Sonetos prestados

Abstract

The essay is dedicated to Carrión's first bookwork from 1972 SONNET(S), an adaptation of a poem by the Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti from 1881. Carrion himself provocatively calls his bookwork plagiarism. The essay’s focus, however, is less on the act of appropriating another's work, making the bookwork a prime example of Appropriation Literature and Conceptual Writing. Rather, the bookwork is discussed as a book of a new kind, as conceived by Carrión in his 1975 manifesto “The New Art of Making Books”: a book in which the (plagiarized, stolen) text is only one of several elements, for the actual method is that the same linguistic material of the poem is repeatedly subjected to different treatments of wording, graphic representation, typeface, production and reproduction techniques, and paratextual framing. This poetics of deviation allows to focus on all the surrounding circumstances of literary production, publication, and reception, which hardly ever receive attention in terms of their impact on texts. On this basis, Carrión's SONNET(S) is read as a specimen of a bibliographic version of site-specific art in the tradition of Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés. Here, everything in a book and text has a specific site – and the form of this site is not arbitrary. This entails a form of literature that stands in the starkest conceivable contrast to ordinary books and conventional texts whose (typo)graphic setting is contingent. In the end, Michalis Pichler's SOME MORE SONNET(S) from 2011 and his concept of page-pieces is used as an example to show how these experiments can be continued in the post-digital present.