Envelope to the issue 7 of the book-newspaper "Alcohols"

Envelope 7. The issue came out on May 9, 2006. Dominance of the vector.

The addressees are Katerina Kozhukhova and Leonid Bershidsky, then residents of Moscow. Katya is one of my best friends.

Quote from A.Kh .: “The printer, puffing and spitting black ink (forgive him, friends!) Prints envelopes.
And I still have to add to the most multi-variant issue (my text changed on two pages along the way, the pictures were also edited) one more little bit of customization. This time, it even makes sense for subscribers to look at least in the preview: what if everything is not the same as yours?

From it, I understood that in this issue there were several versions of the text and the pictures were being finalized. I don't remember anything - 15 years is no joke.

Also, two large texts on the principles of illustrating poetry are associated with the seventh issue, which seem so important that I will post them here - with the seventh and eighth envelopes.

About illustrations

If an artist begins to talk about his pictures in words, it means that he painted them poorly. That's how I was taught.

It took twenty years to understand that there are exceptions to this rule.
I begin to talk about how I imagine illustrations for poems. In particular, why the pictures in Alcools are made the way they are made.

Poems - any verses - resist narrative illustration. The density of the verbal fabric, the concentration of meanings on negligibly small spaces in the verses are such that the illustration for them should be brushed off the eye from the sheet in one span. Poems don't describe anything - they don't have time to describe. The action of the metaphor is like lightning: it pierces through and illuminates everything around. Even if “you and I will sit in the kitchen // It smells sweet of white kerosene.// A sharp knife, and a loaf of bread ... *” This is not an everyday description - this is a murder with words, each of which strikes like a blow with a dagger. It makes no sense to draw in detail all the objects. There should be no more strokes in the picture than there are letters in the stanza.
But, just like everyday life, poetry does not tolerate empty generalizations in illustration, lines drawn “for beauty”, figures for surroundings. As in battle: if you don’t know how to draw a sword from its scabbard beautifully, drag it as best you can. The main thing is to have time to chop stronger. Therefore, multi-figure compositions, well-developed plans, foggy distances, written out with a zero number, are excluded, even if you draw the Odyssey.

Apollinaire's poems are clearly divided in my head into "ordinary" and "avant-garde". The names are conditional, the essence is simple: “ordinary” poems are primarily a story. "Avant-garde" is a construction of words, where the form is also a plot. Mirabeau Bridge on one side, Zone on the other.
"Ordinary" poems almost always have a plot core, which you can catch on with a picture. “The bow-legged peasant and the weary ox / Slowly wander through the autumn fog / Past the lurking, miserable villages” - that's the picture. It remains only to remove the excess of details (in this case, donated "villages") and try to invest in three lines.

It is more difficult when the plot is fused, twisted into a verbal construction, when “The eye, the crystal, Christ...//Oh, the twentieth crystal of centuries!// Having become a bird, this century, like Christ, flies up, not knowing the shackles.” And so a hundred lines in a row, jumping from plot to plot, mercilessly collecting figurative nesting dolls. Here the advantage of the writer over the drawing affects: he has two times in his arsenal. One is reading time, allowing the image to take shape as the eyes scan the lines. The second is the train of near memory, which easily retains what has been read until the new image displaces the previous one. Another trick: what is created by the imagination is a thin matter, another shines through one layer without interfering. The artist here is in flight: unlike mental images, visual images are dense and unambiguous, lie in the same time and are perceived all at once. What to do?
I tried several ways, here are a couple:
The first is a picture for the "Zone". Simple as a poster, an image stuffed with elementary symbols, very densely loaded with meaning. And - knocked out of the usual context. I do not guarantee coincidence with the author's meanings, but I try to keep a parallel course.
The second is an illustration for "Cortege". What is drawn is not what is being told, but the narrator. He made this mess - let him take the hit now :) This is how many complex poems are made - "The Traveler", for example. The book has its own character - Guillaume, who is not equal to the author and does not completely coincide with the lyrical hero. He is an affected illustration, he lives between the space of poetry and the reader. He is the genius loci of the Alcools newspaper.
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* Quotes only by heart - such a geys. Therefore, inaccuracies are possible.