{"title":"The Poetics of the Single Sheet of Paper: From Research to Practice","authors":"Jane Partner","doi":"10.1111/criq.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay begins and ends with a single sheet of paper. The first was used by John Donne whilst he was in France in 1612 to write the fair copy of his verse letter ‘To the Honourable Lady the Lady Carey’. Rediscovered in 1970, this is the only holograph manuscript of Donne's English poetry known to survive, and it offers a unique insight into the material ingenuity that Donne employed when setting out his poems on paper. Not only do the constraints of the page become an aspect of verse form, but other physical qualities of the sheet—its ability to fold and wrap, to create interiors and exteriors; its partial transparency and poignant fragility—are also brought to life by the metaphors of paper that Donne uses across his poems of this period. In this imagery, Donne seeks to re-energise the commonplace that paper is to words as body is to soul. The interlinked metaphorical and material strategies in Donne's verse letter to Lady Carey are directed towards a question with which he was lastingly pre-occupied: how is it possible to represent—indeed even to imagine—the paradoxically material immateriality of the soul? In the service of this inquiry, Donne's single sheet manuscript becomes a cognitive tool for the examination of metaphysical questions.</p><p>The second half of this essay traces my research process in making a single sheet poem that responds to the formal questions raised by Donne's manuscript. For Donne and his contemporaries, <i>poesis</i> and <i>exegesis</i>—that is, literary creation and interpretation—were understood to be profoundly interlinked, such that attentive reading was conceived to be generative of new writing.<sup>1</sup> Putting this connection into action, my practice-based research investigates the expressive potential that paper holds for contemporary poetry. The broadside is the poetic genre in which the relationship between a single poem and a single sheet of paper is currently given the most attention. Whilst in the 17th century this form of cheap print represented the antithesis of Donne's coterie manuscript circulation, the broadside is now an experimental poetic form rivalling the material inventiveness of the artist's book. In creating my own broadside, I investigate how a sheet of paper can embody the nature of poetry as an ‘attentional space’ that is ‘set apart’ from everyday language and experience.<sup>2</sup> Jeffrey Wainwright describes how, in what he terms the ‘deliberate space’ of poetry: ‘just as a prayer mat is made of fabric found everywhere but, once laid out, marks off a space from the surrounding daily world, so does the shape of the poem organise language into a space for pause and for different attention.’<sup>3</sup> My essay accordingly shows how a commonplace sheet of paper becomes a material instrument of poetry's transcendent work.</p><p>In early 1612, John Donne was in France with his patron Sir Robert Drury. In Amiens, Donne met his friend Sir Robert Rich, and in January or February th","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"23-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blank Forms for Future Applications","authors":"Ruth Abbott, Chloe Steele","doi":"10.1111/criq.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<p>On 6 July 2022, I filled in a form. It was an ASQ3, cheaply printed on low-quality off-white paper, and despite its contemporaneity, it had the unique smell of recycled paper from the 1980s, a smell I know well because my parents sold then-rare pads of it in the health food shop in which I grew up. An ASQ3 is an Ages & Stages Questionnaire, which the government asks all parents to complete when their children reach 27 months old. I filled it in with my then 2-year-old daughter, squeezing awkward block capitals into its small boxes and narrow parallel lines, and adding biro ticks to the misaligned circles that followed each question about her development, which were labelled ‘YES’, ‘SOMETIMES’ and ‘NOT YET’. I turned each question into an instruction, and my daughter gamely attempted each activity in turn. ‘Does your child run fairly well, stopping herself without bumping into things or falling over?’ ‘Does your child put on a coat, jacket, or shirt by himself?’.</p><p>Having completed the form, I turned it over to find instructions about where to send it. Nothing. Nothing on the form itself, and nothing in the letter with which it was sent in the post, except brief encouragement to contact a health professional if I had concerns. The ASQ3, it turned out, was a form that needed to be filled but would never be filed. I had to complete it, but no one wanted to receive it, let alone read my responses. I had thought of it as an administrative tool, a means by which the state would assure itself of my daughter's development and check whether she needed additional support. But what could this form administer if it was never read? The answer, I think, was me. This was a form directed at its filler rather than the future. It had controlled my time and activities, and by extension my daughter's time and activities. But the chief activity it had prompted was simply completing it. The intended purpose of this form was to make parents fill in the form.