The inconcision of the snow’s translation of the day was middling me deeply into wanly incorrect answers to questions about where to drain the line. The sun is always somewhere, angry. Too many misspelled birds, speckling the past.
Hey, here’s something for misspelled eyes and brains: a work by Marilyn Rosenberg at Amanda Earl’s National Poetry Month Site.
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Desparate once again for something to blog about, I’m reporting today on an e.mail I got a little while ago from Jorge
Dear Bob Grumman
I hope you are fine.
While reading Writing To Be Seen, I came across your concept of visio-textual art and found it interesting in order to include in my postdoctoral research report. In Permutoria: Visio-Textual Art, the same term and concept appeared. I have bought these books when I was in the II Avant Writing Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio, where I met Crag Hill, Nico Vassilakis, John M. Bennett, Miekal And, and many others. It was a great meeting. It was a pity you couldn´t come, for it was an opportunity to meet and talk with you.
I would like you to send a copy of the text of yours where you explain your concept of visual-text art. The explanation in Writing to be seen is not complete.
Best regards from Brazil
I answered quickly. (I’m pretty good about quick answers to questions about visual poetry.)
“Nice hearing from you again, Jorge!” said I. (We’d talked a bit about visual poetry over the Internet before.) “Yes, I wish I could have been at the symposium in Columbus—I would have enjoyed meeting you. And seeing Nico in person for the first time, although he’s an old friend. I’ll try to find where I’ve discussed “visio-textual art and e.mail it to you. It may take a while because I am not well-organized and I have discussed it and related terms in various places.
“Feel free to ask for clarification or whatever else you may need.”
Yes, this is my standard boilerplate, but I harp on it because no one else seems to take it seriously. Visual poets don’t like narrowing terms; the academy would agree with me if they paid any attention at all to visual poetry.
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Here are the last of the photographs of my current exhibition, finishing with a view from the end of it back to where one comes in, to the left at the other end:
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My trifle the other day inspired Marton Koppany to come up with something (to me) much more interesting:
“Distant Thunder, Sentient Moonlight,” he calls it, using all my words, which means I can sue him for every cent of the millions he makes from the poem–except copyrights don’t cover minimalist poems . . . or titles! Phooey. Anyway, he sent me his poem at a good time: once again, I wasn’t sure what to put in my latest danged entry.
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There’s little to say about the above except that I consider it a joke that can be taken to thoughts quite deep once you’ve carefully examined it.
A hint to solve it, written in reverse so you won’t accidentally see it and miss the fun of solving it without help: drow a rof kool.
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Here’s a quotation from Randall Jarrell that I completely disagree with: “Remember . . . that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader. . . “ I say a great critic of a poem about daffodils, say, equals the creator of the poem–why should something brilliant about a poem about daffodils not be as valuable as something brilliant about daffodils? I find Eliot the critic as worth reading as Eliot the Poet; Ditto Coleridge. Hayden is as worth reading as most poets though not himself a poet. I’m afraid I don’t think much of Jarrell as either a poet or critic. I. A. Richards was a top-drawer critic, but not quite that as a poet–I vaguely remember that he wrote poetry, but I’m not sure of it. William Empson’s criticism impresses me much more than his poetry. Cleanth Brooks is an under-rated critic but not a poet. Northrop Frye is another first-line critic who wrote no poetry that I know of. Their names will last longer than a lot of poets once widley honored.
Bonus (which I will comment on tomorrow–and, yes, it is–among other things–a puzzle-poem):
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Here’s Hal Johnson’s visio-infraverbal poem again:
”Lost in thought” is the simplest explication of this, but a better reading focuses on thought that is opposed, disrupted, damaged and finally sent in the wrong direction back to its futile beginning. With “ugh” and “tough” being disconcealed in the process further to suggest the losing struggle for meaning expressed. In short, a deft pwoermd. A visuaol one as well as infraverbal because you can see the word’s letters metaphorically enacting the struggle.
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Here’s an infraverbal poem–actually a visio-infraverbal poem–Hal Johnson posted at New-Poetry:
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