Column110 — March/April 2012
Another Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2012
the bleed.01
Editors: Mara Patricia Hernandez and John Moore Williams
Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2011. 90pp; Avantexte Press, Oakland CA,
http://www.avantexte.com/thebleed
Webzines featuring visual poetry and related artworks are becoming much more frequent of late. Among the best of them is the bleed, subject of my last two columns, and my subject once again. Fortunately for me, it is available as a regular hardcopy magazine, for I was unable to read it on the Internet–due, I’ve been told, to my still being on dial-up.
In his introduction, Editor Williams describes his discoveries during his first year “in the bleed”: “that the world is much larger, and more full of fearlessly creative souls than (he’d) ever imagined; that bringing the work to light takes much more work than (he’d) expected; that there are days when (he wished he’d) never started this thing in the first place, and, in a secret corner of (his) aorta, that (he had) come to resent doing it; and that another day comes when (he sees) a submission and (realizes) that (his) eyes have been skinned wide open, (his) cranium levered back with a gut-wrenching crack, and how happy the world makes (him).” Which certainly brings me back to my own days as an editor/publisher.
There are all kinds of works in this issue of the bleed, with interesting accompanying commentary by both Williams and each individual artist. First up is Amanda Earl, with a three-piece suite of concrete poetry (i.e., producing a viso-aesthetic effect through the use of typography only). Based on passages of “The Song of Solomon,” it begins with one consisting of a set of three stacks each of which contains the words, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feeds among the lilies,” in alphabetical order, and three more with the same words except for “am” and “the” in the same order. These latter are perpendicular to, and on top, of the other set. Trust me, the resulting gestalt captures–and renews–all that the original song celebrated. The sequence’s two other poems are equally effective.
Already I have a problem–I’ve only treated one poem out of the many here worth discussion but used up more than a third of my space. I’ll have to be stingy with my words from now on, starting with the visioconceptual non-poetry of Rosaire Appel–wonderfully resonant 3-D blueprints of the shape of poems; Marton Koppany’s finding a way to make his minimalist treatments of (1) the word “or” (its o a white balloon) and (2) a combination of a dash, quotation marks, a wavy line (indicating water) and a comic-strip balloon both very funny and lyrically expansive; Vernon Frazer’s masterful textual collages, one of them with a rectangle inscribed with “the centurion/ of the broken/ codes reaches/ a dark footing,” to wonderfully contradict the geometric rigor of the graphic design it is in (i.e., poetry versus engineering, to the enhancement of both).
Also, some absorbing deformations of a page of print in sudsy water by Michael Justin Hatfield; four gorgeous 3-D constructions with text present or implied of the sort he’s well-known for by Peter Ciccariello; a four-part blur and swirl of words by Andrew Topel; four arresting non-representational images with texts printed on top of them by Berne Reichert, the graphics and texts bouncing off each other into interesting new locales; three inimitable all-word poems by John M. Bennett, the first half of one of which is (approximately, as I can’t duplicate the fonts used here) “elimination of the gnatss a lun/ ching ear fooaam my rabb/ bbit coughs an stre/ ams beneath th/ e gate your f/ lash==olight/ sunk nost/ ril can/ of f/ –=O=–/ rks . . .”
Yes, that last one takes a long while to get an understanding of, but it does eventually unclear into the kind of sensually sensible loud mood/situation the best poems, and almost all of Bennett’s, do, given patience and sufficient mental surrender on the part of the engagent.
To continue, we have “border again border,” by Aysegul Tozeren, which is not in English, so I can’t say much about it except that it looks interesting. After that, five poems by Willem van den Bosch, the first of which is “The Anxious Prince”: “be or not/ to be or/ not to be/ or not to”; four terrific images by Carlyle Baker, one of which I described at my blog as “simultaneously some sort of alchemical diagram, a map of a section of an archaeological dig, a frame from a film of a dream, a ‘careworn and coffee-stained map’ of a lost country (as John Moore Williams described it), maybe even a piece of square currency from some mystical secret nation . . .” Then 2 pages of what seem like found combinations of text and graphics by Sean Burn (I think–the design of the page combines too many disparate items for me to be sure what’s what in it, but “Sean Burn” was the only name among them); some provocative computer-distortions of text by Mike Cannell, and some fascinating microbiologalizations of isolated letters by Nico Vassilakis; also five conceptual poems by Eric Goddard-Scovel that caught my fancy, especially the one called “eleven!”: “!!!11!!!!11!!1111!!!!11!11!!!!!11!”
Finally, there is an essay, “On a Letter Sufficient for Visual Poetry,” subtitled, “A Report, with a Fantasia,” by Iain Macdonald Matheson–12-pages including a page of afterthoughts and two pages of footnotes, one of them citing a poem of mine at Mad Hatters Review, so you know the thing is of the highest seriousness. My immediate off-the-top-of-my-head impression of this after only dipping into it here and there was that it was “brilliantly (and valuably) philosophically irresponsible.” I was “pretty sure I was understanding it, but didn’t think its author cared too much whether or not he was understood. The French School.” Derrida and the other relativistic French writers on literature of his time are, for me, entertainers, not verosophers (my term for serious seekers of the truth). Not that I consider entertainment of less value than truth. And it can sometimes annoy a reader into valid insights–just as the search for truth can sometimes entertain. Of course, said writers considered it an absolute truth that truth did not exist. But don’t let me get going on that. Bottom line: I extemefully approve the appearance of essays like this one as part of collections of poetry of any kind, but particularly of oddball poetry. I think visual poetry’s greatest problem is lack of them.
.