Marton Koppany’s latest visual poem may be the gentlest satire on a country’s government ever, if I’m interpreting it correctly. Note the boot on the head of one of the country’s citizens, for instance–and the complete insanity of the country the cloud with an umbrella suggests. Much more is going on that I’ll let you discover without help.
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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.
Today I’m getting work done on the little chapbook I’m publishing of Marton Koppany’s The Reader. One of its pages, tentatively is the one below, without the extra instances of “change.” They are my additions, which I impulsively added because I thought them terribly clever and witty. As a variation by Me, certainly not to be included in the book. Adequate to fill an entry I would have trouble filling otherwise. And it will give Marton an idea of what I’m doing to his poor manuscript (i.e., what I’m doing to crowd its lines so the book will be affordably short to publish.
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Note: I rarely encounter anything by Marton that I don’t want to do some variation on. I’m sure I’ve done more than five or six, maybe as many as ten. I think one or two have been not completely lame.
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Here’s the front cover for the latest Runaway Spoon Press publication. Available at either doorway into my house at 1708 Hayworth Road in Port Charlotte, Florida, for $5.
I’m feeling okay, but still a little groggy from yesterday–the anaesthesia, I now think.
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These are all from my previous blog. The top one is “Ellipsis No. 10,” by Marton Koppany. The second is my variation on that, and the third a second variation on it by me. There here partly because, again, I could not come up with anything else to post, and partly because today I finished buying bus tickets to and from Jacksonville, Florida, where I’ll be visiting with Marton Saturday, 2 April. Anyone who’ll also be there then, let me know. Especially if you have a bed I can sleep in on Friday!
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marton koppany says: Thanks for posting these, Bob!
Hopefully see you soon,
Marton
So I can’t get this entry quickly out of the way and try to get into my next column for Small Press Review, in a couple of weeks (and because I really like it!), here’s Marton Koppany’s “Arrival”:
He, like Geof Huth, is another Klee, and I have higher compliment than that (although I have a few equal compliments, like “another Pollock”).
Marton Koppany says: Thank you so much for your encouragement, Bob! It means a lot!
(I’ve just read your entry. I was out of town /and without internet connection/ for five days from Sunday.
All the very best,
Marton
This is one of the three pieces Marton Koppany sent me recently. I’m posting it now (1) to take care of another entry with minimum effort, (2) because I like it a lot, and (3) to allow me to babble a bit more on my favorite topic, What Visual Poetry Is.
As those who know my work as a critic, I contend that a text cannot be a poem unless it has words that are of significant importance to what the text does aesthetically. This piece contains no words, as most people understand the term. Nonetheless, I’m prepared to claim it to be a poem. Clearly, this piece is on what I call the borblur–the borderline between conceptual visimagery and visual poetry. I call it the later because I believe all punctuation marks (and similar symbols such as those used in chemistry or mathematics) can act as words in certain unusual situations.
Specifically, when a punctuation mark in a work is sufficiently emphasized to make it difficult for someone “reading” the work to treat it as nothing more than a punctuation mark, it will become a word. That is, it will not be skimmed through with little or no conscious notice–actually, with no vaonscous verbal notice, as with the dash I just used–but pondered consciously, possibly even indentified consciously as what it is, it will become a word. It will denote as well as, or even perhap instead of, acting purely punctuationally. In the case of the work above, I claim most people–at least most people familiar with the territory–will read the dash in it (even without the title of the piece), as “dash, short-cut,” then realize sensorily how it is making something rather large disappear, or realize how it works. A simple but unexpected metaphor visualized.
The pun in English of “dash” as a verb meaning to go in a hurry is a very nice extra, entirely verbal extra.
Note: my only problem with the piece is its title, which I think too overt. I’d prefer something more like “Punctuation Poem No. 63, or the like. “Mountain subjected to Punctuation?” No, but something like that, but more intelligent. . . .
