Pataphysical Alphabet

Author: Anne Kingsbury

Publisher: Partly Press (2026)

Anne Kingsbury’s Pataphysical Alphabet may be viewed as an answer to a question that was never posed. In her afterword, “Alpha-beads and ‘Pata-creatures,” Johanna Drucker suggests that the letters “embody ‘imaginary solutions’ to the question of how the latent identity of the letters of the alphabet can be revealed.” 

The production of the alphabet has been shaped by chance and necessity. In 1981, Kingsbury had her first encounter with pataphysics when the Four Horsemen (bpNichol, Paul Dutton, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, and Steve McCaffery), a Canadian sound poetry group, visited Woodland Pattern, the literary center founded in 1979 by Kingsbury, her husband Karl Gartung, and Karl Young. 

Forty-five years after that first encounter, the official Pataphysical Alphabet, twenty-six letters and a production file containing approximately 56 preparatory drawings, notes, and photocopies reside at the Beinecke Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

This publication and Art That Keeps on Singing, Kingsbury’s retrospective exhibition at Woodland Pattern gallery mark the end of an era for the literary center’s original (1979-2026) 720 East Locust Street location.

"These are crazy little things, inventive and surprising, but oddly familiar at the same time. Eyes, mouths, noses, and features peer from the counters and serifs of the letters, their expressions wry and winking with their frontal view and sideways glances. Beading is an art that requires patience and concentrated application. Beaded images do not spring into being spontaneously. They require steady effort with the work of a needle, thread, and in this case, the tiny “seed” beads made of glass from which the pattern appears. This is rather like sewing pixels into an image until they are lodged in place. Not quite an impromptu practice, it requires steadfast concentration. The result is stunning as each bead reflects light individually, even as it contributes its dense color to the whole." 

—Johanna Drucker