GUILLON, Léa (ed.)
SLANT No. 1: To Be The Receiver And The Maker All At Once
A collection of contributions from the 40 young artists, authors and poets who answered the call for entries for the mail art project SLANT, initiated by Léa Guillon.
From October 2023 to June 2024, every two weeks, a fragment of poetry, literature or imagery was sent by email as a suggestion for a theme. Participation was free and the book contains almost all the contributions received. Some of the themes suggested were truth, emergence, the mother, conspiracy, flowers, childhood, distraction, responsibility, friendship and radiance.
SLANT No. 1 comes from the first fragment sent on Wednesday 11, October 2023, a collage based on the poem “tell the truth” by Emily Dickinson, evoking the act of being truthful, but always a step aside. Over and above the initial poetic intuition, the idea is to constrain arid isolation, because a thought is never alone. It is illuminated at second view. A continuous weighing fixes it. This is the aesthetic of relationship, the lesson of the watershed. Edouard Glissant called for 'the transmutation of reflective solitude into shared inflection' and states that poetry is 'a convulsive search for a “shadow of one’s self that creates within itself signs of friendship.”
SLANT suggests we come to terms with the fire of diversity and impure relationships. Heavy with hidden references, it is a poetic research project, or rather, poetry in search of reference. Poetry is an open space, where one cannot come to an absolute conclusion. It is perhaps our common zone, of the outside and the other. Its subtitle to be the receiver and the maker all at once expresses this desire to be in continuous reception. To extend the poetic moment, create a loop, receive in order to give, read in order to write, to write and then to read again. Doubled work, second-hand work. Thought never in isolation, rather in “re-co-naissance” or in correspondence. [publishers’ note]
4-colors riso printed., 300 copies. Coptic hand-made binding.Texts in French and/or English.
Published by Slant, 2024
Design by Léa Guillon
Anthologies / Artists' Writings / Poetry
