Some Forms of Availability: Critical Passages on The Book and Publication

Dubbed the "Apollinaire of our times" by fellow poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, Simon Cutts, born in 1944, has tirelessly worked the fertile gaps between genres, issuing poems, prints, sculpture, artist's books and combinations of all of the above through Coracle, the imprint and sometime gallery he runs with book artist Erica Van Horn from their home in Southern Ireland. Through Coracle, Cutts has also championed artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Anish Kapoor, Richard Tuttle and Trevor Winkfield, often long before their works found wider fame. Some Forms of Availability gathers speculative essays, interviews and other statements and texts by Cutts that address the legacy of the small presses and magazines of the 60s, from which milieu Coracle arose, as well as more recent developments in artists' books. Some Forms of Availability is illustrated with thumbnail images and facsimile reproductions of Coracle books and ephemera, and includes a useful chapter on their "polemical postcards." At ease in all printed idioms, and constructively indifferent to divisions between them, Cutts exploits the potential for humor and lightness of touch that is inherent in such idioms. This collection of his writings testifies to the clarity of his project.