This edition has been superseded by a new and expanded edition published in March 2023 and this is an archive page. To read about the new edition, click here.

Jesse Glass – After Heraclitus. Fossil facsimilies with fragmentary poetic etchings, accompanied by book, presented in a box and black organza bag, in a strictly limited edition of five. Also available as book only. Click here to read a sample of the text.

After Heraclitus is a meditation on social class (as reflected in language), language (as reflected in itself), (history of science), (philosophy as graffiti, and graffiti philosophy), (translation as graffiti), (paleontology as found art), (paleontology as evidence of auto-generative form in lower types of matter), (paleontology as evidence of panspermia), (paleontology as proof of the gods), (cosmological time, geological time and human time), (the ethics of graffiti), (the ethics of science), (the ethics of art), (the maintenance of form in fire, in liquids, and in liquid-acting solids), and living things that maintain form, yet can be perceived as ever-moving liquids.

Jesse Glass has been writing linguistically innovative poetry and prose since the 1970s. He is currently at work on a long poem which incorporates poetic texts, found poetry, erasure poetry, visual and sound poetry titled Nothing Epic: The Complete Gaha Noas Zorge based on the spiritual diaries of John Dee and Edward Kelley. His work has appeared in many anthologies including Visiting Walt from the University of Iowa Press, and in a wide range of magazines including The New England Review/ Bread Loaf Quarterly; Gargoyle; High Performance; Contemporary Performance; Assembling Magazine, Wild Orchids from New York University at Buffalo (special issue on Visionary Poets and Poetics) and websites, including UBU-Web for both visual poetry and sound work, and Penn Sound among many others. His books include Charm for Survivors; Selected Painted Books and Sequences, Black-Out In My Left Eye; Lost Poet: Four Plays; Lexical Obelisk; Trimorphic Protennoia; Man’s Wows; and The Passion Of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems. His visual poetry is featured in Poetics of Cognition: Thinking Through Experimental Poems from The University of Iowa Press. The Tate Gallery includes 33 of his painted books of poetry in its collection.

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David Collard (TLS writer) on Glass’ performance at Free Verse Festival 2014 (London) and his earlier zimzalla production Play [Day] for [Of] the Dead: A [Decryptive] Dance For Mirror and Word (025).

“[two impressive readings]…the second by the American poet Jesse Glass, who had arrived that morning from Japan (where he teaches) and, clobbered by jet lag and with only ten minutes in which to make a big impression, made a big impression. His voice was a modulated growl reminding me of the late Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. Between poems he scrabbled intermittently in a briefcase for more sheets of his dense cryptic verses, which he delivered like a tub-thumping preacher man.

After the reading I bought his latest collection Selections from The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe (weirdly dated 2015 by his publisher, Knives Forks and Spoons Press), which includes colour reproductions of the author’s unsettling Blake-inspired paintings (now in the Tate Britain collection). The title is a reference to the ‘Werewolf of Bedburg’, a ghastly 17th century tale of lycanthropy, and is a redacted and reworked version of a poem originally written in the early 1980s. Also on sale was his Play [Day] for [Of] the Dead: A [Decryptive] Dance For Mirror and Word (‘Inverted text to be read with a mirror. Comes in a miniature wooden or cardboard coffin with book, image, gold mirror, skeleton and skull bracelet.’) Tempting, but I’d already overspent my modest budget on a dozen generously discounted books and pamphlets.”