Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Received 4 years ago, exactly. Still holding up!
Of course, it’s much better at about twice the size of the above, which would be, I believe, its proper size.
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This is my favorite of Guy’s three. I didn’t get the game the text plays right off. Even without it, the piece is major–one of those works that make me think I’m in some non-human species so little do I understand why so much trash wins adulation and works like this hang nowhere but in galleries like this, at best.
I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow. I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.
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Sunday, April 17th, 2011
Finally I’m returning to Clark Lunberry’s installation. Ironically, I already had the words I’m posting written–they’re all from the diary entry I made when I got home from Jacksonville, although somewhat revised:
So, we spent time at a Farmers’ Market–part of it very very pleasantly, under a freeway underpass on a bank of the river through Jacksonville, the name of which I now forget. We had lunch there, while listening to a girl singer accompanied by guitar–in the folk vein, I guess, and nice. Then quite a distance to the college Clark teaches at to see his installation (as well as an excellent exhibition of some of Marton’s pieces) . I wasn’t prepared for the outdoor part of the installation, “SENSATION” making an X with “THINKING” floating in the center of a small pond with geese swimming in it in front of where we parked. An evolving installation: later Clark rowed out to the X in a kayak and changed “THINKING” to “INKING.” It seemed okay to me. The words are from a quotation from Cezanne he’s done many variations on at other installations of this particular (4-year) installation.
The installation continued in the library building next to the pond. First, the long glassed-in exhibition space in the library’s lobby I had a picture of a few entries ago. In it were a huge number of books on water, trees and sky, plus an intriguing mush of torn pages of text in the jar that summed up the adventure into a secret cave that all the books contained. Then three visual poems, each taking up one portion of the stairway window, or glass wall, that faced the pond. The first featured repetitions of the word, “WATER,” the second “TREES, the third “SKY.” These are in many of the other versions of the installation’s . . . “frames.” Several other texts in much smaller letters, some of them sentences, crossed the windows. I was enthralled with the way one could see through these texts into the pond, and the trees beyond, and–finally–into the sky (wonderfully cloud-clumped when we were there) . (Sound effects were included although only the ones for “WATER” were working at this time.)
I immediately thought of Bob Lax (a favorite p0et of Clark’s too, I learned). Clark is a big fan of Samuel Beckett’s (whom he’s been teaching many for five or more years), who is also an obvious influence. But he’s also absorbed and created out of many other influences, many of them non-literary.
According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow
But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere. Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at. Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem: suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend. For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness. That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.
To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much. But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story. Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine. I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to. It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.
I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:
But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly– one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once. Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness. For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.
Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:
In this poem the F suggests to me a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point. So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text. Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives. And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been. Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world. In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.
So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.
Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:
![100_0085[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00851.jpg)
What the heck, here’s another wall:
![100_0087[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00871.jpg)
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Márton Koppány says: They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.
All the best,
Márton
Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!
Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
Finally I’m returning to Clark Lunberry’s installation. Ironically, I already had the words I’m posting written–they’re all from the diary entry I made when I got home from Jacksonville, although somewhat revised:
So, we spent time at a Farmers’ Market–part of it very very pleasantly, under a freeway underpass on a bank of the river through Jacksonville, the name of which I now forget. We had lunch there, while listening to a girl singer accompanied by guitar–in the folk vein, I guess, and nice. Then quite a distance to the college Clark teaches at to see his installation (as well as an excellent exhibition of some of Marton’s pieces) . I wasn’t prepared for the outdoor part of the installation, “SENSATION” making an X with “THINKING” floating in the center of a small pond with geese swimming in it in front of where we parked. An evolving installation: later Clark rowed out to the X in a kayak and changed “THINKING” to “INKING.” It seemed okay to me. The words are from a quotation from Cezanne he’s done many variations on at other installations of this particular (4-year) installation.
The installation continued in the library building next to the pond. First, the long glassed-in exhibition space in the library’s lobby I had a picture of a few entries ago. In it were a huge number of books on water, trees and sky, plus an intriguing mush of torn pages of text in the jar that summed up the adventure into a secret cave that all the books contained. Then three visual poems, each taking up one portion of the stairway window, or glass wall, that faced the pond. The first featured repetitions of the word, “WATER,” the second “TREES, the third “SKY.” These are in many of the other versions of the installation’s . . . “frames.” Several other texts in much smaller letters, some of them sentences, crossed the windows. I was enthralled with the way one could see through these texts into the pond, and the trees beyond, and–finally–into the sky (wonderfully cloud-clumped when we were there) . (Sound effects were included although only the ones for “WATER” were working at this time.)
