Stacy Doris's The Cake Part (Video)

Thom Donovan and Lucy "Labchow" Lasky from Stacy Doris on Vimeo.

The Poetry Foundation has a useful write-up about Stacy Doris's book project with Publication Studio, The Cake Part, which will feature "fantastic" censored literature from the era of Marie Antionette. As Doris tells PF:

The Cake Part is a fantastic redeployment of banned pamphlets from the time of the French Revolution in the form of a book-length poem. Long kept hidden because of their transgressive content, these pamphlets were stored in a secret archive at the Bibilothèque nationale called the enfer (hell). Highly pornographic and formally promiscuous, The Cake Part is an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of that 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century. Set in the typography of Web 2.0, the design of this book searches for the modern day equivalents of these banned pamphlets in the virtual networks which aid and abet current revolutionary movements.

The project includes videos of Doris's friend and colleagues reading and performing selections from the book, including a video I shot with my dog, Lucy.

Here is some of what Poetry Foundation has to say:

In a consideration of how best to launch the book, Doris and Matthew Stadler decided to use the revolutionary potential of the internet and ask varied and friendly poets to participate in an online book launch for The Cake Part (which will take place at the Morgan Library in NYC). Doris told us that she was interested in how “online presence is central to the structure of revolutions today, and how in a sense it was in the French Revolution as well, where zines and other networks were key for circulating information and propaganda.”