Column090 — November/December 2008
A Key Vispo Publication
Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2008
Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection
Edited by John M. Bennett. 2008; 142 pp; Pa;
John Bennett, Rare Books, 6070 Ackerman Library,
610 Ackerman Rd., The Ohio State University. $30.
I wrote one of the three introductions to Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection, the book this column is about. Marvin Sackner and its editor, John M. Bennett, wrote the other two. Four of my poems are reproduced in it, as well. And I personally know many of the others with work in it. Small wonder I’m positive about it. But if anything were holy to me, I’d swear by it that my bias has nothing to do with my opinion of it.
First off, it’s about as professionally packaged as anything of this kind can be: glossy 7.5″ by 10″ pages with nothing on one side showing through on the other; dazzlingly intense full color reproductions of some 250 works (the color very accurate, if the reproductions of my own pieces are any indication); and wonderful design and layout by Linda Lutz, Pamela Steed Hill and the staff at University Publications. The introductions, forgive me for bragging, are important, too. Sackner’s is a sharply discriminating, succinct overview of the catalog’s contents, Bennett’s an insightful discussion of what visual poetry is, mine a series of close readings of many of the pieces in the collection.
What makes it a “key vispo publication,” though, is its representation of just about all the best current American visual poets–and a fine sampling of first-rate poets of other countries–in something published by a bigtime university. It is a worthy successor to the first anthology of visual poetry put out by an American university (that I know of), the anthology edited by Mary Ellen Solt and published by Indiana University some forty years ago, Concrete Poetry.
It should be kept in mind that the pieces in the catalogue are simply a sampling of what’s at the Ohio Statue University Library. It is not intended to be a Serious Statement about the State of World Vispo. Bennett, the collection’s curator (with a “staff” of two student assistants at most and a severely limited budget) has done his best over the years to entice friends and acquaintances in the field to donate materials to the library rather than unrealistically trying to get work from every notable practitioner around (some of whom have already donated to other libraries or archives, or are procrastinating about letting their work go, or–like I–are waiting for Harvard or Oxford to offer a few million dollars or pounds for what they have). In any case, a number of important visual poets are represented in the book by only one piece: Joel Lipman, Karl Kempton, Julian Blaine, Crag Hill, Klaus Peter Dencker and Guy R. Beining, for example–although Bennett would love to have had more of their work at the library to choose from. With luck, this catalogue may inspire some of them, and others doing first-rate work, to start sending packages to The Ohio State University Library.
K. S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Bennett himself (often in wonderful collaborations), Jim Leftwich and Carlos Luis are the stars of the show, each (deservedly) with four pages or more of pieces (in part, I understand, because of the size of their donations of materials to the library). The book is too loaded with just about every possible kind of visual poem for me to be able properly to characterize it in the limited space of this column. Instead, I will be lazy, and re-cycle a slightly-edited version of one of the attempts at a close reading I made in my introduction to it. It’s of a poem by Gyorgy Kostritskii, one of a number of poets whose excellent work I was ignorant of until this collection. My excerpt would be much clearer for someone reading it in my introduction, and thus able to turn to the work it concerns, but I hope something useful about the way text and graphic interact in Kostritskii’s piece (and, I should add, in so many of the other pieces in the book), and how one critical mind flickers and sputters in reaction to his piece, comes through.
“The text of Gyorgy Kostritskii’s ‘is of,’ ‘is of/ Has a/ And goes,’ is a conundrum. Something that is of something, possesses something . . . and goes. Is of–is part of something else, makes up something larger than itself. Words shorn of connectivity like this, and in a nothingness of confusedness, force their reader to either leave quickly or seep into thoughts like mine. Perhaps into the idea of ‘And’ going (on), or connections being made. Or is “And” leaving, and connections being broken? The work’s blots declare themselves an illustration of this text but clearly at the same time connect in no way with it other than geographically (by sharing a page with it). The scene is primordial: the most basic of words in black and white. Geography? I keep wanting to take the scene as a beach. Whatever it is, it seems to enclose the text–but has an entrance, or exit, for it or other texts, at its top. The highmost blob is difficult not to take as the sun, which makes little sense, but gives the work a feel of archetypality I also get from similar works of Adolph Gottlieb. Can the text be considered the color of this picture?
“The work’s text seems part of one of the two trails the other shapes in the picture make. It also hangs in about the same direction of the rest of the picture mostly does. So: is the black of the graphic portion of the work achieving verbal expressiveness? There’s something in it of text as quotidian–just something there with a small world’s other sloppy arbitrary shapes. The thing forces the engagent–me, at any rate–to read the text into the graphics, and see the graphics into the text. A mystery that won’t finally declare itself, but avoids irritating by being utterly, serenely all curves except where the tiny letters make their sharp angles, and by being pleasantly balanced. I’m not sure where this piece should go on my continuum. I find it an A-1 illumage with a text that prevents it from staying for long in the visual cells of one’s brain. Strictly speaking, it’s not a collage, but close enough to put among the other more legitimate collages on the continuum.”
I end this column feeling I haven’t done justice to the book discussed. I’ll be shocked if any other poetry publication of 2008 is half as important for poetry as it.