US Postal Service censors Adrienne Rich and Nancy Grossman book mailing

"Untitled," 2009 by Nancy Grossman. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Let us now observe Banned Books Week. As usual, the ironies abound. Recently, when the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery tried to mail out postcards for the occasion, announcing the publication of Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send, a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich with etchings by Nancy Grossman, the United States Postal Service refused to let the mailing go through.

They claimed the postcard—which featured an etching by Grossman of a naked man who is bound and gagged—violated Title 39, Section 3010 of the US Code designed to “protect” the public from “sexually oriented advertisements.” Never mind that the image was a work of art and a protest against censorship, rather than actual pornography. Such distinctions were lost on the powers that be.

Next the Rosenfeld gallery tried pasting a pink warning sticker over the naked man’s small and delicately-drawn genitals. The sticker referred to the decision by the USPS. However, a postal official rejected this too, claiming the sticker assigned blame to the US Postal Service. Well, yes.

In the end the Postal service demanded that the postcard be placed in an envelope, with an extra piece of white paper inserted, to prevent even the ghost of an image from showing through. This is how the gallery finally managed to send their book notice through the mail.

Despite it all, the limited edition book was released this week. Printed by David Sellers, of Pied Oxen Printers, on beautiful Somerset Bookwove and hand bound in Belgian linen-covered boards, each of the 100 copies of the book are signed by the poet, artist and printer and will—of course—become instant collectors items. The large 13 by 17-inch volume is a beautiful thing to behold. They don’t make books like this anymore. Gorgeously designed and hand set in foundry types and letterpress printed, the book is obviously a work of  craftsmanship and love.

Nancy Grossman’s two black and white intaglio prints are disturbing, as they should be, hovering in an artistic netherworld somewhere between Francisco Goya and Abu Ghraib. During the 1960s and 70s, Grossman was famous for her troubling sculptures of large heads, wrapped in leather, straps and zippers. As one of the first American artists to explore the imagery of bondage, she was a natural choice to interpret Rich’s meditation on human suffering.

Rich’s poem Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send begins with a quote from the prosecutor who sentenced Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci to prison in 1928: “We must prevent this mind from functioning.”

Like so many of the poems Rich has written over the last half a century, Letters Censored is a cry against all those forces that would prevent us from feeling, thinking and fully responding to the world. First published as part of her book Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 (W.W. Norton), the poem speaks in many voices and is by turns dark and silvery, cogent and fragmented. One thinks of The Wasteland—if T. S. Eliot had been a woman and a radical, instead of a future votary in the Church of England—and if he’d been writing from America, during the war in Iraq, during the era of Dick Cheney, satellite phones and Britney Spears.

Rich, of course, is one of America’s finest living poets. Her voice and perspective are absolutely her own. What she shares with Eliot is the ambition and confidence to speak about our civilization and the honesty to reflect on the most personal of details. Since 1951, when she published her first book of poems at the age of 22, she has been writing eloquent, lyrical, bold works that neither settle for the merely beautiful nor the easily shocking but probe ever deeper into the connections between the self and the surrounding world.

This lovely, hand-made edition of Letters Censored is—like the poem itself—an assertion that, despite the viral spread of mind-deadening mass culture, it is the things we make ourselves, with mindfulness and care, that finally matter.

Let us remember, this week and every week, the books, art works, ideas and even people that have been banned. And may we fight the censor, wherever he appears.

A signed and numbered edition of the hand-printed Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send can be purchased through the Rosenfeld Gallery or from the publisher, Pied Oxen Printers. The poem is also available in the book Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (W.W. Norton) and can be ordered through your local bookstore.

By Mona Molarsky © 2009

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery – 24 West 57th Street, NYC – 212-247-0402

For other stories about poetry and bookstores click on the links below:

Poem in Your Pocket Day

Searching for Dylan Thomas in New York

Seductive bookstores of the East Village