RESEARCH FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS:

     By the time Sappol entered the poetry scene in the 1970s, the second great awakening of 20th century poetry had already taken off and was in full blast. There were poetry scenes in New York, in Washington D.C., in California, and many more. There was no one to police the boundaries of poetry versus prose, of writing versus performance art, and it was in this scene of constant overlap that Personal Injury was founded. It does not come as a shock, then, that the poems featured in each issue pushed the boundaries of what a poem could be, with countless examples - even just in regards to form. There is a poem in the form of day’s offbeat TV guide (“Triptych”) by Paul Violi, a play by Opal L. Nations, an “interview” from the first issue between Peter Inman and Sappol, and even a letter from Sappol’s mother. Certain lines can sometimes be profound, or even hold gravity, but the poems are filled with a certain kind of humor and brevity, as if nothing mattered; sometimes coming off as crass, sometimes ironic, but always managing to stay afloat.

     This juxtaposition between the serious and frivolous is similarly mirrored in Sappol’s inclusion of visuals in Personal Injury. The images range in topics from mathematics, to psychology, to zoology and anatomy, and they are removed completely from their original source, stripped of captioning, and re-contextualized in the space of the magazine. This emphasizes the contrast between the more surrealist language and the very technically grounded visual content. However, just as the poems would have their moments of gravity, there were pictures of equal surreal and shock value, such as the genetics tree of a fly crossbred-with a human from the third issue, or the image of a young girl’s head photoshopped onto the naked torso of an adult woman. These images serve a similar purpose to the poems they accompanied, yet also created a sense of estrangement from the subject.

     Although the overall range is broad, the image selection per each issue is more confined, as it is often restricted to two to three sources. In the first issue, for example, most of the illustrations came from the book How to Read a Person Like a Book, with only a few other pictures - two from a comics source, and two from a mathematics book. There is also a consistency in image quality and style in each issue: for example, the visuals from this first issue have very clean and crisp lines due to the style of illustration, but in the fourth issue, Sappol uses reproduced paintings from the book From Dance Hall to White Slave, which offers more blurred lines and hazy edges. This provides a better continuity across individual issues, as the individual pictures are of the same style and formatting and creates far more cohesion than placing pictures haphazardly across the different magazines. All these new things that I found while researching Michael Sappol and his relationship to Personal Injury come together to paint a new picture of Sappol and his current research.

 

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CONTRIBUTION TO THE FIELD:

     I believe that my artifact will add to the study of not only Michael Sappol, but also the New York School as a whole. The New York School is known for its ability to utilize collaboration and multimodal art, something that this artifact demonstrates for Sappol and Personal Injury. Sappol was a New York School poet, one fascinated by the visual elements, who loved collecting comic books and thrift-store books with charming illustrations and images, who was able to translate both passions into a collection in the form of a magazine.

     Very little to no research has been done on Personal Injury, so I believe my project will be one of the first to investigate both the magazine and editor. Because of the lack of available and convenient information all in one place, I hope that this website will function as a resource to scholars, and allow them to further investigate the range of aesthetic choices across New York School little magazines, as well as the relationship between Sappol's current research in the history of visuals in medicine and his prior work as editor of Personal Injury. I also hope that, through my interview with Dr. Sappol, I can provide primary resources providing further insight into the creation of the magazine that are not otherwise available. As a student at a technical institution, I believe that I can also offer a unique perspective in studying this mode, as I may be able to better identify patterns in the methodology of selection and arrangement.