Marton Koppany says: Thank you so much, Bob! I’m VERY glad you liked it and I’m grateful for your attention! The title serves only to slow the reading down in this case. It may be too overt, I’m not sure.
nico says: what id like to know is what are the 2 pieces on each side of the dash. mirror images of torn paper? or are they 2 items that give a base to the top “mountain” piece? and does the “mountain contain within it – a dash? or does the dash signify the name of the “mountain. i like it and i like what you wrote, bob. marton, youre making work that’s moving in another direction – always a good thing. i always enjoy seeing, thinking about it.
Marton Koppany says: Thank you so much for your words, Nico! (I’ve just come home from vacation and read your comment.) The two pieces on the two sides of the dash are identical: they’re the image of an iceberg, taken from the internet. I’d had a certain idea, and needed an iceberg for it. But I hadn’t guessed beforehand that they would look like a pair of shoes. I’m always in a dialogue with the “material”. This time the “material” really surprised me, and it took the initiative. The second surprise came from
“Magic Wand” (of a simple image editor software). I wanted to insert a piece of mountain-like negative space (made of sky) between the two icebergs, but I did something wrong, and had to realize that the edges of the sky are “thawing” – in complete synchrony with the icebergs. (My original idea got an extra confirmation, which was stronger than mine.) I didn’t touch the image from that point on. DASH is the base of a mountain-like (and already thawing) negative space between two disappearing icebergs which are identical with each other. And the shoes belong together, and the negative space is their wearer. There’s no separate place or time for the thought “between” the two other thoughts. They “happen” at the very same moment and belong together.
Or something like that. 
Marton got back to me about his “cursive” yesterday, giving me enough material for a full entry.
” I was being modest, but I see that the dedication actually is important, for it connects the poem to my series, “Cursive Mathemaku.” Thinking about that connection, I thought of something else to mention about the poem–the fact that cursive writing is personal. The Nature in the poem is not a machine typing out falling leaves but an individual writing a poem with her leaves.
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.
nico says: “certain kinds of semantically meaningless texts that somehow act like language are a form of visual poetry.”
what’s wrong with that?
nico says: actually, id be more interested in a report of marton’s presentation during his stay in this country.
As you ought to know by now, Nico, I have this absurd idea that poetry is a literary art, and therefore must have a semantic meaning. But I might have to accept certain kinds of “semantically meaningless texts that somehow act like language are a form of visual poetry” as poetry if there’s no other category for it. If it does something aesthetically interesting visually, then I’d call it “visimagery,” my word for visual art. If it is strictly textual but averbal, then, perhaps, “asemic poetry” would be the proper category for it. Justified by its having “near-words”–and having to have some category.
As for what I put in my blog, there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to see in it but am habitually too tired to post. I should be up to saying more about my day with Marton (and Clark) eventually, but not about Marton’s presentation, because I could only afford to stay a day, so missed it. It may have been recorded, though. By now he has probably given a second presentation in Chicago. His tour includes a third city–Milwaukee, I think. Anyway, he’ll be meeting Karl Young.
–Bob
–Bob
nico says: i know i stepped in your definition field, but wouldnt a “foreign” language be considered meaningless to someone without the semantic keys. though, of course, it would still be language.
im glad to hear marton’s visiting mr young..
thanks,
n
My impulse was to joke that all poems have to be in English. But in a way, that’s true: a poem is FOR ITS ENGAGENT a collection of wrods (and perhaps other elements) that he can read. A text in Spanish is not a poem for me, but can certainly be one for a person who speaks Spanish. Just as a painting can be a work of art for someone who can see but not for someone who is blind.
I maintain that everything has a personal definition and social definition. For me, a poem has to be in English. For the world, a poem has to be in some language more than one person can read.
It reduces to the silly philosophical question about whether real things exist where no conscious mind can witness them. I say they do simply because it’s easier to think things are stable, and don’t disappear when no one is looking at them. But the latter could happen. It doesn’t matter, though. Existence stays exactly the same regardless of what happens.
