The Peripheral Archive of Now: On Ugly Duckling Presse's 2020 Pamphlet Series

image by Angelo Maneage

The twenty brief texts in Ugly Duckling Presse’s 2020 Pamphlet Series may seem closer to materials from an archive than to the products of big publishing. There’s a set of postcards, the text of a lecture, a series of letters, collections of notes (Notes on Mother Tongues, Notes Toward a Pamphlet, Notes on a Speculative Archive). The archival, some might think, consists of sketches and scraps. Its sources, however primary, are secondary; they’re supporting documents to final drafts. That vision of the final or central is a fiction, of course. Ugly Duckling’s pamphlets—rigorously ephemeral, resolutely partial—usefully trouble it. They reflect what Polish writer Stefan Themerson, in remarks reproduced on a flier included with the collection, called the “Thought-End” of publishing, not the “Market Research end.” Such works, he said, are “poetic events, poetic happenings, in their own right.” This archive, in other words, is live. It doesn’t bolster certified versions; it multiplies.

None of this will surprise longtime readers of Ugly Duckling’s books and broadsides and periodicals and postcards. Since its founding in 1993, the press (with “no intention of becoming a swan”)  has published indispensable collections of poetry, along with cross-genre works on the main themes of the pamphlets: “collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing.” Its publications have elegant swagger: exquisite printing, brazen staples; fine paper, along with, in the case of the back covers of the pamphlets, a back-of-the-cereal-box puzzle that invites defacement. They’re preciously made, but they aren’t precious about it. These are materials for use, and if there’s an impression—or challenge—that emerges across the press’s projects, it might concern the uses of works that emphasize, as the press’s mission statement says, “an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.” 

Uses that are free from utility, these pamphlets suggest, might foreground what a book is, not what it’s presumed to be for. That invites a reconsideration of functions, relationships, purposes. Consider Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves’s Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure. It’s described as a “bibliomantic excursion” among books that were instrumental to Greaves’ 2012-2015 performance piece “unschoolMFA”. The result is a performance in itself—a poetic happening. Its record spins among verdant precepts (“All I ever wanted was a master’s in Wilderness”; “Anti-blackness is anti-environmental”), critical quotations (from Fred Moten, Grace Llewellyn, many others), narrative glances, and polyvocal forms:

HUMANITY IS A LIFESTYLE CHOICE

In the use of these areas,
man has frequently destroyed
the very habitat he sought,
and so upset nature’s design
as to render it useless

DISTURBING A SYSTEM CHANGES ITS FUNCTION

to the creatures living there
and even to himself. (Stuttman 664)

Virgin grasslands

FEMINIZATION CURSES
WHAT ANTHROPOMORPHISM MEANS TO CODDLE

Greaves’s pamphlet highlights pastoral metaphors in pedagogy and political theory, putting them into contact with her early statement that “Whiteness m u s t frame wilderness as threat.” Exploratory pedagogy, texts connected to performance, critiques of institutions—if you spread these pamphlets on a table, Greaves’s might meet one that picks up any of these themes. The archive, these pamphlets suggest, is talking. That’s more literal in pamphlets such as Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation, which documents an August 2020 conversation on collaboration and community between Nadine George-Graves and Okwui Okpokwasili, and the KUNCI Study Forum and Collective’s Letters: The classroom is burning, let’s dream about a School of Improper Education. It’s also present in Steven Zultanski’s Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley, a “partial catalogue” of how voice in Notley’s poetry serves “as prophetic oration,” “as fuzzy characterization,” “as a meeting point of the personal and the collective,” and more.

In other pamphlets, conversation happens more structurally, among topics. Tammy Nguyễn’s Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile combines memoir and geology, allegory and orthodontia. It suggests metaphorical connections, in a manner that might be familiar from lyric essays, though in these pamphlets the strands typically proliferate and combust and fray rather than braid tidily. Nguyễn’s begins:

In 1992, I found out that I was going to be missing two of my front teeth. I was eight, lying on the dentist’s chair, staring at my velcro shoes when I heard Mrs. Nguyễn, the office administrator, cry: “We must help her!” My x-rays had just been processed, and they showed that my permanent lateral incisors did not exist.

Pamphlets like these, perhaps, consider what may not exist as one expected, what may not need to exist as we’ve assumed, what may be called into existence instead. In response, more than mere “resilience” or “resistance”—those recent watchwords of liberal grit—they offer assertions of presence, of live voices and a living record. And so Sawako Nakayasu asserts that we should Say Translation Is Art (“Say translation as process, say translation as pedagogy, translation as pasttime, translation as navel gazing, translation as close reading, translation as language study, as therapy, as training, mouthing, wearing, playing, running, jumping”). And Don Mee Choi asserts that Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode (translation is “the map of my dislocation,” she writes, going on to consider imperialism and conceptions of the foreign through poetry and film). 

In another declarative title that’s thrilling to type, Magdalena Zurawski tells us that Being Human Is an Occult Practice. Her pamphlet, like several in the series, critiques institutions from the inside; it extends from institutional expertise, but it isn’t neutralized by it. Offering an argument “for and through FEELING,” Zurawski writes, with incisive simplicity, that “neoliberalism is bad because it feels bad.” It “requires us to limit or suppress much of what is human in us because much of what is human in us serves no economic purpose.” She borrows from Kant to suggest that cultivating “the generative purposelessness that aesthetic experience offers each of us” can lead to a “radical transformation of collective human consciousness.” Use without simple utility, generative purposelessness, bold ephemera, manifestos and histories and tracts: Ugly Duckling’s 2020 pamphlets are a trove of possibility and provocation, with nothing less than this ambition for “radical transformation” at their core. An archival sensibility, they suggest, isn’t about finished history; these pamphlets offer the present twenty courageous jolts.

Ugly Duckling Presse’s 2020 Pamphlets Series includes the following titles: Mirene Arsanios, Notes on Mother Tongues; Sergio Chejfec, Notes Toward a Pamphlet; Don Mee Choi, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode; Iris Cushing, The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Korte; Simon Cutts, The World Has Been Empty Sine the Postcard; Nicole Cecilia Delgado, A Mano / By Hand; Nadine George-Graves and Okwui Okpokwasili, Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation; Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure; Dimitra Ioannou, Electric Sarcasm; Sibyl Kempson, Invisible Horizon: A Religious Pamphlet; KUNCI Study Forum and Collective, Letters: The classroom is burning, let’s dream about a School of Improper Education; Claudia La Rocco, Quartet; Aditi Machado, The End; Chantal Maillard, The Semblable; Tinashe Msuhakavanhu, Reincarting Marechera: Notes On a Speculative Archive; Sawako Nakayasu, Say Translation Is Art; Tammy Nguyễn, Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile; Aleksandr Skidan, Golem Soveticus: Prigov as Brecht and Warhol in One Persona; Steven Zultanski, Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley; Magdalena Zurawski, Being Human Is an Occult Practice