POETICKS

Internet Samplings, Part Three

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2011

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      Serif of Nottingblog
      Blogger: Gary Barwin
      http://serifofnottingham.blogspot.com

      Illegitimate pREscriptIONS
      eMTeVisPub
      Blogger: Matthew Stolte
      http://illegitimateprescriptions.blogspot.com/
      http://www.freewebs.com/matthewstolte/

      The Art of K. S. Ernst
      Webmaster: K. S. Ernst
      http://ksernst.com
      http://ksernst.com/links.html

      Otherstream Unlimited
      Blogger: Jake Berry
      http://otherstreamunlimited.blogspot.com

      staring poetics
      Blogger: Nico Vassilakis
      http://staringpoetics.weebly.com/

      Text, Textile, Exile
      Blogger: Maria Damon
      http://hyperpoesia.blogspot.com

 

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Now 70, I think about my decrepitude too much. May is ending as I write this. When it is over, I’ll be getting hip replacement surgery–because I’ve been limping for over a year, and tired of it, especially on the tennis court. I’m not too bad off otherwise, except mentally. I feel that my brain is still in good shape, but that my energy level is rarely high enough for me to make good use of it. It’s depressing, and–as you’d expect–my being depressed about it lowers my energy level even more. Ergo, this installment of my column will be the laziest one yet! Just brief notices and two quotations. But the notices should get you to places on the Internet worth going to, and the quotations will be as good as anything I ever write.

The first of the latter is from Maria Damon’s excellent blog, which features her visio-textilic poetry. In her 18 May entry she speaks of having “been thinking of the seeming decorousness of textile arts, especially as feminized as they are in our culture, and how this often displaces, or plays a strangely adjacent role, to inner wildness. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ hints at this but in a compensatory, diminishing way; Aunt J is clearly less than she should/could be. Why should this be? The sock-yarn named Iggy Pop (see, for example, http://www.flickr.com/photos/berthacrowley/2341363413/) seems sorta ridiculous, but then think of the lady knitting far into the night, listening obsessively to Raw Power, as i did when weaving at the IAS a few years ago; it’s trance music for a trance activity. It’s creative and violent in its own way. The dark night of the soul becomes the cute baby socks or the dangerous punk fashion style accessory, lovingly made with artful design. Tragic histories are hidden behind sumptuous textile creations. The drama of rock and roll sublimates as much as the lace, linens and embroideries of altar cloths and torah covers….

“The people writing such texts as ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,’ or Henry James, who, in a devastating last sentence, condemns a ‘spinster’ to disappointed, bitter life-solitude (‘Catherine,… picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again — for life, as it were.’), are writers. Maybe they see their own activity as superior to, or more expressive than, these women’s ‘fancy-work,’ in a typical gendered division not only of social prestige (writing is ‘head-work,’ needlepoint is ‘hand(i)work’), but of the permission or assumption of the right to express anger or any powerful emotion. But perhaps I’m being unfair and it’s more the case that there is a positive–or, more likely, ambivalent and ambiguous– identification at work: that Rich and James understand themselves and their subjects as involved in the same kind of sublimation that constitutes this kind of hobbyist, minor manual labor, concentration, freeform improvisation, cultural expression.”

Maria’s blog is unlike those of the others I’ll be writing about here for having many discussions of art as well as art, and I feel we need more discussions of art than art. That is, we have too much art, and not enough anchoring discussion of it.

At Matthew Stolte’s Illegitimate pREscriptIONS, for instance, we have a wonderful selection of his own and others visimages (i.e., visual art images), some of them with words, many of them arrestingly abstract-expressionist, just about all of them worth more than a single visit, but no commentary. With this blog and his local activities, he’s been engagingly and super-effectively energetic at promoting his (and my) kind of art, though, so he has my permission to be imperfect. His eMTeVisPub is a sort of catalogue of his own works–no commentary but a few blurbs and ordering information. I have to mention my favorite of the pieces, which is also at his other site: the word, “SEA,” in a wonderfully splashy carnival of colors the orange-opposite of the expected blue/green.

K. S. Ernst’s site is also more a collection of catalogues than a blog, but is full of great art, including one of my all-time favorite visual poems by anyone, “Little Boats,” and visiopoetically painted plates, wall hangings, sculptures mostly of wooden letters that I have no name for (her most outstandingly original achievements being in 3-D visual poetry, in my view), and now classic books such as Sequencing, the original edition and a new, added-to version. Another piece I especially like is “Rainforest”–except that I can’t make out its words at the site. The colors are wonderful, though.

Then there’s Nico Vassilakis’s staring @ poetics. It began as a blog but is now also a book, available at the blog. It is also viewable there, and down-loadable from there. Here’s one of Nico’s always lyrico-trenchant comments from it:

“Through Through. The thread finds its optic hole.  

“How to speak about vispo? For one, the relatable denominator is how we see. How language affects us visually, how staring at language is essential to reaping functionality out of vispo. In this case, we’d consider a stare to be an elongated gaze, and staring the hyper-focused verb from which we gain further insight.

 “The alphabet is continually morphing. It is both evolving and devolving into a periodic table of speech elements.

“Staring your way into and through the letter as object.”

“Staring textually into/through preverbal pieces of alphabet color splendvidly to places neither words nor colors and shapes can take us by themselves” is my translation of the above and the artworks at Nico’s blog, and in his book. That has a higher gush to rationality ratio than my critical pronouncements usually do, and as I like them to do, but remember, I’m slowing down.

Finally, there’s the recently begun Otherstream Unlimited Blog Jake Berry honored me by using my term, “otherstream” in the title of. Then did me the further honor of using six mathematical poems of mine in the blog’s first entry–with my commentary! Joel Chace’s “Periods, 91-100″ is the worthy follow-up. It consists of fascinatingly disjuntive paired sentences, such as “95”: “.His notion sprang from sheer force of imagination, by virtue of which he lifted himself from the earth into the sun, overlooking the planets./.Even with that awful taste, she got by.” Yes, each sentence begins and ends with a period.