Untitled, March 2007
By: Deborah Poe
Contributors: Derrida, Jacques; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: [Deborah Poe]
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York City, NY?
Language: eng
Subjects: Aesthetics; Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Conceptual art; American literature; Poetry; Appreciation; Artists' books; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Literature helps us connect with human beings; it allows us to see and be seen within a larger framework of complexities. This framework is helpful for grasping a richer understanding of social, political and cultural questions - questions dominant narratives don't necessarily ask or answer. Language is the connective tissue that allows us to resist barriers of thought and experience. I attempt here to provide material opposition to binary ways of thinking about identity and difference - binary modes of being that I believe lead to events like the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street. Untitled, March 2007 responds to Al-Mutanabbi Street's history by way of a meditation on language, human connection, and the (im)possibilities of witness"--Statement from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

Deborah Poe's poetry collections include the Last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Her visual work - including video and handmade books - has appeared with the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Poetry Off the Page Symposium (Tucson), the Handmade/Homemade Sister Exhibit at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia), and ONN/OF 'a light festival' (Seattle). Online exhibits of her visual and text work include Lex-ICON, Yew Journal, PEEP/SHOW, Elective Affinities, The Volta's Medium, and Trickhouse.
Notes: Printed in an edition of 3.

Medium: Cover, oil-based roofing material (shingles) and mirror fragment; pages, Royal Linen paper (color "Natural"); endpapers; Kitikata paper; binding, and brass brads.

"Deborah M. Poe made this book for 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street'"--Acknowledgments.

"This piece is in conversation with Jacques Derrida's 'Poetics and politics of witnessing' in Sovereignties in question: the poetics of Paul Celan (Fordham University Press 2005). [The quote] 'light snow fell across Baghdad for the first time in memory' comes from Wikipedia"--Acknowledgments.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.

Primarily in English; some Arabic included.