Drucker’s own work showcases her regard for the importance of the physical in her work, creating dense, beautiful and thought-proviking work. The Word Made Flesh (pictured) is an example of her work with typesetting:
Here, letters being are into sizes which allow them to span more than one phrasal unit. The reader of the work must abandon most traditional left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading in order to navigate the text, and the work exposes how the spatial arrangement of the text can force associative links from one side of the page to another.
Along with other poets such as Tina Darragh, Joan Retallack and Susan Howe (among others!),, Drucker’s work often bears the mark of her process, urging the reader to decipher the modes of interpretation possible in the text, and be rewarded by partaking in the interpretive process, which becomes an active inquiry.
MARK is an important word here; it is used by Drucker – highlighted in Rachel Tzvia Back’s Led by Language book on Susan Howe – to describe a text whose physical traits bear the mark not necessarily of the author’s ego, but of the intervention of the author in the inscription process. This is as opposed to the unmarked text, which obviously bears little evidence of the authorial intervention from the source.
This got me thinking (a rare occurance indeed), since, especially in the cut/copy-and-paste world of digitised typing and editing, it is equally possible to duplicate content and its style, and to remove style. This sense of the marked / unmarked text perhaps extends to a sort of ‘anti-formatted’ text, or uniformed text, in which source texts are collated, edited or manipulated, and are transformed in a way which seeks to remove the original context. Instead, the new texts would then demand a new hollistic interpretation in terms of themselves, or their new aesthetic identity, due to stylistic consistency.
Consider, for example, the clairvoyant work of Hannah Weiner, whose texts are typewritten, but interrupted / augmented by handwritten words which Weiner has ‘seen’. The psychic intervention, a voice which, although Weiner’s, implicitly throws a notion of “I” truly into question, is scrawled in as a definitely marked text, where Weiner has allowed the words to speak on the same canvas, but distinct from the rest of the text.
From another angle, Robert Smithson’s Heap of Language:
which uses a variety of source texts, represents them, literally as a heap, in one hand-written aesthetic, placing the focus on the interrelation of the words in the heap, unusually and unnaturally juxtaposed. I suppose there is an artifice of the natural here, the uniformity of handwriting, which commands the assumption that words were written chronologically and therefore possess a flow of meaning.
Lyn Hejinian’s My Life might be another example of such a text. The passages of the text, coming from various voices, shifting “I”s, come together on the page in a relatively conventional form (save for the square of text around which the rest wraps). No one phrase therefore commands attention over another. This furthers the text’s ambiguities of meaning, a mixture of clarity and vagueness which has the balance needed to be enterable at any point, and promote the reader to introduce personal experience to fill in the final experiential touches to the text. The uniformity of formatting in the piece allows such an interaction with the text to take place.
Either tomorrow or Sunday – whenever I can next get on the internet – I’d like to try to give a few examples of some interesting multimedia works which take this in other interesting directions….
If anyone’s out there, have a nice weekend!
J
Charles Jensen | Writer 
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