I stumbled upon the conceptual procedure for this poem in writing my first book, Reading the Remove of Literature (2006), and stretched the procedure in my follow-up chapbook, Historia Abscondita (2007).
This distilled version of the procedure can be used in and for any text-based publication, as a specific response and intervention.
The premise of the procedure is simple: my author fee goes to a professional indexer who prepares a complete Name and Subject index for the publication in question, which is typeset at the end of the book per the stylesheet of the publication, only for the reference locators to blanked out. The procedure creates a unique list poem, distilling the key people and ideas discussed into a constellation organised by alphabetical coincidence, within which spacing becomes determined by an absent logic that regulates a unique reading rhythm.
This version was devised for the inaugural issues of The Happy Hypocrite, a periodical founded and edited by Maria Fusco in 2008 and published by Book Works, London. It was later re-deployed for Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, edited by Andrea Andersson and published by University of Toronto Press in 2018.
