ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents Notes from the authors on the process of making this book. "In "Go-Between Between," Anne Waldman writes: "Language does more than merely communicate and 'express.' It arrives, it manifests, it is a relationship."' This book enacts language as arrival and manifestation, composed as it was in the go-between of an email exchange. Both of us were (and are) interested in a poetics of constraint, of resistance, of inventiveness, and in the process of homolinguistic (English to English) translation. To while away a few winter months with some fun and a challenge, we devised a translation exercise. In "Alphabetic Jitterbug," Steven supplied the first text based on an alphabetic accumulation, and Hilary determined a first method of translation of that section: For each word, find in the dictionary the first (or a nearby) word of the same kind (for example, a noun for a noun), and do a replacement. This method was used a few times to produce successive texts; then in "Can a Paddy Sweat?"...