Steve McCaffery's Panopticon
 

"[Steve] McCaffery's Panopticon is perhaps the exemplary / antiabsorptive book. The first twenty pages / are printed on a grid background, a visual trope / for the refusal of these pages to be absorbed / by the reader"
 
Contains images of "[a] man's torso / with a cutaway view / of the digestive system," "a large picture of McCaffery / staring at the reader," "an ad for / acne cream in Spanish," a "handwritted designation 'plates 21-29,' but / of course there are no plates"
 
"Panopticon / makes use of just about / every possible antiabsorptive device [...] the middle section / of the work has a separate text running in / the bottom third of the page, which is shaded / gray; a number of pages are all caps; a number / have two separate strands of meaning on alternating / prose lines, one / designated by caps & the other by upper/lower / case." (63_

> from Charles Bernstein's A Poetics (1992)

> tagged with #poetry, #to_read,

> created Feb 10, 2025 at 2:13:56 PM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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