6: Letters
Editors' Note
LETTERS TO THE EDITORS
Dear Editors,
I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page. These appear in the text in CAPITALS or italics.
Best wishes, Hannah Weiner
•
Dear Editors,
Not the word but the letter is the original material of poetry.
Later, Kurt Schwitters
•
from the desk of __________________
re: ______letters__________________
--look these up by next week
Johanna Drucker, Alphabetic Labyrinth
Steve McCaffery and Jed Rasula anthology, Imagining Language
•
Dear Editors,
A letter is naked matter breaking from form from meaning. An anagram defies linear logic. Any letter of the alphabet may contain its particular indwelling spirit. . . . I’ve never lost the sense that words, even single letters, are images. The look of a word is part of its meaning—the meaning that escapes dictionary definition, or rather doesn’t escape but is bound up with it.
—Susan Howe
•
Dear Editors,
The Letter is an explosion, the Word—a flock of explosions . . .
Yrs., Vasily Kamensky
•
Dear Editors,
Meaning is never simple (except in mathematics), and the letters which form a word, though each of them is rationally insignificant . . . keep searching, in us, for their freedom, which is to signify something else.
Best, Roland Barthes
•
Dear Editors,
Process this:
xxoo—Isidore Isou
•
Dear Editors,
I’m using this epigraph from Hackluyt for my new book. Hope you like it. "While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."
—Herman Melville
•
Dear Editors,
For the medium as well as the craftsman the MAXIM is "REBEL"
Onward, Marius Lyle
•
Dear Editors,
so adieu deelest Md Md Md FW FW Me Me Me Lele I can say lele yet oo see—Fais I don’t conceal a bitt
yrs truly, Jonathan Swift
