“L’amour, c’est offrir à quelqu’un qui n’en veut pas quelque chose que l’on n’a pas.”
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XII, leçon du 17 mars 1965,
Fortner Anderson: Conception and Texts
Fabrizio Gilardino: Cover illustration and layout
Here is a short video describing the project.
As its title suggests, 15 Beautiful Love Poems, contains 15 poems about love.
Its text is engraved within a solid block of crystal. The book weighs 5.4 kilos.
The 15 poems appear within the transparent block in super-imposed layers, so are unreadable.
Each of the 15 poems reproduces the syntactic structure of an iconic English-language love poem. Think of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe, William Butler Yeats and others. Each of the poem in the book conserves the rhyme schema, the rhythm, the line length and the punctuation of their model poem.
In addition, the poems have been entirely composed using citations of the work of other Canadian poets; Lorna Crozier, Susan Musgrave, Alice Walker, Margaret Avison, Ruth Taylor, Anne Szumigalski among others.
The book was composed in Montreal and Sutton, Quebec, over a 15 month period from mid-2023 to the early spring of 2025.
The model poems:
1) Elizabeth Barrett Browning,”How Do I Love Thee?”
2) Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Sonnet xxx”
3) William Wordsworth, “The Lost Love”
4) W.H.Auden, “Funeral Blues”
5) Thomas Hardy, “Thunderstorm in Town”
6) Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights!
7) William Carlos Williams, “Love Song”
8) Robert Frost, “The Silken Tent”
9) William Blake, “Love’s Secret”
10) Ogden Nash, “Reprise”
11) Margaret Walker, “Love Song to Alex, 1979”
12) William Butler Yeats, “The Ragged Wood”
13) Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”
14) Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”
15) Christopher Marlowe, “Who Ever Loved”
The works cited:
Lorna Crozier, The Blue Hour of the Day (McClelland & Stewart, 2007).
Anne Szumigalski, A Woman Clothed in Words (Coteau Books, 2012).
Margaret Avison, Concrete and Wild Carrot (Brick Books, 2002).
Ruth Taylor, The Drawing Board (The Muses Company, 1988).
P. K. Page, The Glass Air (Oxford University Press, 1985).
Susan Musgrave, What the Small Day Cannot Hold (Porcepic Books, 2000).
Dorothey Livesay, Collected Poems (McGraw Hill, 1972).
Phyllis Gotlieb, The Works: Collected Poems (Calliope Press, 1978).
Alice Walker, Welcome to the Anthropocene (The University of Alberta Press, 2018).
Susanna Moodie, Enthusiasm and Other Poems (DigiCat, 2022).
Pauline Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose (Dundurn, 2013).
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