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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. For our last few minutes today, some of you know my brother, the widely acclaimed author and designer Warren Lehrer, considered a pioneer in the field of visual literature. Some of his books are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Getty in Los Angeles, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Tate in London, and elsewhere. The New York Times wrote that in Warren's books, "Words take on thoughts very formed, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow. Once considered too far ahead of his time, now the times are beginning to catch up to him." That from the New York Times.

Most of Warren's books are written and designed by him alone, but he sometimes works with poets to set their words visually on the page. He was last on the show in 2019, for the book, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon with the poet and San Francisco radio host, who some of you may listen to Dennis Bernstein. It is with his latest book, a collaboration with the poet and cultural theorist, Adeena Karasick. The book consists of two poems that Adeena wrote that relate to the sometimes awkward period that we're in emerging from the worst of the pandemic, but how and how much?

The two poems which are also the title of the book, are Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings & Touching In The Wake Of The Virus. The book is out today from Lavender Ink, and there will be a book launch event open to the public tonight at the Center for Book Arts on West 27th Street. Adeena is the author of 14 books of poetry, and has a frequent presence on the poetry scene here in New York as some of you know, and internationally. She's currently the Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics, and she teaches literature and critical theory at Pratt Institute.

The Adeena Karasick archive is established in what they call Special Collections at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Warren, welcome back, Adeena, welcome to WNYC.

Warren Lehrer: Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Adeena Karasick: Great.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, Adeena will read a couple of excerpts as we go, but Warren, can you talk first to many listeners who may not be familiar with even the existence of visual literature? Or maybe they know about cartoon-style graphic novels as they're called, but there's so much more to it than that. Can you do a little one-on-one?

Warren Lehrer: Sure. You can trace the history of visual literature to ancient pattern poetry and illuminated manuscripts, and the complicated transition from writing systems made of pictorial symbols to phonetic alphabets, which are very different systems. I think those of us who are plagued or graced with composing visual literature, are always trying to bring the word and the picture back together. In my own work, it's about the visual composition of the words on the page or the screen, being as important and inextricably linked to what the words are saying.

It could be about using typography to help readers hear the voices, or choreographing the kinds of relationships between characters, mapping the shape of thought, sometimes by evoking metaphors that live beneath the surface of a text. In my novel, A Life in Books, I designed all the covers of my author protagonist 101 books and embedded them into his faux memoir.

Brian Lehrer: Adeena, you've published many books of poetry. Have you ever worked on them visually before, and what were you after artistically with this collaboration?

Adeena Karasick: In all my previous books, they all contain collage materials, concrete poetry, this prototype for graphic play, but I've created them and designed them, including all the covers myself. This openings book is the first time that I'm collaborating with someone else on a book. I was just so taken with Warren's work, the sublime fusion of meaning and form, and so, I was really, really honored to work with him.

Brian Lehrer: The book contains two poems and you've agreed to read a short excerpt from each. Thank you. Let's start with the first poem. Adeena, tell us more about the impetus for writing Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, and can you explain the title translating from the French when necessary?

Adeena Karasick: Sure. Well, "Ouvert" in French means to open, and "Oeuvre" is a body of work. It's a play on how everything is open, our bodies, our language, our lives. I live in New York, but in spring 2020, I was in Waikiki, not a bad place to be stuck in, and I was feeling all this ambivalence, seeing and hearing all the confusion after the lockdowns eased up and things started reopening, but in really contradictory or paradoxical ways. Here's a little.

[POEM- Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings]

Brian Lehrer: It's obviously a lot of contradiction or limitation expressed in that passage. I think this is what captures your imagination in both these poems, having read through them the gray areas between opening but not fully, as you were just expressing, and touching which we'll get to, but maybe not all the way, and not with confidence. Is that how I should hear that passage?

Adeena Karasick: Yes. I'm very drawn to those interstices, those in-between spaces, incongruities and consistencies reminding us a language can literally open itself up to a range of interpretive possibilities. I'm really drawn to those gray areas, the mixed messages. See the mixed messages from the media, thinking that from boiling our mail to breathing through layers of cloth, but even language became slippery.

Remembering pre-COVID when say, remote learning was about navigating the clicker, or social distancing was ghosting and masks were for theatrical effects, or even how flattening the curve was to watch one's carbs, when chloroquine was the word of mosquitos. I'm interested or was interested in capturing this spectral space to highlight how we are constantly redefining life, our language, relearning how to be human every day.

Brian Lehrer: So interesting, and so many references just that last couple of sentences that you just said that we probably forgot about since 2020, 2021, and you bring them back in that way. Warren, visually, that page, that Adeena was just reading from, that was all on one page, has a thick black bracket vertically down the left margin, and a straight black horizontal line going to the right margin, after each of those lines, that she was reciting. What were you thinking visually, if you can use this as an example for our radio audience of designing around the words a poet gives you?

