Entry 291 — Frame 14
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Category: Textual Designage
Entry 292 — One Last Textual Design, For Now « POETICKS
Entry 292 — One Last Textual Design, For Now
This is the last frame from my experiment in textual designage that is of any interest, at all.
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4 Responses to “Entry 292 — One Last Textual Design, For Now”
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Entry 1009 — One More from Do Not Write « POETICKS
Entry 1009 — One More from Do Not Write
This one is by Carlyle Baker:
I find this image fascinating. It’s not a poem, for me, but–for one thing–a visualization of a mind’s attempt to find an answer to some unknown but worthy question. One of the mind’s tactics is a doubling back over what it is diagramming, stolidly diagramming. It also employs a white abstract map it briefly scribbles notes toward some sort of understanding that fails to emerge–but it does pin down the location of the unknown involved (the X). I also read in it (less compellingly) the narrative I read in almost all asemic works, the struggle of language to emerge, in this case from thick-lined networks forming layers away from what the language is struggling to speak of, with an abstract outline of what it apparently must include above it. Or the map of a big city, or a close up of a side of such a city . . .
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Textual Designage « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Textual Designage’ Category
Entry 289 — A Labeled Textual Design
Friday, November 19th, 2010
Entry 288 — Two More Textual Designs
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
The upper image below is most of the eighth frame of my series of textual designs, reduced to less than half-size. I thought it passable, certainly better than most of the other frames to this point, and much better than the two after it, which don’t even have a detail worth extracting. The other piece is a detail from the upper one. I don’t know which version I prefer. Probably the detail, slightly.
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Entry 287 — More Textual Designs
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
The following are all details from the seventh frame of my series of textual designs.
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Entry 286 — Successful Textual Design
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
The image below is the first textual design in my series that I really like. It’s a detail from the sixth frame of the work. What makes it succeed, in my opinion, is that I found a nice focal point for part of it, which I cropped to.
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I had a lot of trouble getting what I had on my laptop screen, my laptop being where I work with Paint Shop, to look the same on the screen of the computer I used for this blog. Who knows how it looks on others’ screens, but it’s close to right on the one I’m looking at now.
I have no idea what to make of it. I just like it visually. I’m now wondering what the product would be if I found another image I liked of the same style and multiplied it by that. I do believe I’ll use it in a mathemaku.
Entry 285 — Two More Textual Designs
Monday, November 15th, 2010
The following thumbnails link to two more frames of the sequence of textual designs I made and didn’t like. I keep thinking I may be able to use details of them in better works, preferably visual poems of some sort.
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Hmmm, I like the thumbnail of the top one much better than the full image.
Entry 281 — A Thought & a Textual Design
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
Another Saying of Bob, which I just said (somewhat differently) to Karl Kempton about his latest (most excellent) chapbook, This Is Visual Poetry:
The final message of all of the best poems: “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world,” which I love to quote because I believe firmly in it (as true in the final analysis although almost never true at any particular moment)–even though I don’t believe in Browning’s God or his heaven. To me, it’s a perfect example of how one person can use language and even ideas to express something another person believes entirely in but would package much differently.
And another, thumbnailed, from the sequence of textual designs:
This was originally number two in my sequence. I flat out don’t like it. Later frames in the sequence I recall as being not bad.
My headache persist, by the way. Otherwise, I’m feeling chipper.
Entry 279 — “Deuteronomy”
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
When I made up my mind to submit to Dan Waber’s series This Is Visual Poetry, my first impulse was to submit 17 textual designs, my intent being to show what is not visual poetry. I quickly made the designs but thought them too poor to publish, even as a kind of satire. They did have possibilities, though. Below is a thumbnail to the first of them, plus an addition, the diagram to the right.
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As far as I’m concerned, this is a textual design. It has words but their meanings are irrelevant (as far as I can see). The image to the left is just crumpled paper I scanned. Hey, I like it. I just don’t see it as a visual poem (or, really, as good for a textual design as I think my best visual poems are good for visual poems).
I’m calling it, “Deuteronomy.”
Entry 161 — A Huthian Fidgetglyph
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
In one of his recent mailings to me, Geof Huth sent a folded card with the interior of ther First reformed Church of Schenectady, New York, shown on its 300th birthday in 1980. I’m showing it here because it sets up the fidgetglyph Geof had drawn across the inside of the card and given the title “The Fervent F.” I’m showing that because it seems to me how good a calligrapher Geof is at his best. The original is much better than the image shown here, by the way.
Nico Vassilakis « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Nico Vassilakis’ Category
Entry 1551 — 2 by Nico Vassilakis
Wednesday, August 27th, 2014
The following are from the same issue of Kalligram that the Poem poems I’ve been featuring here are from:
I call these textual visimages–visual art whose subject is the visual appearance of language. These are much more than simple designs, but I can’t quite put what they do into words yet. Something about alteration. Or are they about building simple things that will prove to have vast consequences? Of course, they are also “just” variations, highly elegant variations, on letters.
