To come.

Mini-Survey of the Internet, Part Seven

Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 7-8, July-August 2007

      Cosmoetica.
      Webmaster: Dan Schneider.
      http://www.cosmoetica.com.

      Mike Snider’s Formal Blog.
      http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog.

      po-X-cetera.
      Blogger: Bob Grumman.
      http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog.

      Tomi Shaw’s Blog.
      http://tomirae.blogspot.com.

One of the first blogs I came across that mentioned me when I was trying to round up links to my works on the Internet was Tomi Shaw’s. My name cropped up in her interview of someone named Jason Sanford. In conjunction with (gah) the Philistine poetry website of Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica. Sanford was actually praising the moron: ” . . . Dan educated himself about poetry by reading and studying everything he could on the subject. From his website Cosmoetica.com, he now publishes poetry and literary critiques that drive the literary establishment crazy. Basically, Dan takes a no-holds- barred, analytical approach to critiquing writing. If he likes your work, he says exactly why it is good. If he hates it, he lays out why in immense, excruciating detail. His site has literally recorded tens of millions of visitors since it debuted in early 2001. If you Google for information on poets like Bob Grumman or Thylias Moss, his critiques pop up. Dan and his website were even mentioned in the New York Times Book Review last year in the essay ‘The Widening Web of Digital Lit.’”

I fired off a comment, naturally. It got no response, naturally. As I keep saying, Internetters seem to just want to make assertions, then go their way; they don’t want to discuss anything (with anyone, not just me), which keeps the Internet from being as valuable as it could be. I said, “I agree with (Jason Sanford) that webmeisters and bloggers like Dan Schneider, who have a passion for some kind of poetry, and energetically promote their points of view, are the future of poetry, but there are a huge number of them superior to Schneider. I do applaud the way he takes on poetry he doesn’t like, such as mine, at some length. But he doesn’t really do much analysis, preferring assertions, and if any of his victims responds to his crap, he ignores him–except occasionally to lie about how he has “denuded” him. Evidence of all this is at my po-X- cetera blog. But, hey, thanks for mentioning my name!”

Near the top of the list of links an Internet search of my name will bring up is Schneider’s alleged “denudement” of me, which is annoying. All he did, by the way, was reveal his complete inability to understand what I was doing in a rough draft of one of my mathemaku at my blog, treating the rough draft as a completed work. He’s basically an estabnik, but proudly allying himself with the poetry establishment of the fifties, rather than with the present one–yet courageously pooh-poohing T. S. Eliot to prove his non- comformity. His poetry, as I show at my blog, is unadventurous and semi-competent at best in technique, and dead-standard in outlook, diction and imagery–except where it improves to incoherence.

For a change of pace, and to show what an excellent bookstore the Internet can be, here’s a sonnet from 44 Sonnets, a paperback by Mike Snider that he’s hawking at his blog (for just $3), and I deem well worth buying, unless you hate formal poetry. The sonnet’s called “Homework”:

      My daughter’s learning how the planets dance,
      How curtseys to an unseen partner’s bow
      Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
      To find new worlds in heaven’s bleak expanse,
      How even flaws in this numerical romance
      Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
      Mistake to marry meaning. She writes now
      That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn’t chance.
      Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
      Than nudge her at her homework while I try
      To master patterns made so long before
      My birth that stars since then have left the sky?
      I’ll never know. But what I try to teach
      Is trying. She may grasp what I can’t reach.

Here is what I say about this at my blog: “The remarks I lost (when my blog crashed) were penetrating, I’m sure, but I remember them only vaguely. One thing I remember is marveling at how smoothly well these poems (and the rest of Snider’s poems in his book) carry out the aims of Iowa plaintext lyrics (i.e., standard contemporary mainstream American poems)–but employing rhymes (note, for example the abbaabba of the last one’s octave!) and fairly strict meter. Ergo, they deal sensitively with common human situations and end in effective epiphanies, all more or less conversationally–but with the plus of the significantly extra verbal music that meter and rhyme can provide.

