Column098 — March/April 2010
The State of North American Vizpo, Part Six
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2010
Visio-Textual Selectricity
Edited by Bob Grumman
2008; 44 pp; Pa; The Runaway Spoon Press,
1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $50 ppd.
I didn’t expect this overview to go on for a full year, but it has. With this installment, however, we should be to the end. It will be about an anthology I edited that had work by the following, in order: Peter Ciccariello, mIEKAL aND (the same piece he had in Poetry), David Baptiste Chirot, Marton Koopany, Nico Vassilakis, Karl Young, Myself, John Vieira, Cecil Touchon, Larkin Higgins, Karl Kempton, Sheila E. Murphy, C. Mehrl Bennett, K.S. Ernst, Endwar, John M. Bennett, Jefferson Hansen, Geof Huth, Michael Basinski, Joel Lipman and Marilyn R. Rosenberg, a reasonably representative cross-section of the best visio-textual artists currently being published in America. 21 pieces, 16 in full color. The production values of the anthology are close to down and dirty, but my readers will remember what I think of production values–great when you can afford them, but essentially not even secondary compared to all that art can do beyond look nice to the status-conscious.
In compensation, this anthology does something important that the other collections I’ve discussed in my series don’t do, particularly the Poetry gallery: it showcases works that are among the best its artists have done rather than the latest they’ve done. Another feature I was pleased to get so many of my contributors to take seriously (and for the most part illuminatingly) was its inclusion of one-page artists’ statements about the works–which were favorites of the artists’ from their own works (albeit not always in each case the a given artist’s number one favorite).
I liked just about all the pieces in the collection. Among the ones I liked most were those by Endwar, Marton Koppany, Karl Kempton, John Vieira, Karl Young, Cecil Touchon and Marilyn Rosenberg, so those are the ones I’ll comment on now in hopes of conveying a reasonably accurate idea of the collection as a whole.
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Endwar’s piece is just one-word in length, “speed.” But it’s spelled with 46 e’s and drops
down a space just after its 23rd e. The letters in its upper half are blue, those in its lower half red. All of them are italicized. A simple dramatization of something speeeeeeding but with an embedded onomatopoeia? Well, yes. But also containing the step downward and change of color at that point to both auditorily and visually suggest the Doppler effect. And, perhaps even most significantly, a rendering of an image, paradoxically of speed, in slow motion enough to give it haiku-duration.
Marton Koppany provided a pwoermd, too–unless you count the quotation marks he uses as extra words, and you probably should. He calls it “Poem – for Karl Young (and Laszlo Kornhouser) – December 2006.” If you take my 6’s as the quotation marks that look like 6’s , and the 9’s as the other kind of quotation marks, his poem reads in full as, “669dust9.” So: righthand and lefthand quotation marks with a word in between the two 9’s of the second of these. The background is nighttime blue, the “dust” is a bare white outline, the quotation marks gold–lamps, Marton calls them. A barely perceptible image caught in a quotation but in the process of escaping it . . . Evanescence? The starlit glory of something as commonplace and scorned as dust? In his artist’s statement, Marton tells us the poem is about the paradoxical nature of evocation. Yes, that–and much else.
Karl Kempton’s, “Sound of One Hand,” particularly interests me because it is a meditation on an older work, which is what I often do in my poems but feel too many current visio-textual artists rarely if ever do. In his artist’s statement, Karl quotes his triggering poem: “In the mountains deep/ Places, the moon of the mind/ Resides in the light serene:/ Moon mirrors all things everywhere./ Mind mirrors moon . . . in satori now.” The poem Karl is triggered to is a wonderful visiopoetic combination depicting in five narrative frames Basho’s frog/pond haiku and the famous Zen question about the sound of one hand clapping, metaphoring together to . . . “m1nd.” (Where frog and understanding of frog and one hand clapping enter satori–or so I interpret it.)
Also cerebral (as I’m realizing most of my favorites are–and so much of current visio-textual work is not), and minimalist is John Vieira’s “Street (Sheet) Music (Nocturne).”
Really a drawing whose verbal matter consists of a bass-clef, staves, and a treble-clef, the staves suggesting telephone lines above a street–containing somewhat dark, heavy communication, due to the bass-clef drawn on the staves where they begin. The telephone pole of the scene has what looks like a quarter-note with its stem stuck in it, and its “bulb” emitting another set of five staves, or rays of light, which a g-clef makes cheerful. One of his most popular pieces, John tells us in his statement. I can see why.
Like Karl Kempton, Karl Young makes potent use of another’s poem: the top half of his diptych (which is from Stellar Dreams Above the Middle Kingdom) is a soldier’s lament at missing his wife in a time of senseless war by Li Shang-Yin in the original Chinese, with a translation into English in small letters at the bottom of the piece. In the bottom half is an elegy for lost love by Karl, printed in small clumps of words lineating after just two or three letters–e.g., “RA/DIA/NT” is the first word of the poem, with “IN/O/UR” to its right.
Hence, the typography seems as visually resonant as the Chinese characters of the text above it, and the far-awayness in time and place, and the slow ethereality of the mood of
the over-all piece (exquisitely enhanced by the colors of the background and text) gradually make a permanent spell of the poem.
Cecil Touchon, is represented here by a piece also in Anthology Spidertangle–but here it is full color, the colors being gorgeously sensual greens against clays. In Anthology Spidertangle I described him in this and many of his pieces as “specializ(ing) in rectangular cut-outs of letters rectilinearly collaged into non-representational arrangements that remind me of both Mondrian and Kline.” Since the piece has no words, I can’t give much more of an explication.
The final work in the collection is Marilyn Rosenberg’s diptych, “VOYAGE.” Playful but not minor, Marilyn’s piece swirls stenciled words like “encourage” and “disadvantage” through what seem to me two versions of the same pure design of field mice she says she hates but expects to return to her house yearly, and circles of divers sizes and colors. Result: a colorful unpredictable adventure carnivalling who-knows-where. We know what it’s about, though, for all its words contain either “age” or “old.”