</p><p>At first, I only got interested in the ASQ3 bibliographically because there was nothing else to do with it. In the 2 years between then and now, I have been increasingly interested in the book-historical questions it raised. Since the invention of printing, the lives of billions of people across the globe have been managed by printed forms like this one. I am thinking not only of questionnaires but also of forms in a more expansive sense, including all the many other kinds of paper that are printed on to elicit handwriting. These have been widespread from the 17th century until today, and they remain common even now that much form-filling occurs online. Printed forms, in this expansive sense, are made of paper that is printed with words or templates but that we somehow still think of as blank, from medical forms and attendance registers to feedback forms and presentation labels, as well as more minimally printed examples with lines, squares or letterheads. The paper in all such documents has gone t","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"57-89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecologies of Papermaking: Craft, Rags and Plants","authors":"Sarah Jane Foster","doi":"10.1111/criq.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay asks how ecological thinking might be strengthened by the act of making things—specifically paper—with our own bodies. By ecological thinking, I refer to Diane Kelsey McColley's invitation to bring ecological inquiry into our approach to material culture by asking ‘where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labour’.<sup>1</sup> I argue that viewing paper within an <i>ecology of making</i> reveals the potential of craft to ground ecological knowledge in sensory experiences and embodied interactions with more-than-human agencies. This is how I understand Timothy Barrett's claim that, ‘A handmade sheet of paper provides documentation or physical evidence of a dialogue between human beings and nature’.<sup>2</sup> In <i>The Craftsman</i>, Richard Sennett challenges Hannah Arendt's claims that making is a morally or intellectually neutral activity, taking place on another dimension from intellectual thought. Sennett's understanding of craft proposes the opposite: rather than shutting out the world, craft is a process of actively analysing, engaging with, and understanding the world. For Sennett, ‘making is thinking’, because ‘all skills, even the more abstract, begin as bodily practices’.<sup>3</sup> Craft facilitates this dialogue, augmenting our capacity for ecological thinking through embodied knowledge, interspecies relationships and material sensitivity. Making paper by hand offers a way to access and rethink ecological relationships: how plants and humans shape one another, how materials behave and resist, and how waste and reuse structure systems of value.</p><p>In this essay, I reflect on my own experiments with papermaking in dialogue with craft theory, critical plant studies, and examples from the long history of papermaking with linen rags to show how sensory, embodied encounters with plant materials like flax can foster deeper ecological knowledge. I account for plants as co-practitioners in the craft process, seeing long-term human–plant relationships as co-constituting, affective encounters between plants and the humans who planted, harvested and crafted them. The experiences and embodied knowledges of contemporary craftspeople who draw on historical knowledge represent the human side of this dialogue, while critical plant studies scholars Michael Marder and Natasha Myers offer conceptual tools to articulate how plants themselves participate in papermaking. Building on my own experiences of making paper with textiles and plant materials, I reflect on historical examples from the early modern tradition of rag paper, in which human and flax relations were shaped through labour, reuse, and degradation, and contemporary practices using waste fibres, to show how papermaking reimagines material excess in the form of waste.</p><p>My experiences with paper and papermaking, although amateur, offer tangible insights into the value of making as a m","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"137-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating Spaces: Redacted Poetry Through Papercutting","authors":"Kate Hipkiss","doi":"10.1111/criq.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I have worked as a paper artist for many years and the texture, material memory, strength, and fragility of the material are ingrained in me as a practitioner. The relatively recent introduction to my practice of appropriated text documents has led to the creation, through cutting paper, of redacted poetry. This new focus has turned a familiar method of working into an unfamiliar one as new methods have emerged. My interest is in how the creation of three-dimensional forms from cut paper impacts on our understanding of paper as a flat surface used to communicate information. While previously working with printed maps, the introduction of printed text has opened up questions relating to visual poetry—particularly those concerning the transparency of language—and how this connects to the materials and methods of making.</p><p>I will focus here on two pieces of work, <i>A Free-Floating Minute</i> (Figure 1) and <i>Coming Home</i> (Figure 2), both made using appropriated books from which I have created redacted poetry within three-dimensional forms. While making these works, the notion of ‘the space between’ has become a meaningful way of examining different aspects of my papercutting practice. These may be spaces between words or spaces that arise between thinking and making, between touch and absence of touch, or between not knowing and knowing. I have found that working with words has drawn attention to these spaces, highlighting that it is often in these spaces that things happen and questions are brought to the fore.</p><p>The haptic experience of papercutting, combined with our innate understanding of paper as a material, are key elements of this exploration. Ingold's ‘Correspondence’ where ‘materials think in us, as we think through them’ describes the flow and resistance I find in working with words and paper, allowing the characteristics of the material to influence, even lead, the work.