elsewhere in Europe. These prices include postage, packaging, and PayPal fees. North Americans would do better to order directly from the publisher.

The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new bilingual web-based work of digital literature today, Bastille Day. In English the work is called The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. In French, Le plaisir de la côte : une bande dessinée. It’s a story of the western mapping of the South Pacific, rather too big for most phones. Best viewed on a laptop or tablet. It’s available here: http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Uinversité Paris 8, supported by Labex Arts-H2H (now merged with ArTeC), in partnership with the Archives Nationales in Paris. It was presented as a work in progress at « Des machines imaginantes médiatrices de fiction ? » 11-13 décembre 2018 à l’Université Paris 8. The (more or less) completed work will officially launch at Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival 15-17 July 2019 at University Collage Cork in Ireland.

An ocean of thanks to Arnaud Regnauld and Pierre Cassou-Nogues at Université Paris 8; to Françoise Lemaire, Nadine Gastaldi, and Clothilde Roullier at the Archives nationales; and to Robert Sheldon and Stelios Sardelas for ground support in Paris.

larecherche2

For anyone unfamiliar with French naval history, some background information may be useful. In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.

On the 1st of August 1785, Lapérouse departed Brest with no less than ten scientists aboard. On the 10th of March 1788, Lapérouse departed the English Colony at new South Wales, Australia. He was never seen by European eyes again.

To the English ear, the name Lapérouse sounds a lot like the verb ‘to peruse’ — to scan or browse, to read through with thoroughness, to survey or examine in detail. The dictionary cautions, the word ‘peruse’ can be confused with the verb ‘to pursue’ — to follow in order to overtake, to strive to gain, to seek to attain, to proceed in accordance with a method, to carry on or continue. The English word ‘pursue’ sound a bit like the French word ‘perdu’ — disposable, ruined, lost.

On 25 September 1791, Entrecasteaux departed from Brest in search of the lost Lapérouse. One of his two 500-ton frigates was named La Recherche. On board was a young hydrographer, Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré (1766-1854), a close contemporary of the English hydrographer Francis Beaufort (1774-1857). Beaufort is perhaps most famous for the wind scale named after him, for measuring the force of the wind. Beautemps is an auspicious name for an ocean-going person, in need of fair winds. Once at sea, however, beau pré are few and far between.

Finished sea charts are designed to be uniform in appearance, as precise as possible. The Archives nationales in Paris holds hundreds of sheets of drafts of charts made by Beautemps-Beaupré aboard La Recherche, and boxes of sketchbooks. A mix of drawing, writing, and numbers. The active marks of a practicing hand. Oak gall ink on rough paper. Liquid lines of inquiry. Drawn onwards by a moving ship.

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’. This détourned philosophy is intermingled with excerpts from Beautemps-Beaupré’s Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts (1808). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She becomes shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré.

I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, poly-vocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.” Imagine if Barthes were the bastard love child of Giraudoux but grew up to be a hydrographer instead of a philosopher. Or if Beautemps-Beaupré had secretly written a symbolist novel from the point of view of a female castaway. But for the web…

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. I’m calling this work a hydro-graphic novel.

The images in this work are a combination of my own photographs and digitisations generously made for me by the Archives nationales. More information on the text sources can be found within the work itself. Finally, I would note that this work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

An Ocean of Static Highly Commended by the Forward Prizes 2018

I’m thrilled to share the news that my debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, has been Highly Commended by the Forward Prize 2018. Congratulations to all the other Highly Commended poets for their fine works.

Forward Prize Commendations 2018
Forward Prize Commendations 2018

Many thanks to my wonderful publishers Penned in the Margins for supporting this book. The book launch was held at the British Library in London in April 2018, thanks to the Eccles Centre for American Studies. An Ocean of Static has been presented at Cuirt International Festival of Literature and Edinburgh International Book Festival. It has received excellent reviews. Ian McMillan from Radio 3’s The Verb called it: “A marvellous firework of a book … a Moby Dick and Ancient Mariner for our times.”

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter
An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018

An excerpt of one of the poems in the collection has been published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019, which is now available for purchase. This poem started off as a digital text called, Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl. This work has been performed at Le Cube in Paris, The British Library in London, The Club at The Banff Centre, The March Hare in Newfoundland, and many smaller venues. A print iteration of this poem was first published in Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, in May 2014. Many thanks to all those who helped Owl and Girl along on their long voyage. I’m especially thrilled to see traces of JavaScript grace the pages of the Forward Book of Poetry 2019.

