I started writing about clouds as a fire lookout on Red Mountain in Arizona. The lookout tower was in the Sonoran Desert about six thousand feet above sea level, on par with the surrounding peaks and the clouds. Summer is monsoon season there, and the clouds are quite dramatic—seedlike in the morning, burgeoning cumulus towards noon, thunderheads by early afternoon.
When I moved to New York in 2001, I was surprised to find the clouds just as spectacular. Alystyre Julian, poet and dear friend, and I collaborated on a cloud poem, The View from Everywhere, over the course of the next couple of years. That poem contains a collage of fragments from the lookout and such beautiful things by Alystyre. After we released it online (no longer available on The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s website), I began work on this book. It was written and made in New York, with Dieter Roth’s 246 Little Clouds (Something Else Press, 1968) and Rachel Bers’s new drawings in mind. For a long time, I simply called it “the cloud book.” Its proper name comes from HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) source code for a character, “ ” that preserves a blank space between words and simultaneously prevents a line break.
I determined from the start that this book would be scanned and viewed online through Ugly Duckling Presse. This allowed for a certain abandon in making it—no editioning process, no worries about whether the materials or methods were archival, and no production budget. I wanted it to be a free book, one called up on screen by demand—for it to exist as needed. When I give readings from this text, I bring the paper book for everyone to handle. I like to think that the object will eventually die from touch.
—Jen Bervin