I immediately thought of Bob Lax (a favorite p0et of Clark’s too, I learned). Clark is a big fan of Samuel Beckett’s (whom he’s been teaching many for five or more years), who is also an obvious influence. But he’s also absorbed and created out of many other influences, many of them non-literary.
Friday, December 18th, 2009
The Four Seasons
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3 31 43 73 5 67 3 61 43 67 67 19 41 13 1 11 19 7 31 5 3 12 15 21 4 19 3 18 15 19 19 9 14 7 1 6 9 5 12 4 8 21 25 33 9 30 8 28 25 30 30 16 24 14 4 12 16 10 21 9 64 441 625 1089 81 900 64 784 625 900 900 256 576 196 16 144 256 100 441 81
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Today, the solution, with an explanation, to the above.
1. Each line says, “clouds crossing a field.”
2. A reader should know from its looks and the fact that it is a cryptographiku that it is a coded text. He should try simple codes at first on all the lines, the way one would in order to solve a cryptogram. If he’s familiar with my other cryptographiku, he will know I’ve more than once used the simplest of numeric codes. Such is the case here, in line 2. The code is 1 = a, 2 = b, etc.
3. The codes used for the other lines are harder to figure out, but the lines themselves give an important clue as to what they say: they each consist of four words, the first six letters in length, the second eight, the fourth one (which would almost certainly be “a”) and the fourth five. That ought to make one guess that each repeats the decoded one. As each indeed does.
4. It should be evident that the code for the fourth line uses the squares of the numbers in the code for the third. The basis of the arrangement of numbers in the third line will probably not be easy to guess.
5. If you consider what kind of numbers are being used in a given line, and are at all mathematical, you will realize that the numbers used in line one are all primes, with the first prime, 1, representing a, the seond prime, 2, representing be, and so on.
6. The next step is trickier but also requires one to think about kind of numbers. It turns out that the numbers used for the code in line three are the non-primes in order, with first of them, 4, representing a, the second, 6, representing b.
7. The surface meaning of the lines and the kinds of coding they’ve been put in is now known. All that remains is to find if a larger meaning in intended (yes) and, if so, what it is, and what the logic behind the coding is (and the kind of coding used in a cryptographiku is, by definition, meaningful. Wallace Stevens, whom one familiar with my poetry and criticism will know is important to me, helps with the last of these questions. Stevens wrote many poems (“Man on the Dump,” for instance) meditating on the idea that winter is pure reality, summer poeticized reality. Or, winter is primary, so can be metaphorically thought of a consisting of prime numbers only. Spring, by this reasoning, can logically consist of all the (lowest) numbers, summer of only factorable numbers, numbers that can be reduced to simpler numbers–expanded, poeticized numbers. Autumn, the peak of the year because it yields the fruit of the year, consists of summer’s numbers squared, or geometrically increased.
8. The final meaning of the poem is derived from its repetition of the simple nature scene about the clouds. A reader aware of Robert Lax’s work (and he will, if he’s familiar with mine), will know that he has a number of poems that repeat words or phrases–to suggest, among much else, ongoingness, permanence, undisturbable serenity. My hope is that this poem will make a reader feel the change of seasons within the grand permanence that Nature ultimately is. A constant message, in different coding as the seasons change.
9. All this should lead to “Whee!”
5. The decoded text uses a technique Robert Lax pioneered in to convey a meaning I consider archetypally deep, like the meanings Lax’s similar poems have for me.
6. The final meaning of the poem is (a) Nature is eternally changing; and (b) Nature is eternally unchanging. When I saw I could make iti say that, I got a thrill! I consider this poem one of my best inventions–even though I’m not sure it works as a poem.
Have fun, kids!
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
The Four Seasons
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3 31 43 73 5 67 3 61 43 67 67 19 41 13 1 11 19 7 31 5 3 12 15 21 4 19 3 18 15 19 19 9 14 7 1 6 9 5 12 4 8 21 25 33 9 30 8 28 25 30 30 16 24 14 4 12 16 10 21 9 64 441 625 1089 81 900 64 784 625 900 900 256 576 196 16 144 256 100 441 81
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Today, just some helpful clues toward the solution of the cyrptographiku above:
1. A cryptographiku is a poem in a code. The code chosen and the way it works has metaphorical significance. The text encoded is generally straight-forward.
2. There are three codes used here, one of them very simple, the other two simple if you are mathematical.
3. The codes were chosen to illustrate a theme of Wallace Stevens’s, to wit: winter is reality at its most fundamental, summer is winter transformed by metaphorical layering.
4. Note that each of thr three lines is the same length, and divided into three “words,” each the same length of the homologous “word” in the other two lines.
5. The decoded text uses a technique Robert Lax pioneered in to convey a meaning I consider archetypally deep, like the meanings Lax’s similar poems have for me.