“One value of being forced to re-type, and re-consider a poem one is critiquing, as I’ve had to do with these, is that it can sometimes lead to an improved interpretation. That’s what happened to me just now. For who knows what reason, I didn’t realize that the persona of the poem was writing poetry, so had him working on astronomy. So I missed the wonderfully fertile juxtaphor (implict metaphor) equating writing verse with astronomy (and the ones equating either with doing homework, or learning in general). And with poems for the sky-charts–explained sky-charts–of astronomy. All this along with the now stronger explicit comparison of the father’s work toward mastery of poetry with his daughter’s toward mastery of schoolwork, and the simple, conventional, but not pushy moral of the poem, “trying is what counts.” Consequently, I now count this poem a masterpiece; the others are “only” good solid efforts. Good brief character studies, too. (Note: I’m pretty sure Schneider would agree with me on this one, but even Philistines can be right about some poems.)”

Simplexity

Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2008

      Simplex 17.
      Edited by derek beaulieu
      2007, 18 sheets; House Press,
      #2, 733 2nd Avenue Northwest,
      Calgary, Alberta, Canada t2n 0e4. np.
 

Early in December 2005, derek beaulieu sent out an invitation to various artists, including me, to participate “in a collaborative / constraint-based concrete poetry portfolio.” Each artist opting in would get a Letraset sheet from beaulieu with instructions to make a work using part or the whole of it and nothing else–on a standard sheet of typing paper. I, to my regret, was too lazy to accept the invitation–something that happens too often with me. Seventeen artists did, though, including Nicole Burisch, Frances Kruk, Jonathan Ball, Christian Bok and Pete Spence. Dan Waber, too, luckily for me–because his piece was a tribute to 15 concrete poets that included me, so he was kind enough to send me a copy of the portfolio. This latter consisted of 17 8..5″ by 11″ sheets of heavy stock in the pocket of a standard stationary store folder–with an eighteenth sheet containing beaulieu’s preface and a list of the contributors.

As is so often the case with the anthologies of otherstream poetry I see, this one would serve excellently as a short survey course in its subject, which is not only concrete poetry but the poetry I call “infraverbal” (because of the poetic importance of what it does inside words). A piece by Bruce Andrews, for instance, is full of infraverbally fragmented words–“E     LA/LA        ting,” for one (a multi-meaninged representation of Los Angeles, among other things). But he scatters his fragments into a visiopoetic design, with a good deal of shattered, disoriented letters metaphoring creation/destruction, death/rebirth– emanating, to my eye, from the one more or less linearly printed word in the piece, “COLUMN,” albeit without its C, and upright rather than horizontal, so his poem is as much a concrete one as infraverbal.

Geoffrey Hlibchuk’s piece is primarily infraverbal. At first, I thought it perhaps the weakest piece in the collection. It consists of a somewhat crude depiction of a sine wave fashioned of what look like two capital U’s, one upside-down, and a horizontal line, up in the top right; the apparent title of the piece, “Sine Curve,” in the bottom left; and a few letters flipped above “Sine Curve”–with a tiny star just above them. These letter, I eventually realized, spelled “univerSe.” Each of them is a different distance exactly above the same letter in the phrase, “Since Curve,” below them–in classic adherence to a long- practiced concrete poetry convention. Ergo, “sine curve” turns out to be an anagram for “universe”–with a C left over. Zing. Something as fundamental as a sine curve from which cometh something fundamental in a much more huge way. With a C–for the speed of light and/or “sea/see,” and no doubt other things that make that plausibly connect to the poem’s foreburden (roughly: “sine curve underlies universe”), so qualify as legitimate undermeanings.

Every once in a while, I come upon an artwork that really bothers me. That’s because I like it, but–even after more than a few minutes with it–can’t figure out why. Such is the case with John M. Bennett’s contribution to Simplex 17, a frame around a mess of letters and letter-fragments. It is clearly visual. It also has a few words, the central one being, “TURD,” which shouldn’t surprise those familiar with Dr. Johnee’s work, continuuming from the basest of the base to the loftiest of the lofty zones of human experience, however subtlely, as it so often does.

The only other significant words immediately evident are what the frame is made of. Strings of o’s, u’s or n’s, s’s, r’s and e’s, they can be said to spell “ours,” “no,” “on,” soon,” “noon,” “none,” and “one,” the letter u doubling as n–or vice versa. So, does the text, “soon (at) noon) no one, none, ours,” or some similar combination of those words, with or without “on,” contribute enough to the piece’s central meaning to make it (by my standards) a poem? You got me. Needless to say, there is much more going on in the work than I’m able to discuss here that could well makes things much clearer.