J. R. Carpenter || Forward Prize
J. R. Carpenter || Forward Prize

For more information about An Ocean of Static, check out this interview I did with Penned in the Margins in July 2018: J.R. Carpenter talks to Elle Eccles about translation, migration, and variance in her newest poetry collection An Ocean of Static

An Ocean of Static

The launch of my debut poetry collection will take place at the British Library in London on Friday 27 April 2018, 19:30. Join us for an evening of digital projection, live performance, and a conversation with Peter Jaeger. The event is hosted by Penned in the Margins and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. It’s FREE but booking is essential. RSVP now to reserve your place.

Published in paperback by the ever-excellent Penned in the Margins, with silver cover foiling and French flaps, An Ocean of Static, will be available for purchase 24 April 2018.

Pre-order 9-20 April for £9.99. (regular price £12)

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter
An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

This book transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into a sea of fresh new text.

What surfaces in An Ocean of Static are arrays of language, “arguments” that can be read as a chorus of subtle alternatives or sometimes like confused cries in a nautical crisis, along with records of journeys from centuries apart. J. R. Carpenter draws language through the icy passage of code’s style, gripping the rigging with a performative voice developed in many presentations of this work. The book that results is in the ancient form of the cento (literally, a patchwork), but one that fits together like whole cloth, functioning as a sail, allowing air, human effort, and machinery to work together to carry us along.

–Nick Montfort, author of The Truelist

This book is made of other books. The poems in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. The poems in this book are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works.

Portions of this work first appeared, often in very different forms, in a wide range of print, digital, and live performance contexts. A full list of links and references is available here.

Upcoming Talks – February 2018

I’m hitting the road next week, to talk archaeologies of experimental wind weather writing and unconventionalities of weird web art design to students, faculty, and anyone who turns up really, at Epsom, Southampton, and Winchester school of Art.

On Monday 5 February 12:30-13:30 I’ll be speaking to Graphic Design students, faculty, and members of the public at the University for the Creative Arts in Epsom. I think the event poster gives fair warning of my highly eccentric approach to web ‘design’. I hope a lively discussion of how very best not to do things ensues.

UCA Epsom || J. R. Carpenter, 5 February 2018
UCA Epsom || J. R. Carpenter, 5 February 2018

On Thursday 8 February I’ll head south to Southampton to give a reading at the excellent ENTROPICS experimental poetry series. In advance of the reading, Sarah Hayden asked me a few interview questions. My answers, along with interviews with past ENTROPICS poets are online here. I am deeply indebted to the organizers for the fabulous event poster, below. The reading will take place at 18:30–21:00 at Mettricks Old Town Cafe, 117 High St, Southampton SO14 2AA, UK. All are welcome.

ENTROPICS || J. R. Carpenter, 8 February 2018
ENTROPICS || J. R. Carpenter, 8 February 2018

And then onward on Friday 9 February to talk about my new web-based work This is a Picture of Wind at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) Research Group at Winchester School of Art as part of their Talking Heads Series. The event will take place at Winchester School of Art, Lecture Theatre A, 15:00-17:00. It’s free, and open to the public. For more information, see the event page Writing a Picture of Wind. Many thanks to AMT director Jussi Parikka for putting the Southampton-Winchester bit of the tour together.

The Gathering Cloud book is out now from Uniformbooks

This thing about clouds is, they refuse to stay still. Initially commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival as a web-based project, The Gathering Cloud quickly spawned zine and live performance iterations. It won the New Media Writing Prize 2016 and was an Editor’s Pick in the Saboteur Awards 2017. The Gathering Cloud has now been published as a print book by Uniformbooks.

This new book collates my research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803. This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page.

In his foreword, media theorist Jussi Parikka, author of A Geology of Media, describes the multi-modality of The Gathering Cloud project as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.

In her afterword, poet Lisa Robertson, author of The Weather, describes this iterative compositional process in quite another way: “…whatever gathers things together whatever gathers people together and thinking together given the great long whooshing passage of time wind economies technologies believes and whatever gathers a sentence together and whatever a poem is both physical and mysterious and so we wish to read…”

Many thanks to Jussi and Lisa, to Uniformbooks editor Colin Sackett, to NEoN curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell, to Chris Meade and Jim Pope at the New Media Writing Prize, and to Claire Trévien
 at Sabotage Reviews.

For more information and to purchase The Gathering Cloud book, visit Uniformbooks.

Uniformbooks to publish a book on The Gathering Cloud

My hybrid print– and web–based project The Gathering Cloud will reach its fullest extent yet in an essay, primer, and glossary to be published by Uniformbooks in spring 2017.

The book will consist of a foreword by Jussi Parikka, author of A Geology of Media, a brief afterword by Lisa Robertson, author of The weather, and a new essay by J. R. Carpenter, with illustrations and references drawn from the research into weather, data storage, and climate change undertaken during the work’s development. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803.

Winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2016, The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016.

Uniformbooks is an imprint for the visual and literary arts, cultural geography and history, music and bibliographic studies. The uniformity of the format and the expansive variety of the list and its subjects, is characteristic of our open approach to publishing. Printed quarterly Uniformagazine gathers contributions by the writers and artists that the press works with with, sometimes thematically, as well as slighter or singular content. Copies will be available direct from Uniformbooks or online booksellers and independent bookshops.

Trade distribution by Central Books: centralbooks.com

Uniformbooks: uniformbooks.co.uk

The Gathering Cloud Wins The New Media Writing Prize 2016

My recent hybrid print- and web-based work The Gathering Cloud won the Main Prize at the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Winners were announced at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event, which took place at Bournemouth University 18 January 2017. The award, now in its seventh year, saw entries from around the world from across a variety of different styles and media including poetry, non-fiction, digital novels, web-based works, and trans-media pieces.

The judges admired Carpenter’s grasp of digital and non-digital elements, and found her piece, about the relationship between the digital and the natural, beautiful and engaging.
The Literary Platform

Research for The Gathering Cloud began in 2015 when I submitted a proposal to the inaugural Dot Award for Digital Literature, sponsored by if:book. I proposed to create a new web-based work in response to the storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish. Reading the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by how difficult it is to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather, and wind in particular, in all its written forms.

Winning the Dot Award enabled me to explore the intertwined topics of language, weather, and climate change in a freer and more open-ended way that I might otherwise have been able to. I looked through mountains of private weather diaries held at the Met Office Library and Archive in Exeter. One thing I figured out pretty early one is that it’s hard to study only one kind of weather. On one single page of a weather diary it is possible to see noted thunder, lightening, lilacs, a meteor, and hyacinths in full flower.

Detail of a private weather diary held at the Met Office Archive in Exeter
Detail of a private weather diary held at the Met Office Archive in Exeter

During the first week of August 2016 I was a principal performer in the South West Poetry Tour, along with Steven Fowler, Camila Nelson, John Hall, Mattie Spence, and Anabel Banks. Each night we performed new works written in collaboration. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to generate new writing on weather. In my collaboration with John Hall (video) I used classical texts on weather as raw material, and in my collaboration with Anabel Banks (video), we worked with two texts on clouds. She drew upon Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, written in 2007, and I used Luke Howard’s classic Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, written in 1803. Howard was the first to standardise the names of clouds that we still use today. Anabel added one tricky constraint to our collaboration, that we write in hendecasyllabic — eleven syllable lines.

In September 2016 I was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee to create a new web-based work in response to the theme “The Spaces We’re In”.

Physical urban space and virtual information space are inseparably intertwined. How does being digital change our sense of our spatial surroundings? Can we play in or animate the hybrid or glitched spaces in-between? Is there negative space in cyberspace? […] NEoN will interrogate the materials that make up our built environment – from air and glass, to cardboard and concrete to circuits and steel – and the designed devices we use to navigate it. As buildings and bridges seem to emerge readymade from the screen to real space, NEoN’s programme will help us figure out how ‘the digital’ helps us through the transition, or at least helps us to understand and critique it.
NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016

When the festival’s curators told me about the theme I knew immediately that I wanted to call attention to the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ storage. I’ve thought a lot about the complex relationship between biological and digital memory in previous work. The scale of the digital cloud is too vast to think about in terms of the body. I had to think bigger, so I turned to the clouds in the sky.

I decided to continue to build upon the structure of Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, to incorporate more recent texts on cloud storage and media theory, and to stick with the hendecasyllabic constraint. The resulting work, The Gathering Cloud launched to a crowd of 350 people at a Pecha Kucha Night in Dundee on 8 November 2016, the night of the US elections. I hadn’t intended for the title to wind up sounding quite so ominous, but I do think that now more than ever we need to find ways of talking about the enormity of climate change in human terms that we can understand and act upon.

Many thanks to everyone at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office, all the performers on the South West Poetry Tour, the curators and staff at NEoN Digital Arts, and everyone involved with the Dot Award and the New Media Writing Prize, with special thanks to Michael Saunby, Kay Lovelace, Chirs Meade, and Jerome Fletcher.

Further reading:

NEoN speaks with JR Carpenter

JR Carpenter takes the big prize at the 2016 New Media Writing Prize Awards

Writing on the Cusp of Becoming Something Else

As an artist and author of both print and digital literature I have made extensive use of archival materials over the past twenty years, incorporating ‘found’ images from old text books and ‘borrowing’ source code from dusty corners of the Web. I will aim to frame these acts of appropriation as contributions to a larger cultural project during Friction and Fiction: IP, Copyright and Digital Futures, a one day symposium taking place at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London 26 September 2015.