6. The final meaning of the poem is (a) Nature is eternally changing; and (b) Nature is eternally unchanging. When I saw I could make ti say that, I got a thrill! I consider this poem one of my best inventions–even though I’m not sure it works as a poem.
Have fun, kids!
Today I’m finally starting to post what I’ve decided to call “13′s from The Pedestal Project,” by which I mean my favorites of those submissions to John M. Bennett’s and my gallery of visio-textual art at The Pedestal. I call them “13′s” because the people who created them were, so to speak, all–in my opinion–tied for thirteenth place in the competition for the twelve spots available in the gallery.
The first piece is “Fifth Grade,” by Connie Tettenborn:
When I saw this, I was biased toward it because so many of the other submissions to a gallery supposed to be of visual poetry was (tediously) not visual poetry by any reasonable definition, and this was. I was also charmed by its evocation of what fifth grade seemed to me. I found the choice of data the kids were being bombarded with interesting, too: it happened to include three pieces of knowledge of extreme importance to me all my life: the discovery of America (and I claim Columbus discovered America; Eric the Red or his son, whoever it was, who got to Newfoundland only extended the shoreline of Europe), long division and the planets (which in fifth grade were just about equal to dinosaurs and the Pyramids to me).
I liked the little kids in proper order–although I’m not sure why Connie uses the particular letter she does to represent them. Wait, they are, I now see, “e.g.’s” . . . I’m still not getting the connection . In any case, one of the kids seems not paying full attention, which is a nice touch. The idea of Knowledge coming in from some Afar that seems almost divine intrigued me, too. There’s the concept of a window into understanding, too.
In chatting over syberspace with Connie, I’ve learned that she is new to visual poetry, so deserving of special praise for doing so well to being with. Because she asked for help, I’m now going to say a few minor negative things about “Fifth Grade.” One is that I’m not sure “bah bah” fits the piece as well as “blah blah” would have, and I think “gaga” and “lala” not particularly effective. I think the choice of varied fonts good, but believe a little more could have done to the in-flow–for instance, some overlapping could have worked nicely, I think, and great difference in the size of letters.
I wondered about the use of color, finally deciding straight monochromatic, facts-only dry knowledge worked best. But use of colr and visual imagery might be something to try, too, if the artist wanted to make a sequence of variations on a theme, which her piece would be a good start to.
Connie Tettenborn says: Thanks for the feedback, Bob. FYI, the letters representing the students are “e a r.” They can only be seen if one clicks on the image to enlarge it to the full screen size. I agree that “blah, blah” is better than “bah.” Too bad I did not think of how to represent the nasally sounding “Wanhh” of the teachers in Charles Shultz’s “Peanuts” movies!
Ah, “ear” makes sense, and an e does look like an ear. Not sure I like it, though–to literal. But I can’t think of a good alternative.
They’re from #674.
Communist Evolution
NoNo
Transgender
#673 had two poems by John Elsbergs from his Runaway Spoon Press book, Broken Poems for Evita. One was this:
RAISING EVA (Or, the myth of art and politics) L EVITA tio nis th EPRE fer RED al TERN at ivefor thosewhona t UR ALLY S inK
And that’s it for this entry. (Am I feeling more worn out than ever for no reason? Yes.)
Sunday, April 24th, 2011
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
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When I visited Clark’s installation, I somehow failed to notice that he had three texts, not just one, in water-filled jars in the three-part lobby showcase–because, I guess, two were in colored water. In one respect, I was lucky: at the time, the one I saw, the central one, may have been at its best state of decomposition, for I found it enchantingly like a jut-filled, twisty opening in a secret caves. Here, according to Clark, is a more accurate description of the trio of showcases:
The showcases were divided into three sections, mirroring the stairway (and, of course, something or other outside the library)—water, trees, sky—with each section filled with books selected because that key word happened to be in its title. The selection of books was, as a result, wildly eclectic, linked only by that one word. The water section had, immersed within it, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; the trees section had The Selected Writings of Paul Cézanne; and the sky section had André Breton’s surrealist classic Nadja.
Of the three, Cézanne’s writings degraded the most dramatically over the four weeks of their immersion and, by the final week, had taken on something of the geologic look of Cézanne much-painted mountain, Mt. Ste. Victoire. The quality of paper, etc. must have contributed to that.
For the most part, I left the books alone to degrade at their own pace (I’d added color-appropriate water colors to each jar), but a couple of times I got into the jars and shook them up a bit, accelerating the decay (and the variety of pages visible). By the end, the books were, in fact, stinking to high heaven; removing the jars was a disgusting experience, especially the Cézanne; it smelled like a rotting carcass!