Representing the down&dirty strand of concrete poetry in the anthology is “Emplacement and Drift,” by Jason Christie. A work of many overlapping texts, it is a problem piece for me for the same reasons Bennett’s is. It has words, but its words are hard to make anything coherent out of. The piece is similar to Bennett’s, too, in seeming to be (linguiconceptually) a depiction of language in disintegration or formation–or, more exactly, emplaced but adrift. The cursive prettiness of one of the work’s phrases spells, “Velvet Touch Lettering,” to provide a sardonic commentary on what’s going on. But a little slash of black from all the typographical noise jangle around it alters the c to a t. It thus becomes, almost, “truth.” Ergo, is some kind of touch/truth our subject?

Dan Waber’s contribution is a veritable survey course of concrete poetry within a survey course in concrete poetry, as it’s title makes clear: “probable lineage (for Eugen Gomringer, bpNichol, Geof Huth, Karl Kempton, Aram Saroyan, endwar, Nico Vassilakis, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, derek beaulieu, Clemente Padin, Roy Arenella, Irving Weiss, Karl Young, Marton Koppany, and Bob Grumman).” A historical survey of the field. From his letraset sheet, Dan has used nothing (aside from a few arithmetical symbols and two punctuation marks) but o’s and h’s–and parts of the latter, primarily u’s and n’s but also some y’s and and ingenious r broken off an n–that was broken off an h–to trace the field. He begins with Gomringer’s “Silence” (here represented by three layers of five o’s with the middle one missing), and touches on well-known pieces of all the other concretists in his title–“om” for karl kempton, for example, with the same word except with an m with an extra leg in it for Aram Saroyan, for example. It ends at the bottom of the page with a line like the one from simple arithmetic problems (which is how I got into it) with an exclamation point under it, to stand for the poet whose lineage is represented, Dan Waber himself.

As usual, I want to keep writing about this fine experiment beaulieu has pulled off, but haven’t room to. So, here I end.

Hodgepodge 2001

Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2001

Axle, issue 76, November 2000.
Edited by Tony Figallo. 4 pp;
Paper Virus Press, Box 4180,
Richmond East, Victoria Australia 3121. $10.

Fuck!, Volume 4, Numbers 1 and 3,
January and March 2001. Edited by Lee Thorn
6 pp, each; Lee Thorn, Box 85571,
Tucson AZ 85754. $4/3 issues.

O!!Zone 2001, Winter 2001.
Edited by Harry Burrus. 64 pp;
O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View,
Houston TX 77057-2204 or
[email protected]. $20.

100, by Charles Doria. 228 pp;
2000; Pa; Charles Doria,
[email protected]. $7.50, ppd.

Popular Reality, Volume 436, Number 7,
January 2001. Edited by Suzy Crowbar Poe.
12 pp; Popular Reality, 116 Shepard,
Lansing MI 48912. $1 (payable to Susan Poe).

The Secret Life of Words.
Edited by Betsy Franco and Maria Damon.
142 pp; 2000; Pa; Teaching Resource Center,
Box 82777, San Diego CA 92138. $18.95.

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Today is the second day of spring, and I’ve decided to spring clean my files of matter to review. Hence, the hit&miss hodgepodge to follow.

First item in the alphabetical order I’ve decided to follow, is Axle, a monthly newsletter for an Australian group devoted to “concrete, visual, action, photo and sound poetries,” because it contains a nice (altered) excerpt from a Runway Spoon Press Book. That’s my outfit, in case you don’t know, and I can’t resist any opportunity to plug my authors. The book excerpted from is Commentaries (II) (available for $5 from me at bobgrumman@nut-n- but.net), the author David Miller. The part excerpted is a set of variations on a line, “waking: a figure of stars seen through a glass wall,” that Miller shows fully awake in a larger text otherwise asleep in different degrees of obscuring line-outs.

