Column093 — May/June 2009
The State of North American Vizpo, Part One
Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2009
Poetry, Volume 193, Issue 2, November 2008
Edited by Christian Wiman
100 pp; 444 N. Michigan Ave., Ste.1850,
Chicago IL 60611. $5.50 ppd./copy.
Is visual poetry and related art finally beginning to get its due in our country? Possibly. Last November Poetry, the leading mainstream American poetry periodical, published a gallery of thirteen specimens of such work edited by Geof Huth. At around the same time, three anthologies of such work have appeared. I therefore thought a relatively detailed overview of the field might be in order, starting with a tour of the Poetry gallery.
Those with work in it are Huth himself, mIEKAL aND, K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy working as a team, derek beaulieu, Peter Ciccariello, Bob Dahlquist, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Scott Helmes, Joel Lipman, gustave morin, jorg piringer, Philip Gallo and Michael Basinski. Huth’s piece is technically not part of the gallery, but given a page (front and back) as the gallery’s cover illustration. It’s just a mildly pleasant piece of graphic design in black&white using the letters in its title, “jHegaf.” Grade? C+.
aND composed his piece out of (white) typography some forgotten scholar once invented to use to represent a variety of Amerindian language on a black background. The result I would also call just a “textscape,” but it is suggestive of an undeciphered ancient artifact, so conceptually a little more interesting than the Huth piece. Rating: B-. “Vortextique,” by Ernst and Murphy is a wonderfully loud-colored dazzler of text-like elements flung every which way with just one word, “vortex,” in it–as an embedded title. Rating: A-.
The piece by beaulieu makes up for its lack of color by sizzling with sounds (e.g., “sssss” and “rrrrr”). It is the first of the pieces verbal enough (although barely verbal) to call a visual poem. I give it an A-. The same grade goes to Ciccariello’s fine “The Disremembered Glossalist.” As in nearly all the works of Ciccariello’s I’ve seen, some kind of extremely three-dimensional, gorgeously-colored terrain is overlain (via some kind of clever computer manipulations) with an originally-readable text whose letters follow the contours of the scene in and out of visibility to become basically averbal.
Another monochromatic piece follows Ciccariello’s, Dahlquist’s “alwaysendeavor.” It has two layers of the text, “ALWAYS ENDEAVOR TO FIND INTERESTING NOTATION,” one of which is printed in reverse exactly on top of the other. It is interesting and amusing (especially for those who like puzzles as much as I)–what I’d call a conceptual linguiscape. B+ (not higher because a bit low in visual appeal, in my view). “Mama,” by Ferguson, is a bunch of e’s (hence barely verbal, like beaulieu’s piece–and morin’s) but vividly expressive. For Huth (who annotates all the pieces in the gallery), it is expressive of a child’s warbling cry, for me that plus a child on a roller-coaster ride (because one large e swoops up and then slight down like a roller coaster and seems to fling another e upward, like a roller coaster . . . and/or a mother, propel–ling a child into a higher life (or just into life). In any case, something to think about and feel: A-.
One of the two pieces in the collection I give an A+ to is Helmes’s “haiku #62,” a vivid collage of snippings of magazine ads patterned to suggest a haiku in shape, its colors and shape and hints of words suggesting a haiku’s tone. My other A+ favorite is Joel Lipman’s excerpt from Origins of Poetry. It consists of three layers. The one on the bottom seems to be a page from an old physics textbook that describes experiments with electric charges. A second, framing layer consists of repeated rubber-stampings in red of some ideograph that seems Asian. On top of the other two is a text rubber-stamped in black giving the text of a poem that seems a sort of paraphrase of one of the experiments described in layer one but also directions for the performance of a magic trick. Its title is “Origins of Poetry,” its final words, “Leaves will diverge and flower.” To me, a masterpiece as both poem and visual artwork. As well as the two interacting, multiply-interacting.
“toon tune,” by morin, is a collage of 63 toon-hued fragments of comic-book exclamations like “Aaaarrrrrgh,” and “Whoooosh.” Blastfully successful in capturing its subject, and as a work of visual art. A. The piringer piece that follows morin’s is the one I fear I liked least: a black&white depiction of a pile of junk, each piece of which is a letter. That the letters are from The Communist Manifesto doesn’t make it resonate for me–all I needed was the concept fully to get it; no visualization was necessary. C. I didn’t much care for Gallo’s black&white conceptual piece, either. “PING PONG et tu ut DITERROT,” it spells, first rightside up, then upside-down. Nice bit of typographic design, but I’m less taken by that kind of thing than Huth is. C. The final work in the gallery (although one is directed to an Internet gallery I haven’t been to for additional works) is Basinski’s wacked-out “Labile.” There are words in it, but mostly it’s a “cacaphony of text and shape,” as Huth has it. Vivid colors, too. Of the many possible appropriate things it could be, the one that hit me first is a swirl of mostly nonsensical babble through a room a cocktail party is at its peak in, seen from above. Very much a fun piece to which I award an A.
It remains to be seen whether Poetry is serious about giving visual poetry and related art a boost or has just tokened it in briefly so it can claim to be open to everything. If the former, it needs reviews of books of such work, and intelligent critical discussion of the field in general as well as continued specimens of it in its pages. In any case, I cannot deny that it has done those of us involved with this kind of art a favor by exposing its readers to this quite good representative sampling of what we’ve been doing near-invisibly for so long.