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Friday, April 22nd, 2011
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Go here to see a slide show about it, which will give you a much better idea of the adventure it was–the evolving adventure–than my entries on it.
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
Finally I’m returning to Clark Lunberry’s installation. Ironically, I already had the words I’m posting written–they’re all from the diary entry I made when I got home from Jacksonville, although somewhat revised:
So, we spent time at a Farmers’ Market–part of it very very pleasantly, under a freeway underpass on a bank of the river through Jacksonville, the name of which I now forget. We had lunch there, while listening to a girl singer accompanied by guitar–in the folk vein, I guess, and nice. Then quite a distance to the college Clark teaches at to see his installation (as well as an excellent exhibition of some of Marton’s pieces) . I wasn’t prepared for the outdoor part of the installation, “SENSATION” making an X with “THINKING” floating in the center of a small pond with geese swimming in it in front of where we parked. An evolving installation: later Clark rowed out to the X in a kayak and changed “THINKING” to “INKING.” It seemed okay to me. The words are from a quotation from Cezanne he’s done many variations on at other installations of this particular (4-year) installation.
The installation continued in the library building next to the pond. First, the long glassed-in exhibition space in the library’s lobby I had a picture of a few entries ago. In it were a huge number of books on water, trees and sky, plus an intriguing mush of torn pages of text in the jar that summed up the adventure into a secret cave that all the books contained. Then three visual poems, each taking up one portion of the stairway window, or glass wall, that faced the pond. The first featured repetitions of the word, “WATER,” the second “TREES, the third “SKY.” These are in many of the other versions of the installation’s . . . “frames.” Several other texts in much smaller letters, some of them sentences, crossed the windows. I was enthralled with the way one could see through these texts into the pond, and the trees beyond, and–finally–into the sky (wonderfully cloud-clumped when we were there) . (Sound effects were included although only the ones for “WATER” were working at this time.)
I immediately thought of Bob Lax (a favorite p0et of Clark’s too, I learned). Clark is a big fan of Samuel Beckett’s (whom he’s been teaching many for five or more years), who is also an obvious influence. But he’s also absorbed and created out of many other influences, many of them non-literary.
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
Below is a small portion of a long display case to the right as you enter the college library. It is filled with books about water, trees and sky, the main subjects Clark’s installation is intended to cause engagents to experience sensations of, as we shall see in my entry tomorrow. (I hope.)
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When I visited the Installation, I was my usual out-of-it self, so took no notes, and let it all wash into me rather than analyze it, so I can’t remember what the pages mushed into the jar are from–although they may be writings of Cezanne, or about him, including something Clark quotes of his regarding the superiority for the artist of sensation to thinking. That is the set-up line for this installation and previous ones in the sequence this installation is only the latest work in.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
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I may have it wrong, but I believe the college pond part of Clark’s installation began with the top image, then changed to “INKING/SENSATION” which, in turn, became the second image, finally becoming “SENSATION” by itself, then the bottom image, thereafter losing verbal meaning gradually until wholly gone. When I visited it, I saw the middle image. My memory is lousy but I remember it as the green of the bottom image. In any case, it was colored.
I will leave it here for now as an object of meditation as you might have happened on it walking to a class or the library of the college Clark teaches at. More tomorrow.
Friday, April 8th, 2011
Clark Lunberry, who took the picture, too (at the college Clark teaches at, the name of which I’ve forgotten, on Saturday, 2 April 2011):
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I’m the taller one. Marton is trying in vain to convince me of some idiotic idea of his that certain kinds of semantically meaningless texts that somehow act like language are a form of visual poetry. Actually, we came close to agreeing, I assigning such poems tentatively to the borblur between visual poetry and textual visimagery–until I can see examples of what Marton was talking about, and bounced their author’s name off my head, without any a trace of it getting inside. I think his over-all position on the definition of visual poetry is fairly close to mine. Anyway, we’re still friends!
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Note: I guess I should add for the sake of those uninitiated into the way my sense of humor works, that the “idiotic” above is a joke on myself. I automatically react with hostility to any idea I disagree with (as, I believe everyone else does), so over the years I’ve developed a habit in person of displaying a violent rage at having to deal with an idea I don’t like that’s is so excessive, it can only be taken as a joke. I’m conveying, I hope, the fact that I do disagree but don’t take myself or my disagreement seriously. Meanwhile, I’m letting off steam. Because I do take everything seriously–and completely unseriously. The “idiotic” is the print version of that.
Hmmm . . . . all leaves in fall.
Was this one of the response to Dan Waber’s “Fall leaves” project?
– endwar
I’m away from the files in my main computer so can only tell you it was a response to one project of Dan’s, probably the one you mention. Not sure, though, It had to do with work by bp Nichol, though.