by Andrew S. Guthrie (Author)
Alphabet consists of twenty-six poems concerning the vagaries of failure, the underrated opposite of success. But in this case, the context of failure necessarily includes the genre of contemporary poetry, that most disabused yet over-abundant mode of expression. Why would anyone choose to express themselves in a manner that automatically narrows the readership, even after dispensing with avant-garde ambitions? - Precisely because its condition might lend itself to the aimless, useless or extra-economic moments when success can be turned on its head. And though the poet might be prone to the audience's neglect, history itself is rife with countless examples of spectacular literary failures (as addressed in Alphabet), whether these traumas are eventually redeemed or forever lost. These examples include: misplaced manuscripts, writer's block, articulate illiterates, libraries that were burned to the ground, posthumous fame for the previously poverty-stricken, botched yet endlessly repeated translations, along with the obvious shortcomings of the dilettante, the over-inflated ego, and the perennial loser.
Author Biography
Andrew S. Guthrie was born in New York City, lived most of his life in Boston, Massachusetts USA and moved to Hong Kong in 2005. In Boston, he exhibited at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art in 1996 and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography in 2003. His artist edition "Broken Records: 1960 -1969" has been collected by The Brooklyn Museum of Art and is available from Printed Matter in New York City. In Hong Kong he has exhibited at The Shanghai Street Artspace, Videotage, C&G Artpartment and most recently at 100ft.PARK. In 2012 he established www.likink.com, a Hong Kong based site for the distribution and production of artist book/editions. He has previously been published on the websites of Make Do Studios and Weaponizer and in the print magazine Poetry is Dead. His first published poetry collection, "Alphabet", was a finalist for the Proverse Prize 2013.