From "As We Know"
by Amaranth Borsuk & Andy Fitch
"As We Know" seeks to invert gendered trajectories of appropriation and editorial intervention as these have played out in the famous cases of figures such as Dorothy Wordsworth (whose Grasmere Journals get appropriated extensively, without attribution, in her brother William’s poems) and Emily Dickinson (whose posthumously edited corpus has produced any number of recalibrated iterations — from Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd’s early disciplining of the text, to Susan Howe’s emphatically personal My Emily Dickinson, to Roni Horn’s sculpture texts). Here Amaranth Borsuk has taken a summer diary project of Andy Fitch’s and reshaped 60 passages into a form of collectivized confession or constructivist collage. As We Know takes as its model an iconic project of first-person daily notation: Robert Creeley’s 1972 text A Day Book (with its cover design by pop artist Robert Indiana). Embracing Barthes’s call for a “corrected banality,” we present the most unmediated-seeming idiom — the diurnal, journalistic record — as itself the consequence of both methodical and whimsical extraction. By positioning erasure procedures at the origin of, rather than in response to, a published text, we hope to foreground the tensions of authorship in a work that reveals material the author or editor might otherwise hide.
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope, 2012), and, together with Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012). Her collaboration with Kate Durbin, Abra, recently received an Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and will be issued as an artist’s book and iOS app, created with text/sound artist Ian Hatcher, this spring. A trade edition of Abra is forthcoming from 1913 Press. "As We Know," the collaboration with Andy Fitch excerpted here, was selected by Julie Carr for the Subito Prize and will appear in late 2014. Amaranth teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell.
Andy Fitch’s most recent book is Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard. His collaboration with Amaranth Borsuk, "As We Know," from which this excerpt was taken, will be published by Subito Press later this year. This spring, Ugly Duckling Presse will publish his two collections Sixty Morning Walks and Sixty Morning Talks. His collaboration with Jon Cotner, Conversations Over Stolen Food, will be published by 1913 Press in 2015. For Letter Machine Editions, he and Cristiana Baik are currently assembling The Letter Machine Book of Interviews. Fitch edits The Conversant and Essay Press. He teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1