PRESENCES: A TEXT FOR MARISOL

Of Presences, poet-critic John Yau wrote: “Published by a commercial press, Presences: A Text for Marisol (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1976), is a major, innovative accomplishment in the history of collaboration, as well as a book no other post-war American poet has come close to equaling. The tantamount contribution of the two collaborators is announced from the outset, both on the cover and on the spine:

In accordance with this equal billing, both Marisol and William Katz, the book’s designer, as well as friend of both sculptor and poet, have done much to establish an open-ended yet corresponding dialogue between the sixty-one back-and-white photographs and the thirty single-spaced pages. Because there is no index, and the book isn't paginated, the reader/viewer is not only invited to begin anywhere, but also there is the insistent sense that one can’t return to exactly where one was, because that would imply the sequence is a fixed narrative, which it isn’t.

—KS