Proprietary Method / June July - Tess Brown-Lavoie (Cutt Press)

Proprietary Method / June July is a handmade chapbook written by Tess Brown-Lavoie, and produced by Cutt Press in collaboration with Chertlüdde Books. Proprietary Method (2025) undertakes the systems embedded in abstract paintings: material processes, emergent narrative, and commodity valuation. The essaying poem follows a studio visit with Tyra Tingleff in Berlin, and studies how abstract surfaces hold off meaning or conclusion in favor of durational structures: a booby trap made of desire, souped up time bauble requiring patience. Immersed in visual poetics, the painter and the reader negotiate the imminence of reluctant figuration produced by conditions of the painting: as a valuable/valued object, a time sink, an experiment, and a meter for the artist's days, life, reading, and thinking. Proprietary Method's pairing with June July (2024) further extrudes the dialogue between visual and verbal poetics and their constituent processes. Time is accounted (for) and objectified: two adjacent summers and their various liquidities, canons, affects, afterthoughts, and sensual material. Longing and its detritus are rinsed in the shores of June July, to outline possible uses for a poem made out of the distances intrinsic to life.

Tess Brown-Lavoie is author of Lite Year, winner of the Fence Modern Poet Series Prize. Tess co-founded Sidewalk Ends Farm in 2011, and was recently the Anne Waldman Fellow at Naropa University. Tess teaches writing to architecture students at Pratt.