Episode 2 - Smashing the Image: Susan Howe’s Ikon Basilika or a Bibliography of the King’s Book with Rebecca Newby

Kemp, Sam and Newby, Rebecca (2024) Episode 2 - Smashing the Image: Susan Howe’s Ikon Basilika or a Bibliography of the King’s Book with Rebecca Newby. [Audio]

Abstract

Episode 2: Smashing the Image: Susan Howe’s Ikon Basilika or a Bibliography of the King’s Book with Dr Rebecca Newby Trigger Warning: Death and Execution The page as art, or how to behead text and scatter history. Medieval literature scholar Dr Rebecca Newby joins me to discuss absent centers and visual poetry. A Bibliography of the King's Book, or Eikon Basilike, is a 1989 poetry collection by Susan Howe. It’s about, and to a certain degree, is itself, a book of treatises, meditations, prayers and tracts attributed to King Charles 1st, named Eikon Basilike. The original was published and distributed on the day of his execution in 1649, but is now considered to be a forgery, the real authors being anonymous sympathizers to the royalist cause. Howe’s response centers on an 1896 bibliography of Eikon Basilike by Edward Almanack, and her poetry is part homage and part appropriation. It’s a collection which fits within the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry genre, with a particular emphasis on fragmented and visual forms, a shifting voice and a striking sense of typology and materialism. It poses questions of authorship, form, and language, and is a pivotal text for experimental artists in both visual and written mediums.

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