Observe & Quantify
Grolier Poetry Book Shop is a single-room, 500-square-foot bookstore located in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has been independently owned since first opening its doors in 1927. A long-winded list of notable poets have frequented or read at the store, including Allen Ginsberg, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Frank O’Hara, Mary Oliver, and Adrienne Rich. All remaining wall space not obscured by bookshelves is devoted to framed photos of poets who have befriended the Grolier over the years. Each wall highlights an array of poets both prolific and relatively unknown, hanging indiscriminately side-by-side.
My initial focus was to identify every poet pictured on the wall and create simple diagrams that maintained the size and shape of each frame. I borrowed a camera to document the walls of photos in the store. After reviewing the footage I shot, I became less concerned with labeling who’s-who. Adding names almost seemed to take away from the striking simplicity and selective anonymity of each wall. Instead, I wanted to simulate the physicality of being in the space.
If I were to describe readings I’ve attended at the Grolier in one word, it would be claustrophobic. Before the pandemic, bodies would cram uncomfortably into the small space to watch poets read. Still, the charged air of spoken poetry and local community kept me coming back. Readings now take place on Zoom and not having enough chairs is no longer an issue. Previously, the storefront imbued in-person readings with a sense of legacy that the digital realm lacks.
In his 1968 poem “Bickford Buddha,” published in the collection The Secret Meaning of Things, Lawrence Ferlinghetti beholds the Grolier’s walls of images:
Ontological preoccupations / in Plympton Street / in the Grolier Bookshop / Photos of “everybody” on the walls / All the poets that is / who’ve passed this Blarney Stone / Eliot & Dame Edith / Lowell & Ginsberg & Marianne Moore / Creeley & Duncan & Thom Gun / Where am I / walking by / not announcing myself
Ferlinghetti passed away in February of this year at the age of 101. Today, a portrait of him taken by local photographer Elsa Dorfman hangs by the cash register.
I spent hours searching and listening through audio recordings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in hope that I would find him reading “Bickford Buddha” that specifically deals with the Grolier. After a fairly exhaustive search I was certain that this audio either did not exist, or was housed in some university’s archive in a digitally inaccessible format. I fed text from the poem into an app called Descript to generate audio of a robot-voice reading the poem instead. Using a segment from a 1984 Sunday Morning Broadcast featuring the Grolier, I mashed new footage I shot with archival clips of the store.
In the pre-digital era, poetry readings were typically recorded and stored on cassette tapes. I wanted to use this medium as an extension of my project, but also a thought experiment on the irony of converting computer-spoken audio into an analog format. I created four cassette tapes by connecting a microphone to the tape deck and playing audio from my computer into it.
I intended for the cover art to evoke a design era of the late 60s and 70s, around the time that an actual recording of Ferlinghetti would have taken place. The j-cards were printed on risograph using fluorescent pink as the primary color and alternating uses of fluorescent orange, violet, copper, and green.
