Just today several new things arrived, giving me pause in my daily vveekend roundup series, just launched. One of the headlining items was a package of vintage items from the generous Buck Downs.
It featured both excellent this & excellent that, including an 8 1/2 x 11 book Office Products, a 1995 issue of Washington Review (along with a promo postcard) & finally a white greeting card envelope which contained a 6-leaf chapbook handsewn into a greeting card called Full Spoon. Office Products is a 1991 publication, Full Spoon 1992.
The issue of Washington Review features a cover interview with Downs, Rod Smith, and Mark Wallace by Ross Taylor. The contents of the issue are interesting overall, featuring an early appearance of Rodrigo Toscano's "Circular No 7" from The Disparities & a review of Fitterman's early volume Ameresque, published by Buck Downs Books in 1994, all along with the feature interview.
Bonus Photo Inside: of Downs & Smith having a laugh at Mark Wallace's expense:
The Toscano:
* * *
Four years prior to the Washington Review feature, Office Products was released by joie d'beavre.
The inside back cover info tells us that 200 copies of el producto were produced in April of 1991.
The first poem in the book, "Form Letter" features a hot conceptual bop in a rarely seen style from Downs, couplets.
But Buck's true swagger is imminently concretized by just the second poem, "Blue Sort of Orange" which hails from a different time zone entirely...
Blue Sort of Orange
Candy Apple Taupe
skies of infinite dessert,
radio mayhem and bridges
caught flat-foot.
Live at the scene we turned
that TV on and it became
a little party all of its own.
The fire lynx sat twinkling
in his house of bushes
and slept.
.....................A puddled mile
of face and whine don't care,
nervous skies belly full
of sliding water lack. One fresh
dose of sink brings on this face
dozing from dreams, cool
noseful of sleep, dirt, and hands.
To get up ain't on the boat
any more, let out some little
bevy, passengers, and from
the crow perch serene
eye nest and sway.
* * *
The delectable Full Spoon was published by the same press, the elegantly-named joie d'beavre, only a year later, in '92. This amazing object predates several I've received from Buck, handmade items whose form inhabits whatever finds them, instead of the forceful organization of a behind-closed-doors production. Buck's tact produces works that return to the world instead of simply arriving in it.
The delectable Full Spoon was published by the same press, the elegantly-named joie d'beavre, only a year later, in '92. This amazing object predates several I've received from Buck, handmade items whose form inhabits whatever finds them, instead of the forceful organization of a behind-closed-doors production. Buck's tact produces works that return to the world instead of simply arriving in it.
This one is a greeting card featuring an image from Albert Pinkham Ryder's Children Playing with a Rabbit; inside, five pages of poems precede the signed colophon, signaling the edition size of 40, of which this is copy 10.
* * *
Basically current with the arrival of these items has come news that Buck has just made available many of his working notebooks on the p=o=d service Lulu. No fewer than 7 volumes are already available.
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