Column086 — March/April 2008
Simplexity
Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2008
Simplex 17.
Edited by derek beaulieu
2007, 18 sheets; House Press,
#2, 733 2nd Avenue Northwest,
Calgary, Alberta, Canada t2n 0e4. np.
Early in December 2005, derek beaulieu sent out an invitation to various artists, including me, to participate “in a collaborative / constraint-based concrete poetry portfolio.” Each artist opting in would get a Letraset sheet from beaulieu with instructions to make a work using part or the whole of it and nothing else–on a standard sheet of typing paper. I, to my regret, was too lazy to accept the invitation–something that happens too often with me. Seventeen artists did, though, including Nicole Burisch, Frances Kruk, Jonathan Ball, Christian Bok and Pete Spence. Dan Waber, too, luckily for me–because his piece was a tribute to 15 concrete poets that included me, so he was kind enough to send me a copy of the portfolio. This latter consisted of 17 8..5″ by 11″ sheets of heavy stock in the pocket of a standard stationary store folder–with an eighteenth sheet containing beaulieu’s preface and a list of the contributors.
As is so often the case with the anthologies of otherstream poetry I see, this one would serve excellently as a short survey course in its subject, which is not only concrete poetry but the poetry I call “infraverbal” (because of the poetic importance of what it does inside words). A piece by Bruce Andrews, for instance, is full of infraverbally fragmented words–“E LA/LA ting,” for one (a multi-meaninged representation of Los Angeles, among other things). But he scatters his fragments into a visiopoetic design, with a good deal of shattered, disoriented letters metaphoring creation/destruction, death/rebirth– emanating, to my eye, from the one more or less linearly printed word in the piece, “COLUMN,” albeit without its C, and upright rather than horizontal, so his poem is as much a concrete one as infraverbal.
Geoffrey Hlibchuk’s piece is primarily infraverbal. At first, I thought it perhaps the weakest piece in the collection. It consists of a somewhat crude depiction of a sine wave fashioned of what look like two capital U’s, one upside-down, and a horizontal line, up in the top right; the apparent title of the piece, “Sine Curve,” in the bottom left; and a few letters flipped above “Sine Curve”–with a tiny star just above them. These letter, I eventually realized, spelled “univerSe.” Each of them is a different distance exactly above the same letter in the phrase, “Since Curve,” below them–in classic adherence to a long- practiced concrete poetry convention. Ergo, “sine curve” turns out to be an anagram for “universe”–with a C left over. Zing. Something as fundamental as a sine curve from which cometh something fundamental in a much more huge way. With a C–for the speed of light and/or “sea/see,” and no doubt other things that make that plausibly connect to the poem’s foreburden (roughly: “sine curve underlies universe”), so qualify as legitimate undermeanings.
Every once in a while, I come upon an artwork that really bothers me. That’s because I like it, but–even after more than a few minutes with it–can’t figure out why. Such is the case with John M. Bennett’s contribution to Simplex 17, a frame around a mess of letters and letter-fragments. It is clearly visual. It also has a few words, the central one being, “TURD,” which shouldn’t surprise those familiar with Dr. Johnee’s work, continuuming from the basest of the base to the loftiest of the lofty zones of human experience, however subtlely, as it so often does.
The only other significant words immediately evident are what the frame is made of. Strings of o’s, u’s or n’s, s’s, r’s and e’s, they can be said to spell “ours,” “no,” “on,” soon,” “noon,” “none,” and “one,” the letter u doubling as n–or vice versa. So, does the text, “soon (at) noon) no one, none, ours,” or some similar combination of those words, with or without “on,” contribute enough to the piece’s central meaning to make it (by my standards) a poem? You got me. Needless to say, there is much more going on in the work than I’m able to discuss here that could well makes things much clearer.
Representing the down&dirty strand of concrete poetry in the anthology is “Emplacement and Drift,” by Jason Christie. A work of many overlapping texts, it is a problem piece for me for the same reasons Bennett’s is. It has words, but its words are hard to make anything coherent out of. The piece is similar to Bennett’s, too, in seeming to be (linguiconceptually) a depiction of language in disintegration or formation–or, more exactly, emplaced but adrift. The cursive prettiness of one of the work’s phrases spells, “Velvet Touch Lettering,” to provide a sardonic commentary on what’s going on. But a little slash of black from all the typographical noise jangle around it alters the c to a t. It thus becomes, almost, “truth.” Ergo, is some kind of touch/truth our subject?
Dan Waber’s contribution is a veritable survey course of concrete poetry within a survey course in concrete poetry, as it’s title makes clear: “probable lineage (for Eugen Gomringer, bpNichol, Geof Huth, Karl Kempton, Aram Saroyan, endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, derek beaulieu, Clemente Padin, Roy Arenella, Irving Weiss, Karl Young, Marton Koppany, and Bob Grumman).” A historical survey of the field. From his letraset sheet, Dan has used nothing (aside from a few arithmetical symbols and two punctuation marks) but o’s and h’s–and parts of the latter, primarily u’s and n’s but also some y’s and and ingenious r broken off an n–that was broken off an h–to trace the field. He begins with Gomringer’s “Silence” (here represented by three layers of five o’s with the middle one missing), and touches on well-known pieces of all the other concretists in his title–“om” for karl kempton, for example, with the same word except with an m with an extra leg in it for Aram Saroyan, for example. It ends at the bottom of the page with a line like the one from simple arithmetic problems (which is how I got into it) with an exclamation point under it, to stand for the poet whose lineage is represented, Dan Waber himself.
As usual, I want to keep writing about this fine experiment beaulieu has pulled off, but haven’t room to. So, here I end.