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fall 2022 issue

Gauss PDF (2010–2022), ed. by J. Gordon Faylor

In a tribute to the unconventional digital publisher, Ted Dodson says Gauss PDF “best captures the expanded field of US American poetry in the last decade.”

September 1, 2022

You can’t throw a rock among a literary crowd without hitting someone who will attest that the physicality of the object imparts an existential imperative without which there is no such thing as experience. I would rather someone yell “rock!” than hit me with an actual rock, but maybe that’s just me. Anyone who’s followed small press trends of the last twenty years will have noticed the continued ascension of the book object as the paramount medium of literary exchange. Publishers are dedicated to artisanal production, from the letterpressed and handstitched to the perfect-bound and gloss-covered. It’s obvious that the book is fundamental to literature; however, what is truer than what’s obvious—especially in consideration of poetry—is the book is an object-in-the-way. We say, “I am writing a book,” and not, “I am inscribing imaginative situations of language into the discrete reality of a physical object determined by a millennia-old technology.” Poetry, like any art, is a contortion of material into medium, but distinct to poetry is the material of language, an ever-changing phenomenon whose use as art thinks beyond its manifestation and into its possibilities. It’s not that the book is outmoded, but as long as poetry’s destination for language is speculative, the book cannot be the sole environs for its practice.

In fall of 2010, J. Gordon Faylor started Gauss PDF, a poetry publisher hosted on Tumblr, with an idea to publish works applying the techniques of poetry broadly across media and using each medium as a determinate unit of composition. Like how Jack Spicer thought of the book as a unit of composition, the same would go for an .mp3, an .exe, a .zip, or a .pdf. From Gauss PDF’s inception until its end in May 2022, Faylor published three hundred entries in Gauss PDF’s catalog. The digital envelope of any Gauss PDF publication is, as Faylor described it in an interview with Tan Lin for the Poetry Foundation, “fairly innocuous.” As a print publication’s aesthetical production signifies the work it contains, Gauss PDF’s publications are prefaced with a simple URL, landing page, and catalog number. Beyond that diaphanous scrim, the works themselves are entirely mutable in form, content, and medium. There’s Divya Victor’s Goodbye, John! (GPDF047, 2012), a retooling of a John Baldessari 1971 text-performance, for which Victor challenges herself to write his phrase “I will not make boring art” as many times as possible within the span of a single minute. Using a word processor’s copy and paste function, the result is 290,000 lines. Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford’s Diana Hamilton’s Dreams (GPDF200, 2016) is an oneironautic video game where the user walks a plateaued void and encounters audio recordings of the titular poet recalling her dreams. One of the most recent entries is Violet Spurlock’s VS VS VS (GPDF297, 2022), a collaborative project among friends, spreadsheeting the potentialities of conversation and the vectors of shared language. A personal favorite is Joey Yearous-Algozin’s Air the Trees (GPDF071, 2013), a Word file erasure of Larry Eigner’s book of the same name, leaving behind only Microsoft’s proprietary squiggles underlining grammar and spelling suggestions of the now-absent text. 

Video of Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford's Diana Hamilton's Dreams.

Gauss PDF is not the only publisher of its kind. Yearous-Algozin and Holly Melgard—author of CATS CAN’T TASTE SUGAR (GPDF144, 2014)—edit the web-based PDF and print-on-demand publisher, Troll Thread, along with Divya Victor and Chris Sylvester; Tom Comitta’s calmaplombprombombbalm is another. Gauss PDF is, however, the longest running and most prolific, and it best captures the expanded field of US American poetry in the last decade. Gauss PDF could be as significant as Donald Allen’s New American Poetry was upon release in 1960, though it resists the taxonomizing that made Allen’s anthology so visible, breaking US poets into respective movements: San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, the Beats, and the New York School. Gauss PDF’s manifold overview of extended technique is less explicit. This isn’t to say one can’t read a taxonomy into Gauss PDF. There are loose groupings that coalesce if you already know how they associate: SUNY Buffalo theory-poetics, whatever latter generation of the New York School we’re on now, maybe a Post-Conceptual Philadelphia School, or a Los Angeles digital poetics coterie. This list could go on, but with geographic and aesthetic centralities shifting at the speed of contemporary discourse, nebulized across text threads and chat boxes, collaboration happening instantaneously regardless of distance, this sort of categorization is reading more inert by the day. 

Gauss PDF is also rare within contemporary publishing insofar as it is a project that has ended. The printed book is still trending—it’s been a long trend—and central to its longevity is the impression of the commodity as an unimpeachable symbol of information’s democratizing force and, as such, what’s best positioned to further the indefinite projects of many publishers. Gauss PDF was never a commercial enterprise. There was no call for donations nor prices on the work of their authors, which gives the sense that Faylor intended it as an open archive, one that’s still accessible though decaying, as all things do—a missing file here or an OS incompatibility there. It’s a subtle subversion of the model holding the book commodity as the end to its means. Not beholden to the technology that defines so much of publishing, Gauss PDF not only revels in a broad definition of what poetry is but also indicates that contemporary poetics can be premonitory of the technologies that come to mediate what is otherwise ineffable.

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Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange (Pioneer Works/Wonder, 2021). He is BOMB’s Circulation Director and a contributing literature editor.

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