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Entry 1091 — Waves « POETICKS
Entry 1091 — Waves
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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Irving Weiss « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Irving Weiss’ Category
Entry 1093 — Thoughts Regarding Minimalism
Saturday, May 4th, 2013
I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .
Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year. Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry. The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments. No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:
I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.
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Entry 1092 — More Cursive Writing by Irving Weiss
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
I was going to discuss the minimalist works of the previous entry in this one but had so much trouble simply setting the entry up due to my deranged computer and/or my blogsite’s programming, that I couldn’t continue after losing half my commentary, who knows why. In desperation, I scanned another piece that was in Irving Weiss’s Number Poems (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1997) and managed to post it here:
Nifty visiopoetic portrait of a lady, I think. I haven’t tried super-hard to read the writing but suspect it consists of various scribbled female names–one is Echo. Wait, at the top are Scylla and Daphne. I now suspect these are all nymphs or the like who suffered badly at the hands of various gods and goddesses–hence, if full life only a moment. And en masse here a barely legible flurry representative of all the feminine magic and mystery of the old religions now long-gone.
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Entry 1091 — Waves
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
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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Entry 940 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 2
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012
A few days ago, I got an e.mail from Irving Weiss. He made some nice remarks about my Scientific American blog, then said that neither “read” nor “peruse” satisfied him “for the way one sticks to looking at a work of abstract art or abstract expressionism or, for that matter, any visual poem lacking identifiable content and without a title to help the viewer. I muse: if you look long at a Pollock, Moherwell, de Kooning, what do you do with your looking mind? You have to avoid thinking of what the painting “looks like” on the one hand and going into a mystical mood or trance. It’s like, if you practice any kind of meditation you must try to avoid going to sleep. What kind of “looking at” is it you exercise while standing in front of a work of abstraction?”
Here’s my answer, to take care of this blog entry: “Glad you’re continuing to keep track of my blog, Irving! I agree with you about “pleruser,” but I do believe some such word is needed and so far haven’t come up with a better. Most excellent question you pose. I think I do a lot of different “looking ats” in front of something by Pollock, say. A kind of averbal analysis but a purely sensual absorption, back and forth, but maybe, if it’s possible, both at once? I hope other kinds of perception are going on, too. Sense of rhythms—associative glimpsing probably mostly unconscious to my own life-experiences but to other painters, other visual images. And I don’t go long without trying to think of words I could use to describe what the painting is doing for me, the writer’s gift or defect. I’m maxixperiencing it! I’m a maxixperient. Or “magniceptor,” “Magnicepting?” “a maxcipient?” My first good word for this was “aesthcipient,” but I gave it up because it was too hard to pronounce. Urp, Urp, and Away, Bob.”
Close to philogushy, but with some substance, I think.
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Entry 895 — “Gloss Twombley”
Thursday, October 18th, 2012
Here’s something from Irving Weiss’s collection, Identities, which is published by Xexoxial Editions (www.xexoxial.org). I’m posting it here so people following the discussion I’m moderating at ART=TEXT=ART, which so far has been almost entirely about Twombly’s “Untitled” of 1971, can come and see it.
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Entry 856 — Another from Irving’s New Collection
Sunday, September 9th, 2012
This one’s quite a bit different from yesterday’s–to show you the range of the work in Irving Weiss’s new Identities:
It seems wonderfully to represent the Jewish/Hebrew/Yiddish/Middle-Eastern experience–to Gentile me. I recognized “Moishe” as a Jewish name, but looked it up on the Internet to check and found out that, as I should have known, it is also a Hebrew (or Yiddish) Variant of “Moses,” which was Egyptian. But I’d already interpretted the work to be about the Exodus (“Moses” already being written in it)–and about the whole Jewish experience–the quest for a home, the struggle against . . . near-Hell? but certainly the hostility of the desert. But also, for me, the glorious triumph over, or out of, oppression both by Nature and by tribal enemies. The magical (note the amount of astrology in the piece) triumph. Knowing Irving, though, and having had a lot of Jewish friends throughout my life, and been exposed to a great deal of Jewish comedy–the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen (before he sold out to “seriousness”), I find a kind of irony, even farce in it–from its title, which suggests both an imploration of the Heroic Leader to get the tribe through its perils but also –well, calling a Jewish kid to dinner. But I also take “Moishe” as a pun for “Mercy!” which would make the piece essentially about a final escape into a promised land not yet attained.
I could go on into a sociological analysis of Jewishness, which I do think I have a good idea of because they don’t seem to me that much different from me, if different at all (one reason I got quite involved in geneology was the hope that I’d find out that at least one of my ancestors was Jewish; the closest were all the Protestants who were the heretics of their time). No time for that. I’ll just repeat that this piece seems to me a powerful, far-ranging expression of Judaism. And a wonderfully moving piece of verbo-visual art whatever it is taken to mean!
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Entry 855 — An Appropriately Titled “Untitled”
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
The following infraverbal masterpiece is the world’s first artwork given the title, “Untitled,” appropriately. It’s just one of the 78 pieces in Identities, a collection of work by Irving Weiss just out from Xexoxial Editions. It’s something to wonder through many more times than once, with a fantastic skitter through the arts, from low to high, 100% verbal to 100% visual, the comic to the largest ultimates (as well as a combination of both). I hope to say more about it here and elsewhere.