<sup>2</sup> There is a symbiotic relationship between words and paper in which each need and shape the other to produce the work of art while I, as the artist, need to heed the character of both. Sitting with the text while trying to find the poem within is a significant part of this process and words come to feel like another physical material; one that restricts how I work because they have meaning, and simultaneously one that gives me a way of communicating, of revealing and obscuring information, and of connecting with the paper, words and form.</p><p>In ‘Paper or Myself You Know … (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)’, Jacques Derrida observes that paper is often regarded as ‘[…] the ‘blank’ of writing, its spaces and intervals’, acknowledging that paper is largely regarded as a surface for writing, drawing or printing.<sup>3</sup> In this light, paper is a means to communicate information but not a significant material in itself. And yet paper feeds into our experience of reading the text. Words and paper are both intimately linked to our cult","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"10-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Light Tactics: The Poem as Index","authors":"Kelly Hoffer","doi":"10.1111/criq.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What is a poem's relationship to touch? The italicised lines that open this essay come from a body of text I wrote and then manipulated to generate the text(ile) paper triptych, ‘the sensation is without artifact’.<sup>2</sup> The triptych's first section, ‘cloud cover’ (Figure 4) is a cyanotype of the text printed on a cloudy day. The second, ‘stitch metre’ (Figure 1), is a video of another cyanotype print of the same text cut into strips and then fed through a sewing machine to produce lined paper yarn. Third and finally, ‘knit slip’ (Figure 2) is the textile that I knitted from that paper yarn. In that process of knitting, I slipped stitches and carried the yarn over, holding sections outside of the fabric's weave in order to reveal selected phrases.</p><p>After completing the triptych, I knew deeply, unapologetically, that I had created a poem, even if I had not conformed to the processes of poetic making modelled by my creative education. The artifacts that emerged were not only lyric expressions of feeling nor merely records of the movement of mind. They were instead indexes of a network of activities, some the result of my intention (I typed, I arranged, I knitted) and some beyond my control (light moved, clouds obscured). Encountering the poem–object now takes me back to the moment of its making: to my hands, to the weather and to paper.</p><p>When you touch a page, what (or who) touches you? A hand floats in the margin. In Renaissance texts, the pointing hand or the ‘manicule’ was an especially common form of marginalia. William Sherman argues that these hands adorning a page's edge—sometimes added by printers, sometimes drawn in by readers—served as indexes in multiple senses of the word. They literally pointed to specific passages, allowing readers to collate the abundance of information at their fingertips in a manner we now associate with the index generally found at the back of a book. But the use of this symbol exceeded the desire to organise an unruly text; it indexed the movements of a reader's body. Although the manicule is also found in medieval texts, Sherman draws a relationship between the later proliferation of this symbol and his description of reading in the early modern period as a ‘self-consciously embodied practice, no less a manual art than writing or printing […] readers picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand’.<sup>3</sup> When drawn in by the reader, the manicule had a ‘gestural function’ pointing to the ephemeral and embodied nature of a specific reader's activity.<sup>4</sup> The hand-drawn manicule is one index, or trace, of readerly touch that the archive captures. What other touches are uncaptured by the archive? I use my left index finger as a bookmark while I use my right hand to flip to a book's backmatter in search of a citation. My hunting leaves no trace.</p><p>Sherman's history of the manicule poses questions about the readerly relationship bet","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"40-56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Journalism and Objectivity: Reporting on Palestine and Israel","authors":"FB","doi":"10.1111/criq.12827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12827","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 2","pages":"23-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145271667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Papermaking and Making Whiteness in Othello","authors":"Anna Reynolds","doi":"10.1111/criq.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>On viewing a performance of <i>Othello</i> today, it is easy to overlook the succession of white objects and materials that enter the stage and, more subtly, our imaginations. It is, after all, a play fixated on blackness, and so less explicitly on whiteness. Although the handkerchief is hard to miss, the white linen bedsheets and ‘smock’ (5.2.271) that dominate the final scene are more easily overlooked as conventional domestic objects, and the white paper of the letters passed to and read by Othello have not previously been registered as meaningful objects.<sup>1</sup> This is exacerbated by the fact that some white substances that may have featured in an early performance of <i>Othello</i> are less commonly found in today's theatres: in particular, the white cosmetics that may have coated the face of the boy player playing Desdemona.