Edit Publications

Edit Publications began as an events series and “exploration of editorial practices in contemporary writing and the arts” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. Over the following decade, Edit Publications (EP) has quietly produced a range of books, pamphlets, platforms, posters, hard drives, and occasional printed ephemera—of which a smaller sampling, year-by-year, has been gathered here as a guard against forgetting.

Rather than turn to adjacent disciplines like art or music or film or performance or new media—EP argued that new creative writing practices can be understood within the adjacent domains of editorial theory and bibliographic study. In other words, rather than borrow terms like appropriation (from art history), sampling (from music), montage (from film), improvisation (from performance), or remix (from digital culture) to describe the textual practices of post-digital composition and other emerging experimental poetic genres, we might instead turn to operations like emendation, selection, and circulation, or publishing, editioning, and versioning.

In other words, poets using texts to write their poems, or artists using texts to make their art, might benefit from the discursive registers of editors using texts to produce editions. In this light, from large-scale installations in the museum to community-based productions in the classroom, EP has endeavored to explore what creative capacities might be found in even the most minor edit. While most works made have been collaborative, and a majority under the radar, a select few might best resurface together here.

A decade seems more than a fitting lifespan for any press. May this one’s passing be a memory…as they say. From a sprawling collective publication around the extraordinary work of Tan Lin in 2010 to the editorial adaptation of single a tabletop RPG in “The Ground XR” amidst the pandemic of 2020, this page charts a decade’s progression toward free structures for editorial play, improvisation, and collaborative invention. A final editorial nudge retcons the end date of the press to make the record a tidier decade (over an unruly eleven years): if anything, these playful slippages in the communications circuit have defined EP in all endeavors throughout. 

From its inception, the press was meant to make an argument, a little intervention in diction. I felt that *editing* was a major (and under-theorized) part of the experimental writing world of the 2010s. That it might provide another way of thinking about use and reuse, about how texts circulate and recirculate. That the *edit* might reconfigure some of the more grandiose claims in poetics over the past decade. This argument, I believe, has been made to the best of my ability in the works featured here—a static scroll with a tilt, conversations beyond the bounds of the page, some small edits over the decade. 

Where otherwise unlisted, specific works may still be available from the editor: inquiries welcome @ dss-edit.com. 

Thank you for visiting Edit Publications—find us on the top left, second or third to the right, wherever program windows are open.

— Danny Snelson, 12.12.21