Revolutions – A Collaboration

by John Matthias & Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau

With critical commentary from Robert Archambeau. Revolutions is a unique collaboration between poet John Matthias, printmaker Jean Dibble, and critic Robert Archambeau. Two poetic sequences by Matthias, The HIJ and After Five Words Englished from the Russian generate, first, a corresponding sequence of poster- poems by Dibble and, second, a series of "free commentaries" by Archambeau. The HIJ, emerging initially from an alphabetical game using chance operations in the Dictionary, eventually produces something of a character and a narrative, both of which are probed by the artist and commentator. The Five Words are translated from Russian poet Osip Mandelstam's He Who Finds a Horseshoe. Again, the poster-poems enlarge on the text and the commentaries complete a sequence of revolutions without resolutions. Illustrated by Jean Dibble.

Dos Madres Press
May 1, 2017
115 pages

Praise for Revolutions – A Collaboration

Modernism often sank its footers in earlier foundations: Pound’s transparencies in early Renaissance Italian fresco and panel painting, and Brancusi’s advance on the Byzantine geometric form sense still alive in his Romania. In the same spirit, the unusual three-way conversation in the early 21st-century American book now in your hand sights along Osip Mandelstam’s angle on Dante’s terza rima: One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is reated. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.
—John Peck

How to write in the time of Trump and Putin? In words and images, John Matthias, Jean Dibble, and Robert Archambeau give you an answer to consider: find the muse of amusement and the reality of facts and twin them: you will arrive at “Revolutions,” which instructs us on the possible meanings and uses of poetry in an Age of Emergency. These collaborators sing of methods of representation and ways to make new. Visually stimulating, linguistically innovative, this is work of invention and innovation to help us survive. From eidolon to Eisenhower, from Eiffel to Eichmann, the leaps keep us on our toes. There is much consolation in the anxiety of forms.
—Maxine Chernoff