Morphology by Ruth Lepson & Walter Crump

The era of “colored hearing” is now awash with Morphology’s dreamlaps. Poems sense aside photos while photos press lines to logos – a “double joy” that explodes the “fortune cookie” approach to dream talk. “Awake” is now “Aquake”, and we are more sensible souls for the “light tablets” this collaboration tones us.

– Tina Darragh

In the first image of Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump’s Morphology, the eye follows train tracks into a distant background of earth-meets-sky, the sky a near circle of light, presenting at the same time an enclosure and an eternity. The first text suggests a linkage of thinking and seeing: if I think it, it appears. Magic. The magic here concerns the relationship of verbal to visual, a relationship always lively, never predictable. The text is no less visual than the photographs, and at times even the letters take one’s attention (and one’s breath away); in the section in which it is stated that all men are pencils, two times the letter “y” (why? Y chromosome? a leaning “v” standing on one leaning leg? all these & more) is separated from its word and enlarged to become a visual presence, an occupier of space on the page, in the eye, in the mind. One complete page of the book states that “my brain is a tablet of light.” In this book, this fine work of art, this perfect interplay of writing and photography (both graphic in their own ways), “the sentence is turning into a person.” If you read and see carefully, you will be that person. If you’re looking for something, you will find it here. If you’re not looking for something, you will find it here, where “someone else is standing at the other end of that sentence,” a thought you hear while looking at a dimmed and timeless photograph of water meeting earth meeting clouds, and you gain a sense that the sentence is ongoing and connects everything that you are with everything you have seen, and that it will go on for miles and miles and miles without ending. This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times.

– Charles Alexander

In Lepson and Crump’s collaborative improvisations, language becomes a playful substance in which we find ourselves furtively embodied, “camped out near a shoulder” or “standing in the middle of a paragraph.” Acts of renaming and comparing create a flux of metamorphoses both ominously curious and sweetly surprised. These exuberant, synesthetic leaps between the visual and the verbal bypass unlikeness, pursuing instead a kind of social dreaming in which everyone is included.

– Tim Peterson

___________________________

Trained as a painter, printmaker and photographer, Walter Crump is primarily known for his pinhole work and painterly uniquely toned & bleached prints. His work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally and collected in major museum collections including Philadelphia Museum, Smithsonian, Fogg Art Museum, National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi, Vietnam

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Her book Dreaming in Color was published by Alice James Books. She edited an anthology, Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, published by U of Illinois Press in 2004. In recent years she has been collaborating with musicians, artists and other poets. She has had poems in Carve, Shampoo, Agni, Shuffle Boil and many other periodicals and has given many readings, including one on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and one at LaMama Galleria in NYC. She lives in Cambridge, MA..

Book Information:

· Paperback: 288 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (March 2007)
· ISBN: 1-934289-19-1

Buy it from Amazon

read free ebook in PDF [click here]

Morphology by Between Ruth Lepson & Walter Crump Book Preview