A Humument is a really satisfying thing to hold in your hand. It's very nicely bound and printed. The pages are expensive feeling, and the colors are rich. My fondness of it doesn't go much further.
There's a recurring narrative if you choose to accept it as such. "Toge," something that functions as an actor in several of the pieces, provides a bit of continuity. It is impossible to deny that further continuity comes from the fact that the individual poems are all torn from the same novel. Other than that, I feel that the work is extremely scattered, and while the aleatoric nature of the book leads to meaning-slippage and cerebral high jinks, it's not for me the pinnacle of artistic enterprise.
To me, it feels as if the piece was a great idea that had to be gotten done before someone else took it. It's interesting to this end that the webpage offers newer renditions of the poems. In one way this is progressive. It provides a space for poetry that is dynamic, susceptible to change. On the other it may suggest that Phillips could have held off on publishing the work until he was completely satisfied with it.
It's rather pretentious, in my mind, that Phillips constructs phrases throughout the piece such as "now the arts connect" and "here is art" (7,8), when the mixing of visual and verbal has been prevalent since the dawn of advertising and freeform typefaces. I think A Humument is a little gimmicky for such grandiose suggestions.
My gripes aside, the piece does end up humorous at turns. These moments are for me the highest points of its success. Here, parody works and draws attention to the distinctions between the page and the reader, reevaluating inside and outside and the sacredness of the text. It seems necessary that the thing be taken lightly like that, because all told it's not that much more extraordinary than refrigerator poetry on top of blackened margins.
