Column102 — November/December 2010
Battling the Nullinguists
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2010
Comprepoetica
Blogmaster: Bob Grumman
http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff
http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff
The Pedestal,
Issue 57.
Edited by John Amen.
April 21-June 21 2010;
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/
Slab,
Issue 57, 2010.
Edited by Amy Choate and Caitlin Svetahor
Yearly; 215 pp; Department of English
Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock PA.
slablitmag.org. $10/copy.
I’m not really obsessed with the definition of visual poetry, I just talk about it all the time. One of the reasons for that is that I consider it a cardinal example of what I consider the “nullinguistic” assault on the idea of language as a means of communication prevalent in the West at this time. Not that mysticism beyond the power of puny words to describe hasn’t always been a potent force in all the tribes of earthlings, but the twentieth century seems to have bought into it more idiotically than any previous era.
“Nullinguist” is my term for people consciously or unconsciously out to destroy the meaningfulness of language, mostly by refusing to accept that any word should have a stable meaning. I tilt lances with them mostly regarding the meaning of “visual poetry,” which for them has no set meaning. Hence it is that as co-editor with John M. Bennett, of a gallery of artworks called visual poetry in The Pedestal, I wrote the following in my preface (John also writing an able preface giving much of the other side): “In the field of what I call visio-textual art, I am considered eccentric, for almost everyone in it believes that a visual poem is no more a kind of poetry than a mongoose is a kind of bird. I disagree, so consider many of the works John Bennett and I have chosen for this gallery to be what I call ‘textual designs,’ rather than visual poems.
“For me a visual poem is a poem combined with graphic elements that is able to provide an engagent an aesthetic experience that is at some point significantly and simultaneously verbal and visual. For instance: J. Michael Mollohan’s “Yellow Flower,” which you see as both common flower and uncommonly glorious sun (and ultimate living result of sunlight) at the same time as you read the word for it. The textual designs I speak of lack sufficient words to do that. Some, indeed, have no words.
“So, considering my attitude about visual poetry, why so many textual designs and so few visual poems in the gallery? Because, first of all, I recognize my view to be a minority view and am democratic enough to feel the majority should rule (even when INSANELY WRONG). More important, I consider the textual designs we chose to be significantly superior aesthetically to the visual poems they beat out. Indeed, for me the works Scott Helmes terms his “visual haiku” here and elsewhere are the best visual artworks of our time, so what if most of them are not, by my standards, poems. Fortunately for my loyalty to poetry, John and I still managed to find a number of fine visual poems among the submissions besides “Yellow Flower,” so, I feel, we have done our duty to it as well as to textual design.”
I should add that our gallery has works by Tom Cassidy, Guy R. Beining, K.S. Ernst, Jim Leftwich, Andrew Topel, Paul Thaddeus Lambert, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Baron, Reed Altemus and Márton Koppány, as well as one apiece by me and John (because we felt them useful as a guide to our prejudices as editors) besides the two already mentioned. All in full color.
After our gallery is a short story by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, “Deck Building Deck Building. In it, a journalist, out of curiosity, investigates a $45,000 deck contractors had attached to the home of a Vietnamese-American doctor which collapsed, causing injuries to the doctor that months later led to his death. Excellent character study of both the doctor and journalist, and fascinating study of a not usually-written-about an ethnic group in America.
The issue boasts a fairly substantial review section, too, and ends with a gallery of audio recordings selected and introduced by Zachery Kluckman of audio-recordings of what I guess you’d call stand-up comics: J.W. Basilo, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Molly Kat, Tufik Shayeb, and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, that seemed quite polished to me.
Note: unlike many such venues, The Pedestal pays contributors, in case anyone reading this might be interested in submitting to it. It’s no avant garde publication, but a good one. And, as an Internet publication, it’s out there for viewing more or less permanently.
Aimed at a similar audience is the once-a-year, Slab. Like The Pedestal, it does venture into the otherstream to a degree, for this issue has poetry by Experioddica stalwarts, Guy R. Beining (with a poem that contains a striking image of “spotless/ morning/ fed/ to/ fowls/ with/ feathers/ like/ water”) and Richard Kostelanetz (with more of his deft minimalist word-games), which is why I’m reporting on it here (aside from the fact that my coverage of magazines has slipped a bit of late). There are a lot of good short stories and poems here, and some “creative non-fiction.” Among the latter is a charmer called “The Legend of the Hubcap Lady,” an (apparently) autobiographical essay about a woman new to an American Indian community who shows up at a great powwow thinking that paper plates would be provided so not bringing any plates or bowls–so uses the hubcaps of the family car instead and becomes a local legend, laughed with instead of at.
Characteristic of many short stories I’ve lately been reading is Mickey Hess’s affecting “The Old Man and the Tree” about the quietly believable big-brother relationship of a high school teacher in his thirties with a gifted but screwed-up boy in one of his classes that, after several years pass, piddles away, the boy still screwed-up.
Of the many poems more conventional than Beining’s and Kostelanetz’s is one by long-time small press poet, B. Z. Niditch that I’ve decided to end this installment of my column with because of how effective I find it in spite of being highly conventional–about spring, of all standard poetic subjects!
When Spring Begins
Ice spreads
its paperweight shadows
by the undertow shore
after a muffled winter
white sugar drifts nod
near the bicycle rider
who parks by the beach gazebo
through mountains of sand,
the one-eyed sunshine
unlocks trees
of tasseled snow,
Poseidon waves to his lovers
asking us to break dance
on a frozen morning.