–Bob
Saturday, August 7th, 2010
This is one of the three pieces Marton Koppany sent me recently. I’m posting it now (1) to take care of another entry with minimum effort, (2) because I like it a lot, and (3) to allow me to babble a bit more on my favorite topic, What Visual Poetry Is.
As those who know my work as a critic, I contend that a text cannot be a poem unless it has words that are of significant importance to what the text does aesthetically. This piece contains no words, as most people understand the term. Nonetheless, I’m prepared to claim it to be a poem. Clearly, this piece is on what I call the borblur–the borderline between conceptual visimagery and visual poetry. I call it the later because I believe all punctuation marks (and similar symbols such as those used in chemistry or mathematics) can act as words in certain unusual situations.
Specifically, when a punctuation mark in a work is sufficiently emphasized to make it difficult for someone “reading” the work to treat it as nothing more than a punctuation mark, it will become a word. That is, it will not be skimmed through with little or no conscious notice–actually, with no vaonscous verbal notice, as with the dash I just used–but pondered consciously, possibly even indentified consciously as what it is, it will become a word. It will denote as well as, or even perhap instead of, acting purely punctuationally. In the case of the work above, I claim most people–at least most people familiar with the territory–will read the dash in it (even without the title of the piece), as “dash, short-cut,” then realize sensorily how it is making something rather large disappear, or realize how it works. A simple but unexpected metaphor visualized.
The pun in English of “dash” as a verb meaning to go in a hurry is a very nice extra, entirely verbal extra.
Note: my only problem with the piece is its title, which I think too overt. I’d prefer something more like “Punctuation Poem No. 63, or the like. “Mountain subjected to Punctuation?” No, but something like that, but more intelligent. . . .
Monday, December 7th, 2009
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Csend-Sinc
The Ands
Nothing else. I’m hoping to get going again on columns for Small Press Review. A deadline is approaching and I’d like to get ahead. It’d be nice, too, to start getting real work done.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
In #663, I presented my Odysseus Suite–but the reproduction is too crude for me to re-post it here. My next entry featured this, by Endwar:
As I announced when I first posted this, I am hoping to publish an anthology of mathematical poems, like this one, so if you have one or know of one, send me a copy of it, or tell me about it.
#665 had this by Marton Koppany, which I have to post here because it was dedicated to ME:
Hey, it’s mathematical, too. The next entry, whose number I fear to state, concerned this:
This is from Typewriter Poems, an anthology published by Something Else Press and Second Aeon back in 1972. It’s by Alison Bielski, An English woman born in 1925 whose work I’m unfamiliar with. I find this specimen a charmer . . . but am not sure what to make of it. Three lines, as in the classic haiku. The middle one is some sort of filter. Is “n” the “n” in so much mathematics? If so, what’s the poem saying? And where does the night and stars Hard for me not to assume come in? Pure mathematics below, a sort of practical mathematics above? That idea would work better for me if the n’s were in the lower group rather than in the other. Rather reluctantly, I have to conclude the poem is just a texteme design. I hope someone more clever sets me right, though. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen later visio-textual works using the same filter idea–or whatever the the combination of +’s. =’s and n’s is, but can’t remember any details.)
It was back to my lifelong search for a word meaning “partaker of artwork” in #667–but I now believe “aesthimbiber,” which I thought of in a post earlier than #667, I believe, but dropped, may be the winner of my search.
Next entry topic was about what visual poets might do to capture a bigger audience. I said nothing worth reposting on a topic going nowhere because visual poets, in general, are downright inimical to doing anything as base as trying to increase their audience. One suggestion I had was to post canonical poems along with visual poems inspired by them, which I mention because in my next entry, I did just that, posting a Wordsworth sonnet and a visual poem I did based on and quoting part of it–and don’t re-post here because of space limitations. I wrote about the two in the final entry in this set of ten old blog entries.
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.