Column071 — March/April 2005
The Ever-Visible RK
Volume 37, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2005
35 Years of Visible Writing: a Memoir.
Richard Kostelanetz. 54 pp; 2004; Pa;
Koja Press, Box140083, Brooklyn NY 11214.
http://kojapress.com. $23.
As everyone reading this should know, Richard Kostelanetz has been a leading otherstream poet for a number of decades. His general mode of working as a poet is to find some feature of words that few if any other poets have exploited, and build several thousand poems exploiting it. Well, maybe only a few hundred. Anyway, 35 Years of Visible Writing contains many of the best of them, with a valuable commentary by the author on his practice and philosophy as a poet.
Making the book by itself close to a visual poem is its design by Igor Satanovsky, who provides just the right images of Kostelanetz’s work in just the right places not only to near-perfectly accompany Kostelanetz’s commentary but flow interactively into a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts, to use an expression Kostelantz says in the book is a main aim of his as a poet. Nothing stunningly brilliant, just a lot of things elegantly and sensitively applied. For instance, Satanovsky alternates white on black with conventional black on white pages throughout much of the book. The first exception to the alternation is a . . . minimalist canvas, I’d call it, filled with “69” over and over in black on a white background. The constant op-art reversal of the “6” (or is it the “9?”) is given an extra charge by the sudden white background where black was expected. Elsewhere, a lefthand page contains one of Kostenetz’s “corner poems,” as I guess I’d name them, in which the corners of the page is occupied, respectively, by “WORDS,” “VECTORS,” “VIBRATIONS” and “POEM,” in white, each oriented in a different way (i.e., perpendicularly upward, and the reverse, and horizonatal, and upside-down). On the facing page is a variation of the same poem that consists of the same four words and orientations plus twelve other “inter-resonant” words that form four smaller corner poems. That it switches to black letters on a white page makes it seem like a jump from night into day.
Satanovsky does all kinds of other things with different-sized type, text going up and down or in circles or elsehow, shaped swatches of text, and the like–always enhancing Kostelanetz’s discussion and works, never intruding on them.
Among Kostelanetz’s works are several of the cut-up and reassembled specimens of a photograph of Kostelanetz from his Reincarnations that Satanovsky has deftly scattered through the book to constantly break a face into the otherwise rarifiedly hyper- conceptuality of the book. Reincarnations differs from most of Kostelanetz’s work here (and mostwhere) in being wholly averbal. But it is typical of that work in its sequentiality, its anti-conventionality (though others using the same ploy over the years have cost it some of its original impact), its constructivist minimalism (each frame being made up of 80 rearranged squares), and–at its best–its focused aesthetic wallop.
A page from Kostelanetz’s well-known and popular East Village series of 1970-71 is here, too. Each of these is a little map of some portion of the East Village, but with little squares of hand-written prose description, commentary or simple naming replacing buildings and streets–and placed in such a way (diagonally, for instance) as to make a highly connotative poem of the result rather than just a map.
“Disintegration” is here, too–one of Kostelanetz’s earliest and most-antholgized visual poems, no doubt because, in simply showing the word “disintegration” disintegrating visio-onomatopoeically, it doesn’t take much on the part of a spectator to appreciate it. Many others of the best of Kostelanetz’s word-games are here. There are photographs of his work in holography, too, with more of his discussion concerned with that than with anything else.
The book ends with a description of the 2001 installation he collaborated on with HyunYeul Lee, a grad student at MIT, as part of a group exhibition titled ID/Entities. It sounds like something that should have been captured on film. Here is what Kostelanetz writes about it: “I offered autobiographical texts which she incorporated into an extraordinary multimedia installation that was faithful to my esthetic in nearly all respects, ambitious in using several projections, and rich in the use of my verbal materials. Into a setting that resembled a writer’s study with a desk, typewriter, and a wooden chair next to a simulated window on the left side and a fireplace on the right she cast several kinetic projections of my words and only my words.” As critic Barbara Pollock wrote, “. . . words–animated and projected–replace the writer. . . . lines of text dance across (his) desk, jump in and out of (his) inkwell, and rumble across the window in traffic patterns. . . .”
Kostelanetz’s commentary is always informative and fluid. I don’t know why he considers some of his poems visual, though. His strings–poems in which meaningfullyricalinkingots go on for scores or hundreds of words–are purely verbal, as far as I’m concerned, for example. He considers them “visual” simply, I take it, because his removal of spaces is a visual act. But so is writing a letter. He also considers such of his InSerts as “GrasShopper” and “CrumBled” visual because “capitalization is essentially a visual enhancement.” But so is underlining, bold-facing and italicization, so I consider it a textual operation, and would give Kostelanetz’s InSerts my own name for such texts: “infraverbal,” since they depend primarily on textual manipulations going on inside words rather than inside sentences, as is the case in traditional poetry.
I also think some of his poems are better described as prose. I’ve written about that in my blog, beginning with the entry on his “circular poems” that I posted early in January at http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog/OldBlogs/Blog00337.html. Whatever they’re called, though, the best of them are among the best and most important we have from the past 35 years, and Kostelanetz more worth arguing with about poetry than just about anyone else around. (But WHY did he have to say at the very end of his book that he favors “black and white as the sole colors indigenous to art, believing that all other hues belong primarily to ‘illustration?’”)