Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2022

The Ur-text project, a work in three volumes, is composed from poems, personal writings, and speculations accompanied by quotes, appropriated texts, and images. All have been transformed to suit the concept of a twenty-first century Liber Chronicarum spanning the totality, from Genesis to the Apocalypse.

The texts include the entire Book of Genesis (Jerome’s Latin translation, with the opening verse in Hebrew and Greek), select fragments from Ecclesiastes, The Apocalypse of St. John (The New English Bible translation), William Temple Horniday’s The Extermination of the American Bison (Washington D.C. 1889) and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C., 1957) together with additional marginalia, commentary, and the entire text of my long poems Magnus Annus, first published by The Aldebaran Review (Berkeley, 1968), and L’Alchimie du Verbe published as Bone Black & Vermillion by The Real Lead Saloon (Berkeley, 2021.) The biblical texts (especially Genesis) are what I have posited as the core-texts of our perception, the lenses through which we interpret our culture and our nature. The sub-text (appropriated from The Effects of Nuclear Weapons) is, in its altered format, not so much a lens through which we perceive as the swamp in which we are mired—an ever-present, existential, war-riven, and increasingly poisoned world.

The majority of my personal observations were written and annotated as I composed each bi-folium, revising and editing at each stage along the way right up to and including the final press run.

The images were collected from divers sources, including: Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum; I Modi by Pietro Aretino (Venice, 1527); Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595); Uranometria by Johann Bayer (Augsberg, 1603); Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi ... metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia, &c. (Oppenheim and Frankfurt, 1617–24); with additional images from the United States Department of Defense, Library of Congress, Montana Historical Society Photographic Archives, my personal collection, etc. All are reconfigured, altered, and collaged to varying degrees to suit my project of a re-envisioned creation story and atrocity exhibition of some of mankind’s more questionable accomplishments.

Book; 128 pp.    11.5 x 17.5 inches    65 copies.       $inquire