Jiří Kolář – Návod k upotřebení [Instructions for Use] Inscribed with Pound quote

Inscribed and signed by Jiří Kolář, quoting Ezra Pound’s modernist mantra: “Make it new.”

Just as Pound and his fellow modernist poets sought new forms and subjects fifty years earlier, Kolář was searching for a way to merge poetry, art, and reality. Each of the fifty-two poems consists of instructions to be performed and is accompanied by a thematically independent collage. The poems are, in effect, small personal happenings through which the reader discovers meaning in everyday and often overlooked things.

A particularly appealing association between Kolář’s experimental practice and the modernist tradition, made explicit by his Pound quotation.