Column077 — September/October 2006
Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Two
Volume 38, Numbers 9-10, September-October 2006
Avoid Long Lines, Read My Poetry.
Poet: Ed Conti; Editor: Mary Veazey.
www.stickspress.com/conti.html.
The Heron’s Nest.
Editor: Christopher Herold.
www.theheronsnest.com
Michael P. Garofalo’s Index to Concrete Poetry.
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/index.htm.
Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry Website.
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/concr1.htm.
Michael P. Garofalo’s Concrete Poetry.
www.gardendigest.com/concrete/this.htm
Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.
minimalist concrete poetry.
Blogger: Dan Waber.
www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry.
po-X-cetera.
Blogger: Bob Grumman.
www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog.
Ed Conti doesn’t know much about haiku, but he’s awfully funny. Mary Veazey has devoted a section of her website, Sticks Press, to a collection of his work that includes this “Palindromic Haiku”:
Night!
I with gin.
I consider him (at times) an infraverbal poet–that is, one who composes poems whose main interest is what happens within their words, as in the palindrome. Here’s another of his haiku that’s at the site: “How do I love thee?/ Let me count the syllables/…sixteen, seventeen.” Here, again, is an infraverbal interest in the constitution of words much more than in their denotations. Actually, the first specimen might pass as a haiku (by my roughest definition): one image followed by a second that somehow interacts with the first in an emotionally meaningful way. Night; (depression); alcohol. The second just makes fun of the mechanics of provincials’ haiku, the kind that scrupulously have 5, 7, and then 5 syllables.
The temptation is to quote all of Conti’s poems, for they are all funny. I’ll just quote one more, the very short “Still Life”: “Fly swatter./ Fly flatter.” Conti has long ones at the site, and funnier ones, if you can believe it. There are twenty, altogether, deftly chosen and near-perfectly displayed by Mary Veazey, the site’s founder and editor. I spotlight the collection here in my continuing endeavor to prove the value for poetry of the Internet because they demonstrate how good some of the poems on it are, but also how varied, from light verse like Conti’s to, say, the mathematical poetry often at my po-X-cetera site, or the concrete poetry at Dan Waber’s minimalist concrete poetry.
At Mike Snider’s Formal Blog, you can find sonnets (including many by Mike himself that I very much like and have discussed at my blog) and commentary on that form, while several sites are devoted to haiku, such as –well, my site, again, at times–the Heron’s Nest, which is a webzine, not a blog. I mention the latter simply because it was the first one Google found for me when I searched for “haiku”–and because I thought the haiku on its home page by Steven Thunell, a good one: “summer morning/ squeak/ of the bicycle seat.” Lovely evocation of quiet speed–and summer.
The first haiku in the zine’s Winter 2006 issue is another good one: “winter evening/ a light is burning/ in the back of the house.” It’s by Jerry Ball. Some of the others aren’t as appealing to me–too many comparisons of spring and graveyard concerns–you know, rebirth and death. But the superior haiku make up for the lesser ones (and I haven’t come across a haiku publication yet whose contents were more than ten percent first-rate, at most).
Dan Waber’s blog, minimalist concrete poetry, is an exceptionally good blog from my point of view because of the range of its coverage: all kinds of minimalist poetry and visual poetry–and visimagery with textual elements (“visimagery” is Grummansprach for “art”–when “art” means “visual art”). As I write this (around the beginning of May 2006), a set of terrific artworks by Carlos Luis is featured on its homepage that consist of fractured letters, or shapes suggestive of fractured letters. If they have any semantic value, I’ve missed it, but I find them stunning as stark depictions of language–not language, but visual metaphors for language.
One, for instance, has an F-shape at the top whose lower horizontal bar (whatever its correct name is) extends into a completely- connected downward loop (if you can call something without curves a loop) of hopelessly garbled “speech”–actually black rectilinear irregularities few would take as letters in any context but this one. A compelling shape that reminds me of Klee, but beyond that, one can almost hear the f-sound it makes as it seems (to me) to aggress like a demented steam shovel going who-knows-where to devour something the way language can in some ways be thought to devour things. The work is hugely textual–but visually textual, not semantically textual, so a pure monochromatic Matisse cut-out.
Also currently at Waber’s site is Karl Kempton’s “VISUAL POETRY: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions.” This is well worth reading, although it competes with my own take on visual poetry’s history. For instance, Kempton calls Blake a visual poet, I call him a painter/poet who illustrated his own poems, or captioned his illustrations with his own poems. He thinks ancient rock paintings are visual poetry, I think they’re . . . rock paintings, sometimes (possibly) with words. In short, he covers way more territory than I think such a history ought to. But praise be to the Internet for making such a history of a neglected sub-genre available–not only to read, but to fire comments at, something, alas, no one but I and British visual poet Lawrence Upton have done in the first month or two the piece has been up (with Kempton and Waber responding to Upton at the site, and to me back-channel).
The final site I have space to mention is a kind of multiple site run by Michael P. Garofalo. One portion of it is an excellent resource for those interested in the sort of things that are at Waber’s site. It includes an enormous number of links to full books such as Art and People, by noted visual poet, Clemente Padin, which Karl Young, in his preface to this version, calls, “probably the most important of Clemente Padin’s critical works”; and Padin’s Selections from VISUAL POEMS 1967 – 1970, both of which are at Young’s light & dust site. One section of Garofalo’s multiple site is devoted to Garofalo’s own fine concrete poems. The third section of his site I have a URL above for specializes in Text Poems, ASCII-Art-Poems, Shape Poems, Calligrams, Art-Poems, and Lettrisme. Again, thanks to the Internet, a resource of materials only such rare places as Ruth and Marvin Sackner’s Visual and Concrete Poetry Archive in Miami had available as little as ten years ago.