Archive for the ‘John Vieira’ Category
Entry 757 — The Latest Runaway Spoon Press Title
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012
One I extremefully like:
One personal reason I’m taken with John’s front cover illustration, and even more, with the small one on his back cover, shown below, is that they remind me of Martone Koppany’s wry gems, although different in many ways from them.
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I have a preview of the material inside John’s book in an earlier entry my “John Vieira” tag should get you to. It consists of texts illustrating pen&ink drawings, or the reverse–inimitably. A copy costs $20, which includes $5 for postage. E.mail me at [email protected] if you want to buy a copy. Limited edition of 100, you investors should know. More about it in due course, I hope, hope, hope.
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Entry 702 — Another by John Vieira
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
All I can say about this one at the moment is that it’s delightful. (It’s terrific, too–both visimage and poem.) I hope when my brain is working better to say something more cogent about it. Meanwhile, I’m grateful to have ssomething I like as much to fill this entry with. I’m as sleepy/ blodgy as ever, by the way, but yesterday I got 400 words of my next column for Small Press Review done, and I expect to get another 400 or more done on it today, so I’m not quite non-functional. And I do feel mildly optimistic about existence.
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Januweary
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Entry 700 — A Still Life by John Vieira
Friday, March 30th, 2012
When people wonder if anyone in the group of artists I’m associated with is at the level of–say–Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Berryman (as Geof Huth recently did in a return comment to one of mine at his blog the other day), one of the artists I think of who seems to me to make such wondering absurd (here as poet and visimagists rather than as visual poet) is John Vieira: there are at least ten of us equal or better than the two major minor poets and one minor major poet mentioned. Yes, I include myself, even though I do realize that one cannot properly evaluate one’s own work since much of what one thinks one put into it may not be there for others (even if helped to see it). Or flaws one is sure one didn’t put into it may be there for others. Alas, my work isn’t considered worth showing up by the establishment, and my friends are all polite, so I’ll probably never learn the truth.
Anyway, here’s a sample of John’s recent work, a package of which arrived in the mail today, just in time to give me something related to poeticks for this entry. I was going to write about a cat. I still will, but not today.
One reason I love this still life of John’s is that I couldn’t quickly figure out what seemed so good about it. It’s pears as I don’t believe anyone else has ever captured them, but there’s more to it than that. Something of haiku simplicity and depth is there. The pears seems to me to just tumble off the line John has rendered them out of into being, too deliciously quickly to obscure one another. John’s poem about them matches their simplicity, and heightens the spirit of the drawing without repeating it.
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