Warren Lehrer: Well, Adeena uses a lot of parentheses and brackets in this poem, so they became like walls separating inside-outside borders. On that page, the bracket becomes a metaphor as well, going from inside to outside, and you start on the left with high hopes going to Gucci, Pucci, Prada, then on the right-hand page, the experience turns out to be far more contained and fraught than you had hoped. Also, the poem is very alliterative so I thought I can alliterate too, visually by accentuating certain letters like the O's. Sometimes, the O's split and multiply like COVID cells.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, great. I heard that. I thought I heard that represented in Adeena's reading, so the oral and the visual and the printed word all come together. Let's go on to the other poem in the book, Touching In The Wake Of The Virus. Tell me about that, Adeena. What were you thinking about that? In this one may be different or more specific from Openings in general in the first poem, and then go ahead and do a reading from that.

Adeena Karasick: Sure. Well, as things opened, I was really concerned with how do we learn to touch and be intimate again. Who can one kiss, shake hands with without worry of further contamination, and especially with the constant rise of new variants, the current spike? There's this feeling of unease, but I think interestingly, this place of unease or dis-ease or discomfort is the domain of art. I think it's the hardest rule to shed light on these moments so they can be reassessed in robust ways. As the poem goes,

[Touching In The Wake Of The Virus]

Can one ever really touch anything? Touch nothing, touch without being touched. How to touch without touching without touching too much when touching is already too much? I'll just jump to a related passage in the end. As we grasp the ungraspable, touch the untouchable, touch that which is not given to touch between the ever occurring in the verge of occurrence between labs, maps, tacit, tracks, tax, cracks protracted, acts of tort contracts, as we are always on the surface of contact.

Brian Lehrer: Warren, how do you two work? Does Adeena write a whole poem or a passage of a poem and then email it to you and then you do something graphic with it and send it back to her and she's, "I don't know, maybe we should do it more circular or more jagged." How does a collaboration between a poet and a designer work?

Warren Lehrer: Adeena sent me the first poem in an email. The poem is radical and its syntax as maybe you can hear, but it came in a straightforward form with stances in a flush left column. I liked that it was divided into seven parts. That already spoke structure to me that the opening is poem. Then I start with just the first few phrases, putting it down on the page. As you mentioned, there's a propulsive energy to her writing. I let words grow in size and swell and recede and let the words and the underlying metaphors speak to me. Then I send it back to Adeena.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Well, Adeena why don't you pick it up from there? He sends it back to you and?

Adeena Karasick: We would work together, we go back and forth, like say whether to leave in commas, periods because Warren often uses empty spaces to represent pauses. We worked on the titles together. It was just a really incredible experience. He was so open to the language and somehow he embodied a feminist aesthetics of transgression, contradiction, ambiguity, ornament. I'd say sometimes, "Sweetie, this is brilliant, but maybe there could be a bit more textuality or a little more complexity."

Warren Lehrer: Actually, you kick my butt because you really liked what I did with the first poem. Then for the touching poem, you said, "This is good, but can you open it more." You were right. I dove back in.

Brian Lehrer: Now, in its starred review, Kirkus calls this book, and congratulations on getting a starred review in Kirkus. They call it an arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page. Later, the reviewer writes the collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition. I guess what I'm curious about there, Adeena, is where you see the healing part come in as you're dealing with all this stress and ambiguity in these words.

Adeena Karasick: For me, really using strategies of humor and playfulness belies a sense of hope for coming out of the other end of periods of isolation and fear, touch and be touched in a way that is transcendent and transportive and hermeneutic. I think humor goes a long way in circumventing all that's destabilizing or scary. For example, like the touching poem ends with the half-ironic, "If you're haptic and you know it strap your hands." Basically saying, if you want to reach out and touch someone, maybe don't.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe don't. Warren before we run out of time, I want to just acknowledge and you could talk about it for a second, we didn't pull a clip, but there's a version of these poems set to music by the Grammy Award-winning composer and trumpeter Frank London. Does that come with the book?

Warren Lehrer: Yes, the QR code in the back. We love that idea of enhancing a book to the performance from print and ink on paper to the digital realm and the audio realm.

Adeena Karasick: Really highlighting both the material and acoustic aspects of language, I'd say. It was really just fantastic to have Frank London because his music is so very soulful. As he's rooted in the jazz and klezmer and avant-garde worlds, it adds this passionate socio-aesthetic underlay.

Brian Lehrer: Cultural critic, poet, prep Professor, Adeena Karasick, designer and author Warren Lehrer, yes relation, their new book together is called Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings & Touching In The Wake Of The Virus out today from Lavender Ink. There will also be a book launch event open to the public at seven O'clock tonight at the Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street in Manhattan. Thank you both so much for sharing it with us.

Adeena Karasick: Thank you.

Warren Lehrer: Thank you so much for having us.

Brian Lehrer: That's The Brian Lehrer show for today. Produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our daily politics podcast. We had Juliana Fonda and I think Milton Ruiz, I can see him, at the audio controls. Have a great weekend everyone and stay tuned for Alison.

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