Abstractive

Abstractive is a collaboration in words and images. It was begun in person at Candace Hill Montgomery’s house in Bridgehampton while David Grundy was on an artist’s residency at The Church, Sag Harbor in Summer 2024, and continued virtually into Winter 2024, with final additions and revisions in late 2025 and early 2026.

The title comes from poet-composer Russell Atkins, who passed away in summer 2024 at the age of 98, and whose work in concrete and ‘abstractive’ poetry as far back as the 1940s forms part of a lineage of Black experimentation and abstraction that has long been ignored or glossed over. The word ‘abstractive’ emphasizes abstraction not as fixed destination but as dynamic process: a collaborative dialogue, between writers, between language and image, between representation and what lies beyond or beneath or around it. […] We’re drawn to music and visuals and poems that are polyrhythmic and polyphonic, speaking across and speaking over as well as speaking up or speaking about. Our collaboration aims to incorporate the mess and messages of notes, sketches, drafts, and journal jottings, the multiple places where ideas come in, all the ways in which we’re lead to abstract thought: the unsmoothed edges, the unclean part. The mind’s eye and the mind’s ear both seek and refuse the fixity which music and word and image dance around. Improvising within the improvisation, and improvisation within the edit. In other words: composition.

Author(s): Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy

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Softcover, Further Other Book Works, April 2026
142 p, 10 × 8 in