Column050 — May/June 2001
The Appearance of a Selected Works by Me!
Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2001
Xerolage, volumes 27, 28, 29 and 30. 2000-2001.
Edited by Miekal And and Lyx Ish aka Liz Was.
24 pp., each; Xexoxial Editions, Rt 1, Box 131,
LaFarge WI 54639. $5, ppd.
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In 1966, I self-published a book of some three dozen visual haiku that I re-self-published as a Runaway Spoon Press book in 1997. Other than that, I’ve not had a single collection of my visual poetry published until this year, just a week or so after my 60th birthday on Groundhog Day. While it is true that I have not been a prolific visual or any other kind of poet, I have had visual poems published in zines all over the world, and in several exhibitions, and there are Big Press reference books out there with entries on me as a visual poet.
So, it’s interestingly odd, I think, that it’s taken so long for a non- self-published book of my visual poetry to come out–but pretty par for the course in our still little-recognized off-road of poetry. It is also a Great Relief for me finally to get this particular collection out there, thanks to Miekal And and Lyx Ish, and their since-1985 super-series of 24-page Xerolages, each issue of which is devoted to one artist (or collaborative alliance of two or more artists) making significant use of copier technology. I’ve lauded this series before in this column so will only remind you now that among those who have had Xerolages devoted to their work are Bill DiMichele, Lloyd Dunn, Greg Evason, Malok, Ross Martin, Clemente Padin, Vittore Baroni, Marilyn Rosenberg, Ruggero Maggi, Bill Keith–and now, at around the same time that the issue with my work in it appeared (volume 30)–Jean-Francois Robic (volume 27), Carlyle Baker (volume 28) and Carla Bertola (volume 29).
Robic’s collection is of what I call visiocollagic poetry, a subset of visual poetry consisting of texts and visual images sharing pages but not fused. In Robic’s introductory words, he “mixed (his) family old pictures & historic events (especially about eastern & communisitc history), signs & words in all languages concerned by the images: french, russian, breton, spanish, german–so you need a dictionary to appreciate all the images’ meanings. It’s up to you to . . . connect signs, words, & images; to give them back a signification; your signification.” A lexicon, however, is provided for the very few words that are scattered through these classically xerolagically distorted, blurry, oriented-in-all-directions clusters of images. Even without the lexicon, though, an aesthcipeint’s flow into the pathos/ever-long-ago of the nations and families (metaphoring each other) of Robic’s sequence is practically automatic.
Baker’s collection almost entirely leaves the verbal, though it is saturatedly textual. It begins with an abc, each letter of which has several words or symbols next to it that start with it, eventually turning into a poem of sorts in the style of “dat damn dada” of the D entry. On the next page a piece of paper covered with horizontal slices of words and phrases flutters away from three blank pieces of paper toward the viewer to speak, barely, of such things as “thing,” “insight,” “the people,” “wide range” . . . Next to this is a page of coded material using little lines, dots, x’s and the like which the same sliced phrases and words from the previous page cross–and can now be seen to say, “Someone who is truly knowledgeable makes even the complex things seem simple,” and goes on to something about helping “the people” decide between “products and services.” From that point on, Baker’s sequence is a wordless meditation on language. It ends with an image of what seems to be the tower of Babel in ruins–with a very abstract dadaist sketch of some kind of Buckminster Fuller structure behind and above it that suggests to me something about the material’s evolution to the conceptual. Without space for twenty or thirty thousand more words to discuss this work, I can only say here that it is . . . fascinating.
The same is so much the case with Bertola’s collection of mostly textual visimages, too, that I will sneak away from my responsibilities as critic and just quote from Bertola’s brief introduction, in which she speaks of “dismembering or recreating” words to make signs/designs of them. “The voice,” she says, “breaks (them), throws (them) into the whirl of sound. The Xerox succeeds in twisting and reconstructing (them) in haunting sequence.” (Which is my impression of her work, too.) “At times,” she goes on, “my signs-words aren’t drawn with a pen but with a thread (wool, silk) and they create new writing to which the Xerox gives the look of very ancient or futuristic graffite. When the ‘subject’ is an image, for instance my face, the Xerox intervenes to give off the anguish and the grotesque with a language that the word couldn’t and doesn’t want to face.”
My own collection cheats a little by being more of visual poems than of the collages-via-Xerox that And coined the word, “xerolage,” to represent, but just about all of them, in spite of looking like poems rather than collages, consist of cut-out texts and graphic images pasted together and xeroxed (and, often, re- Xeroxed). As I somewhat ruefully confess in my one-page introduction, the 26 poems in the issue (which include a front- and a back-cover poem) represent almost my entire output over the years as a visual poet, aside from a few sequences, and my latest works in color. I feel very good about it, though: it represents me at my best as a visual poet. And it includes a few of those of my mathematical poems that are also visual poems.