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Entry 591 — A Work by Carlyle Baker « POETICKS
Entry 591 — A Work by Carlyle Baker
I don’t know much about Carlyle Baker–only that I see his work every 0nce in a while and always like it. The piece by Baker below, untitled, is from the bleed 0.1.
I have a lot of trouble saying why I like this–extremely like this. I do know that I am automatically attracted to anything with the word, “ur,” in it. Beginnings, origins, the number one. The work seems to me 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 bleed editor John Moore Williams muses in the text accompanying the full set of four pieces this one is the first of), maybe even a piece of square currency from some mystical secret nation . . . Baker says of the set that “most of these pieces begin hand-drawn in ink, pencil crayon, watercolor, etc., and later are altered in a paint program”–much as the graphics in my work are. My only gripe: he apparently doesn’t title his works–if he does, the titles have been omitted here.
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Sunday, 11 December 2011, 5 P.M. I played around with an image at Paint Shop for less than half-an-hour, and posted the result as my blog entry for the day. Tennis in the morning, dinner with Linda in the late afternoon, futzing around in between. Almost nothing accomplished.
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Scott Helmes « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Scott Helmes’ Category
Entry 1014 — “Haiku #53″
Thursday, February 14th, 2013
Once again, I’m too out of it tp do more here today than post a poem. No matter that the poem I’m posting isn’t a poem but a pen&ink visimage of a poem. It’s from Scott Helmes’s ongoing series of translations of haiku into what I call textual designs. This one arrived with a mail art project he invited me to contribute to and I hope to, if my brain will only revive enough to help me.
It seems to me the epitome of haiku-elegance. So many wonderful touches, like the only image of the nine the piece consists of that is nowhere curved is the central one. The bird I see at the top left is its “season word.” If even the quarter-mind I’ve been operating on of late can see even those things, how much must be there for those with fully-functional (observing) brains–and is there, even for me, but only in pieces in different parts of my brain, unintegrated, ununderstood in the fullest sense of “understood.”
Note: at first I posted this image cropped; I realized that it worked better with its margins restored so restored ‘em.
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Entry 844 — 3 Major American Poets, Continued
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Here are two of John M. Bennett’s works from differential:
Both of these are visual poems, by my standards. So is the one by Guy Beining in yesterday’s entry. I don’t yet consider the one by Scott Helmes a visual poem rather than a visual image (“visimage,” in my aesthetics). But Scott has done more than enough works that are unarguably visual poems for me to consider him a poet.
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Entry 843 — 3 Major American Poets
Monday, August 27th, 2012
Among some things Guy Beining recently sent me was a copy of what I take to be a Japanese zine from September 2007 the title of which seems to be “d,” the symbol for a differential. It is part French, for it bills itself as a “Revue internationale pour la poesie experimentale.” Among those with work in it are three of my friends whom I am certain will one day be taken as major American poets: Guy, John M. Bennett and Scott Helmes. Here are pieces by Guy and Scott that I thought interestingly similar and dissimilar, Guy being usually down & dirty, Scott generally elegant:
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Entry 553 — “Haiku #92,” by Scott Helmes
Friday, November 4th, 2011
I stole the work below from Geof Huth’s blog at http://dbqp.blogspot.com/#!/2011/10/3-lines-haiku.html where he accompanies it with some interesting, sensitive words.
Geof says the shapes in this are pieces of letters. Perhaps they are, but few of them seem so to me. Nonetheless, they certainly represent lettered language–and the essence of the haiku form, compressed (not reduced) to the purely visual. A visual depiction of the haiku. Over the past few days I’ve been making posts about how bad the new Penguin anthology of “twentieth century American poetry” is, so what a good anthology of the period would be was on my mind. I wondered what I would do about works like this one of Scott’s. Could I include them? Not if I remained true to the long-agreed-upon meaning of poetry as a construction of words. I decided I’d have a section of such an anthology devoted to “near-poetry.” If there are any good twentieth-century prose poems around, they could also go into it. Automotive poetry, too, like the Ford Mustang, what the hell. I’d call the anthology an anthology of twentieth century American Poetry and Meta-Poetry.
Actually, maybe the issue wouldn’t come up. Scott’s poem is dated 2011. I don’t know when he began his series of “visual haiku”–maybe not before 2000.
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Hanne Darboven « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Hanne Darboven’ Category
Entry 1093 — Thoughts Regarding Minimalism
Saturday, May 4th, 2013
I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .
Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year. Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry. The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments. No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:
I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.
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Entry 1091 — Waves
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
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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Hey, Bob, for some reason I really like this one!
Your friend, Bob Grumman
I like the work of the first Bob and share the opinion of the second one!
All best,
your friend
(and the humble translator of Poet, our mutual friend),
Marton
I’m sorry, Marton, but I cannot concur. The evidence of a recent detailed examination I carried out indicates beyond serious doubt that both Bobs are complete idiots.
Professor G.
nicely done & different than befores