Archive for April, 2010
Entry 125 — My Latest Slump
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
I’ve been in and out of my Null Zone quite a bit of late, and for the past few days have been extremely in it. No zip, at all. I want to sleep but am barely able to–it takes me four or five hours to get to sleep at night, and I can’t sleep past six or seven. Even with a sleeping pill–or two. Ambiens? Something like that. The lowest dosage.
Maybe my trouble sleeping is why I liked the visual poem below of mine so much when I came across it earlier today while looking for a sonnet-related visual poem of mine for use in a presentation on sonnets I’m scheduled to give at the local writers’ center in a little over a week and can’t seem to work on for more than ten or fifteen minutes a day.
I may need my dosage of synthroid, the medicine I take for hypothyroidism, increased. I’m sure I’m suffering depression, too: one of my two brothers recently died. Visiting him for a week, then returning for three or four days for his funeral was one of the reasons for so few recent entries here.
Apologies for this doleful entry, but I wanted you few who come here upon occasion to know what’s going on, especially you few I’ve told I expected to write about an artwork of yours here by now.
Now that I’ve gotten going, I might as well make an announcement: the issue of The Pedestal with the gallery of artworks John M. Bennett and I edited for The Pedestal will be published tomorrow (at www.thepedestalmagazine.com), according to our editor, John Amen. We expect the usual flak about it. I just want to say all the wrong choices were John’s. And that I prefaced it with a ringing undorsement of calling textual designs visual poetry. Which John’s preface countered, but we’re still pals.
Isn’t it amazing? No matter how null I get, I retain my acerbic wit.
Another announcement: if I ever get even slightly energetic, I’m going to post a few of the works submitted to the gallery that didn’t make it into the gallery but that I liked; John says he might like to post a few of his favorites that didn’t make it, too. We also plan to have a gallery containing just about all the works submitted. It will go up at Spidertangle.net 1 August. I thought it’d be extremely informative for people to see what was submitted. We won’t post anything without the submitters’ permission, and have been turned down by three, so far. The same number so far have granted permission.
More, eventually, I very much hope.
Entry 124 — Re: Comments
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
I have to apologize to those of you who have sent me comments about this blog. For some reason, I was not getting e.mail notification of them. I also wasn’t aware of where I had to click to, to approve them (and apparently I have to approve them at this site for them to be posted). So I didn’t know I was actually getting comments.
I hope they will now show up. I hope, too, to get to them and reply. I just glanced at them when I finally discovered them, unapproved, but noticed several very interesting ones. Be patient with me, though. I’m pretty bushed at the moment, and out of it because of unhappy family matters. I’ll recover, though–always have.
–Bob
Entry 123 — Kinds of Words
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
In a shift in my way of describing varieties of visio-textual artworks, I’m trying out a taxonomy of words and wordlike, uh, expressitons. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll change the latter to something better. I threw it onto the screen within a second or two of reaching where it put it in my sentence. What I’m talking about are things that act in an artwork the way words act in standard poems. It would include a brush-stroke in a painting, say, or a dot of paint, or maybe an entire shape. I got the idea of calling such a thing a kind of word, by the way, when I thought I might send Geof a pwoermd consisting of a scribble of paint, using the logic that since a visual poem, for him, need not have words, a visual pwoermd need not, either.
Here are the kinds of words I thought of:
1. word — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically rational context; e.g., “gulp” in “I gulp water just before playing tennis.”
2. nullword — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically incoherent context; e.g., “gulp” in “water I just tennis before gulp playing.”
3. unword — a nonsense word; e.g., ” gspp”
4. fragword — a fragment of a word incapable of easily being read as a word, and in a context in which it would be incoherent even if read as some word; usually intended to represent language, never to be language.
5. preword — something in a photograph or work of visual art that a word exists for–for instance, a tree.
6. visword — an element in a visual artwork like some of Scott Helmes’s visual haiku that is wholly atextual but intended, it would seem, to represent a word. Helmes’s visual haiku generally consist of three shapes, each suggesting a line in the classical three-line haiku; hence, each shape must contain a set of words adding up to five or seven syllables.
The use of these terms: I can now call poetry that is significantly visual visual word art; I can call visual art with semantically meaningless words in it, visual nullword art; visual art with nonsense words visual unword art; and three other kinds of visual n-word art. Then I will be able to communicate with the five or six people in the world who would are capable of telling the difference between these forms of art effectively.