Column095 — September/October 2009
The State of North American Vizpo, Part Three
Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2009
Anthology Spidertangle.
Edited by mIEKAL aND.
2009; 107 pp; Pa; Xexoxial Editions,
10375 Cty Hway A, LaFarge WI 54639. $10.
October is Dada Month.
Edited by Marshall Hryciuk.
2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
30 Laws St., Toronto ON
M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.
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.
Visio-Textual Selectricity
Edited by Bob Grumman
2008; 44 pp; Pa; The Runaway Spoon Press,
1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $50 ppd.
From the evidence of the four collections of visio-textual art that my current series of columns deal with, one would have to say that many of those creating it are at war with verbality. With what words mean, that is. While none of the thirteen pieces in the Poetry gallery completely eschews text, three are wholly without semantic content (so far as I can tell–although one consists of the letters of a written work, scattered purposefully into meaninglessness); the words in seven others exist only (again, so far as I can tell) to provide sound effects, furnish a title or represent language or a social milieu or the like (except for Scott Helmes’s “haiku #62,” which does aesthetically exploit the verbal meaning of a bit of its few whole words); two of the remaining three play minimalist conceptual word-games; Only Joel Lipman’s piece does what poetry traditionally does: use words to lyric out some kind of image-and-idea complex, employing the arresting and suggestive graphics of the piece as an equal rather than dominant partner in the process.
Am I condemning these works? Most contemporary visio-textual artists seem to consider such a viewpoint hostile. But I am merely pointing out what seems to me the direction the field is headed in (often with brilliant success)–while reminding my brethren that there are still wonderful things to be achieved in visio-textual art as literature. I would hate to see no one use averbal text in visual art; but worse would be no one’s using words semantically) in visio-textual art. Not that I perceive any real danger of that happening, just that I’d like to see more genuine visual poetry, work that consists of both visual art and poetry, interrelatedly.
There are 112 works in Anthology Spidertangle–give or take 2 (since my count may be wrong and/or I may have mistakenly counted a single split work as two works, or two side-by-side works as one work). Of these, 26 have no verbal content that I could make out (including one of my two), and two among them have no text (except a stray O or
two. 19 of them seem visual art only except for their titles, which are embedded in them. There’s also one that seems to me a piece of captioned visual art rather than a poem. Another 37 have plenty of words but I would call them “dadaguistic” because they are not semantically coherent (or seem not to be to me); that is, their scraps of text seem in the dada tradition of jarring against each other, and whatever graphics they are with, rather than relating to each other and to the graphics. That leaves 29 pieces which contain verbal and graphic elements that interrelate to good aesthetic effect. In short, a quarter of the works are not visual poems, and almost half are only tenuously visiopoetic. Anthology Spidertangle thus supports my contention that the flow of the times in visio-textual art is away from the verbal.
Perhaps the most entertaining pieces in Anthology Spidertangle are two by Richard Kostelanetz called “Intricate Infinities.” Each is an endless sentence on a drawing of a long strip of paper that twists and turns and weaves its way into a maze that returns to its beginning. The better of the two says, “words whose sequence loops back into itself to suggest infinities should be my epithet for,” then continues with “words whose,” etc.
Not enough space to do more than hint at all the other excellent work that’s here: two pieces from Joel Lipman’s Origins of Poetry that carry on the provocative interplay science/education and poetry/magic were carrying out in Lipman’s piece in the Poetry gallery I covered two columns ago (but in black and white, as all in this gathering is); Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s arrangements of gorgeously soft-edged letters; Karl Young’s remarkable meditation (I would call it) on final creation/destruction patterns which includes a photograph of a burning house with a somehow super-calming round photograph of a stairway into light superimposed on it, and a prose caption rippling away into something vast; and some wonderful conceptual visual poems by Irving Weiss, endwar and Marton Koppany, one of the latter a three-frame.
Also: two great textscapes by Reed Altemus, one of them a famous one depicting a man and tree in a letter-full windstorm; two others by Cecil Touchon, who specializes in rectangular cut-outs of letters rectilinearly collaged into arrangements that remind me of both Mondrian and Kline; David Baptiste Chirot’s four electric frames from a series of his on the word (and concept) “Spidertangle”; Liaizon Wakest’s wry continuation of the Bern Porter collage tradition, one of this two pieces (about living on the farm) ending with, “the third conclusion cannot be related”; William James Austin’s stunningly darksome evocation of a “cast out world”; another goofy/brilliant visual poem by Marilyn R. Rosenberg with enough charming wordplay in it for five conventional poems, and enough dazzling victories of design for seven conventional visual artworks, plus one of her fetching works-with-mouse; Matthew Stoltes’s fascinating graphic extension of the word, “soil,” above a similar graphic extension of “skill” which sets up all sorts of intriguing connections between them; and–all kinds of other fine pieces I haven’t space to mention, plus short comments in the back by the artists, and a small circle at the right-hand page-top of the work of each with the artist’s photograph in it. Fun to see what people look like with whom I’ve corresponded but never met in person.
In short, another publication anyone interested in current visual poetry should be sure to have.