The Songs of Maldoror (1869)
Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror (1869)

In 1870 Le Compte de Lautréamont famously wrote: “Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.” In The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, McKenzie Wark observes that Lautréamont “corrects, not back to a lost purity or some ideal form, but toward to a new possibility” (2011 34). In this spirit, let’s use Lautréamont’s expression, but eliminate the false idea of an assumed male author:

“Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses her expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.” J. R. Carpenter

In the 1920s Lautréamont was re-discovered by the Surrealists, who hailed him as a patron saint. In the early 1950s news broke that some of the most poetic passages of Lautréamont’s most well-known work, The Songs of Maldoror (1869), had been plagiarised from text books. I’d love to say this is where I got the idea from, but I’d been plagiarising text books long before I’d ever heard of Lautréamont.

Hannah Hoch, Bourgeois Wedding Couple (1919)
Hannah Hoch, Bourgeois Wedding Couple (1919)

The Letterist International credited Lautréamont with the discovery of a method they termed détournement. To détourne is to detour, to lead astray, to appropriate — not a literary form, as in a style, a poetics, or a genre, but rather a material form, as in a sentence, a book, a film, a canvas. In this material approach the Letterists lagged decades behind the Dadaist, Constructivist, and Surrealist collage and photomontage artists of the 1920s.

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (1934)
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (1934)

I went to art school. I came to writing through the material practices of photographing, photocopying, cutting with scissors, and pasting with glue. Hannah Hoch was my hero. Her lover Raoul Hausmann was pretty great too. I was mesmerised by the strange relations between image and text in the collage novels of Max Ernst (1891–1976), as was another of my art school icons, Joseph Cornell. At the recent exhibition of Cornell‘s work at the Royal Academy in London I was delighted to discover that Cornell had appropriated a black and white image of a girl balancing a stack of suitcases on her head from the front page of my website.

J. R. Carpenter, Luckysoap.com
J. R. Carpenter, Luckysoap.com

One of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls was first published in a literary journal in 1995, but I remained unsatisfied with the fixed order of the story. In 1996 I made a non-linear HTML version in which readers could move through the story their own way. Most of the images and subtexts come from a civil engineering handbook. The deadpan technical descriptions of dikes, groins and mattress work add perverse sexual overtones to the otherwise chaste first-person narrative. Between the diagrammatic images and the enigmatic texts, a meta-narrative emerges wherein the absurd and the inarticulate, desire and loss may finally co-exist.

Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore (1979)
Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore (1979)

I built The Cape in 2005, but some of the sentences had been kicking around in my brain since the early 1990s. I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with them until came across a used copy of an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published by the University of Massachusetts in 1979, around the time of my one and only trip to Cape Cod to visit a grandmother I barely remember. I used photographs, charts, graphs and maps from the Geologic Guide as stand-ins for non-existent family photos — a surrogate family album. I used DHTML timelines produce a silent, jumpy, staggering effect reminiscent of the Super-8 home movies in which I’d always longed to star. The Cape has since been published in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, under a Creative Commons licence, and as a zine, in which images from the Geologic Guide mingle with diagrams appropriated from children’s text books.

Zine iterations of web-based works by J. R. Carpenter
Zine iterations of web-based works by J. R. Carpenter

In more recent works, I have turned my acquisitive attention toward the appropriation of literary texts.

In …and by islands I mean paragraphs (2013), small paragraphs generated by JavaScript draw upon variable strings containing fragments of literary texts harvested from a vast corpus of essays, plays, poems, novels, and travel writing on the topic of islands, including a number of works which have already borrowed from each other. My aim is not to claim these fragments of literary works as my own, but rather, to make their inner workings more overt. For example, whilst the title of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England” (1971) makes clear reference to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), nowhere within the poem does Bishop acknowledge that the textual topography of her Crusoe’s island borrows heavily from Charles Darwin’s descriptions of the Galapagos Islands in The Voyage of the Beagle (1838), a book which Bishop admired. And why should she?

J. R. Carpenter, ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (2013)
J. R. Carpenter, …and by islands I mean paragraphs (2013)

McKenzie Wark argues: “For past works to become resources for the present requires… their appropriation as a collective inheritance, not as private property” (2011: 37). In …and by islands I mean paragraphs I have clasped the authors’ sentences tight. I have used expressions from both Bishop and Darwin. I have eliminated the false idea that either text is fixed, advocating instead for the bright idea that literature is our and we should use it however we want.

Incorporation of appropriation, variation, and transformation into the process of composition results in writing that is always on the cusp of becoming something else.