A Poem Is a Material Object: Claire Van Vliet’s Artists Books and Denise Levertov’s 'Batterers'

A literary text is, for a book artist, like a score for a musician or a script for an actor: a basis on which to construct an artistic performance. Book artist Claire Van Vliet has, at her Janus Press, constructed dazzling broadsides and artist books based on poetry by, among others, Hayden Carruth, Galway Kinnell, and Margaret Kaufman. These works test or ignore boundaries between conventional categories such as book and broadside, two-dimensional display, and three-dimensional construction. The object she built based on Denise Levertov’s poem “Batterers” unfolds especially powerfully in time and three-dimensional space.