<sup>2</sup> This article suggests that this network of white materials would not have been so easily overlooked on the early modern stage, and that it would have been particularly visible to a specific subsection of the audience: the women who performed or managed the work of cleaning and transforming the white linen, white paper and white skin in their own, or their employer's, households, and behind the scenes in early modern theatres.</p><p>For those attuned to the potential meanings and histories of these white materials, it is immediately clear that the linens, paper and actors' skin are interconnected both within and without the world of the play. The linen fabric that serves as the visual and conceptual centrepiece of the play, namely the handkerchief and the bedsheets, forms the raw material for making white paper, the substrate of Othello's letters. In turn, this white paper provides the raw material for the metaphor of Desdemona's ‘fair paper’ (4.2.72) or white skin. Next in the sequence of events, we imagine Desdemona wearing what is most likely a white linen ‘smock’ (5.2.271), entering her grave in a funeral shroud made from her white linen wedding sheets. Pursuing this pattern of whiteness in the play, three key elements emerge. The first is that the white objects and materials are constantly under threat of staining and losing their pristine whiteness. The second is that the white objects and materials are constantly being remade and reworked, either imaginatively or literally. The third is the way in which whiteness' propensity to staining prompts male anxiety and violence in the play, with women bearing both the weight of this anxiety and the burden of cleaning and reworking the white materials on the stage and in the household. This article argues that as much as <i>Othello</i> is a play about early modern anxieties and formulations of blackness, and particularly black masculinity, it is also about the parallel anxieties of marring and making whiteness, and particularly, the role that the women of the period played in maintaining this precarious, malleable whiteness. A key subsection of the aud","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"112-124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finding Patterns: Virginia Woolf and Marianne Moore's Poetics of Paper","authors":"Claire Battershill","doi":"10.1111/criq.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Virginia Woolf and Marianne Moore took great joy in paper products and in the materials of bookmaking, and paper was insistent in their literary imaginations.<sup>1</sup> In this essay, I extend into an early 20th century context what Joshua Calhoun calls ‘the poetics of paper’<sup>2</sup> and posit a strong relationship between paper imaginaries and the materialities of paper in the work of these two modernist women writers. Both were interested in learning about the craft and materiality of making books. They often involved themselves actively in the publishing and bookmaking process, selecting methods of publication and materials for writerly composition that epitomised modernist design aesthetics. Woolf and Moore, too, both kept extensive reading notebooks and paid specific attention to the materialities of their compositional practices—Woolf bound her own notebooks and favoured a specific purple ink (Waterman's fountain pen ink in Patrician Purple), while Moore favoured carefully chosen personalised stationery for correspondence.<sup>3</sup> Through an analysis of these writers' imaginative explorations and literal uses of paper, their modernist aesthetics can be understood as interdisciplinary artistic engagements that are at once material and literary. The crafting of modernism, for Woolf and for Moore, is a process-driven and affectively rich experience, made with both hands and minds.</p><p>These writers' papery worlds have now been preserved in various physical and digital archives and special collections. While the most frequently researched elements of these archives are manuscript and typescript textual materials, the writers' everyday engagements with paper situate them in a dynamic world of modernist print culture. A search for ‘paper’ among Marianne Moore's personal effects now digitised and catalogued at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia turns up over 1100 items, including the paper labels for her preferred sewing needles and spools of thread; postcards; calling cards; receipts; letterhead with art deco decorations; boxes of stationery from Bloomingdales; personalised letterhead and address labels; mail order labels; instructional pamphlets for filling Montblanc fountain pens; paper tape; paper cups; ‘Hot pink tissue paper that has been folded up. Looks brand new’<sup>4</sup>; a small paper bird under a bell jar; several papery gifts, including a papercut from literary critic I. A. Richards and a collage from photographer Jill Krementz; sewing patterns; paintings; prints; and drawings, among many other odds and ends. The ephemeral universe conjured by this collection preserves Marianne Moore's specific paper pleasures and its rich and detailed catalogue offers an intimate view of Moore's habits and preferences for the purchase, use and preservation of paper.<sup>5</sup></p><p>In Woolf's case, the collections in her richly decorated home at Monk's House (now preserved as a National Trust site); Washington State University Li","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 3","pages":"90-111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145706564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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