Critical Analysis

by C. Dworkin

Design Features

typographic: Faces used: Schmalhalbfette and Lux.

openings: Absence marked by pun of title.

sequence: Variable

other features: Absence of binding marked by punning absence of 'signatures' in excerpted closings to correspondence.

Critical Discussion

A Book Of Closings was conceived and printed before the death of Robert Creeley; accordingly, it was initially a work of wry patacriticism and appropriation, investigating one aspect of Creeley’s correspondence, the closing, through isolation: each card reprints only the closing from one of the letters. That investigation further takes place under the aesthetic sign of the modernist fragment, the list poem, and the late 60s minimalism of which Creeley was himself a key influence (along with poets such as Clark Coolide and Aram Saryoan). That tradition culminated in Robert Grenier’s Sentences, a work associated with A Book Of Closings not only through its similar format — a portfolio of cover-stock cards — but through Grenier’s own editorial and apprenticed relationship to Creeley. The status of the book changed, however, with Creeley’s death on 30 March, 2005, roughly coincident with the distribution of A Book of Closings; this event transferred the work more squarely to the genre of elegy. In this generic reconfiguration, the work is particularly affecting because (and not in spite of) its oblique and sanitized relation to its subject. The initial chronological composition and arrangement of the cards, which project their own narrative of increasing familiarity, underscore the inelcutability of chronology itself, and the telos of the biographical in death; the series of epistolary farewells culminate in a gesture of final farewell; and above all the pun of “Closings,” always at work in the book, darkens and resonates. The work is not, however, bleak or pessimistic: although ordered chronologically, the cards can of course be reshuffled at will, and the epistolary closings contain a complicated play of suspensions: affirming relations as they terminate the act of relating, and often pointing, with an inherent optimism, to the future (“write soon”; “I look forward”; etc.). The elegiac pun of the “closing”, moreover, resonates with the format of the work itself. The unbound pages of Closings do not of course provide “openings”, and the “closings” of its text are made without “signatures” (as is the unbound book). These palpably present absences — what we might call a ‘negative bibiliography’ — underscore the absence of the subject, Creeley himself, and further contribute to the status of the book as conceptual cenotaph.

A Book of Closings

Agents

Kyle Schlesinger

type: initiating

role:
author
designer
printer
publisher

nationality:
active: United States

dates:
other: 1997-00-00 produced work after 1997

Publication Information

edition type: editioned

publisher: Cuneiform

place: Berlin

dates:
production: 2004-00-00
publication: 2005-00-00
distribution: 2005-00-00

edition size: 40

Measurements

horizontal: 14 centimeter closed

vertical: 16.7 centimeter closed

depth: 1.2 centimeter closed

weight: 2 grams other closed

Production Information

production means:
letterpress (local)

binding: other Paper folded triptych to form warp-around sleeve without closure; exterior of left-hand section contains title; card stock archivally glued to interior of left-hand and center sections and to both sides of right-hand section. Left-hand interior panel is glued only at left-edge to form flap; other panels are glued down. Center interior panel contains colophon; right-hand interior cover panel serves as title page. Right-hand exterior and left-hand interior panels are printed in black ink with (entire) main text in run-on sequence. Left hand interior is further overprinted in a 90-degree rotation in red ink. This latter feature may be unique to this copy

substrate:
other: paper

media:
ink (local)

Appearance

general description:

format: cards (local)

color: yes blues, red, goldenrod, black. ink colors used: dark blue for main text; black for title and part of interior cover as noted above; goldenrod for title page (except title, in black); light blue for colophon; red for cross printed interior cover as note above.

Content

pagination: unpaginated 36 pages [Publisher lists 34 pages].

numbered?: unnumbered

signed?: unsigned

Colophon

A NOTE ON A BOOK OF CLOSINGS:/ This text is an arrangement of closings culled/ from Irving Layton & Robert Creeley: The/ Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978. Handset in/ Schmalhalbfette and Lux in an edition of 40.