Book Spine Poetry

I recently discovered the art of Book Spine Poetry, the act of making poems out of book titles or at least the titles given on the spines of books. It's a relatively straightforward idea, but as an art or poetic form its rather playful, taking titles as ready-made poetic phrases and linking them together to create a new poetic object.

The master of book spine poetry is artist Nina Katchadourian, whose Sorted Books project has been ongoing nearly 20 years. The Sorted Books project began in 1993 and saw the artist arrange books from numerous lookings - private homes to public libraries and specialised books collections. Whilst the artist herself claims that "Taken as a while, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncracies, and inconsistencies - a cross-section of that library's holdings", her work also producing some interesting literary results. Here are two of my favourites (my organisation of typed text):

Book spine poetry appears to be taking off on the web, perhaps because it seems to offer the same sort of authorly promise as web2.0 - it is an art everyone can do. Indeed, there are libraries in America holding Book Spine Poetry competitions. Another writer of Book Spine Poetry is cultural commentator and literary reviewer Maria Popova, who posted her attempts on her blog Brain Pickings. Again, two favourites:

Anyway, I thought I'd have a go at some Book Spine Poetry myself! If you're interested you can see my own Book Spine Poems on the next blog post here.