Next up is Fuck!, whose editor, Lee Thorn, deserves all kinds of kudos for keeping a monthly (!) going for over three years now. The two issues nearest at hand, like all the issues of Thorn’s zine that I’ve seen, are down ‘n’ dirty: three sheets of typing paper stapled in the upper left corner and covered mostly with contra-genteel poetry and drawings. Neatly-typed. Among the specimens of poetry in the March issue is Ryan G. Van Cleave’s, “Y Chromosome,” which is refreshingly pro-male (but laughingly so.) Its third stanza is: “More than a swerve from mere genital utility/ it’s a dynamic curiosity, the driving desire to know./ We don’t mean to be insatiable,/ but we are,” followed by, “.” The poem ends, “We’ve already got one X chromosome./ Who’d be nuts enough/ to trade all this in for another?” Others, including Antler, have some good stuff in the March issue, too, and for my crowd there are four infraverbal gems in it from Mike Basinski, one of which includes the passage, “LARGE/ Nevel’s oranges/ textswitch detect defect,” and if you don’t hum up at the sight of “textswitch” with its blur of witchery/ text-switchery/ sandwichery/ wit-stitchery,” then I suspect infraverbality will never be your thing. The January issue boasts two inimitable visual poems by Joel Lipman (whose work I too rarely see in print), one with the crude slogan “First poetry, later de/ Mockracy,” which is–as just quoted–a kinda silly joke but type-set/mis-set/myth-set/et-set by Lipman yields all kinds of shimmers about firstness, poetry, communication–and later deMockracy/ freedom, et-set. Among the more standard good stuff in that issue is Thorn’s “people are/ SO/ FUCKING/ RUDE// and then, if you don’t like it,/ YOU’RE the asshole.”

The latest issue of O!!Zone is as packed with excellent reproductions of mostly first-rate straight illumages, visual poems (mostly in the form of collages) and illustrated straight poems as ever. The mix of nationalities is particularly appealing, Russia being especially well-represented.

Then there’s Charles Doria’s 100, a collection of short poems which includes, “1/1/00″: “when everything old/ becomes all things new/ we’ll laugh down/ meadows lightly green” but is mostly leftist anger with the USA, as in, “Beirut”: “260 USA dead/ Reagan/ why weren’t you there/ instead” or with what I’d call American Christianity (“evertime I see a christer/ moving the mouth/ this marvelous urge/ to piss it shut”). It’s hard, however, to get too peeved with him, if you don’t agree with him, after his untitled: “the hair on my head is/ just like the hair on my ass/ can you tell if/ I’m talking or farting.”

The latest issue of Popular Reality is as wacked-out as ever, with all kinds of funny stuff crammed into its tabloid-sized pages like the description by Editor Crowbar of her date with John M. Bennett, similarly funny texts and drawings by Al Ackerman, and a reproduction of an authentic old-timey ad for the Smith and Wesson Bicycle Revolver, “the only SAFE Arm For Bicyclists . . . cannot be fired by accident, even in the event of a header.” Also in the issue are discussions of flouridation, electromagnetic radiation and like conspiracies as well as a tragi-comic attack by Jim Goad on Jim Hogshire’s destructive attempts to help Goad in his trial for beating up a nutto woman who had attacked him. It has a nice Musicmaster illumage, too, and I much like the unattributed drawing on the front cover that outlines a man (leaving out his face and like details) who is sitting at a dining table with his fork into something circular on a plate; “It almost tasted like the real thing,” it is captianed. Another dumb-sounding throw-away that really resonates for me.

Last on my list of items to cover in this report is a book for elementary school teachers (grades 3-6), The Secret Life of Words, that uses a charming collection of user-friendly poems to get schoolchildren into the fun of poetry. I mention it mainly, I will admit, because one of MY mathematical poems is in it, but it has some neato stuff by bpNichol, too, such as “Sixteen Lilypads,” which consists of a large square that has been divided into sixteen small squares, each containing some permutation of “frog,” such as “fr?g,” “?rog,” and, finally, “????.” Its inclusion of many other infraverbal and/or visual poems like Nichol’s, and all sorts of other kinds of poetry give it a wider range than any adult anthology I know of–and make it certain to excite the more verbally imaginative children (and teachers) lucky enough to be exposed to it.

Mad Poet Symposium, Part Four

Small Press Review,
Volume 35, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2003

An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
80 pp; 2002; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

Modern Haiku, Volume 34.1, Winter-Spring 2003.
Lee Gurga, Editor
100 pp; Pa;
Box 68, Lincoln IL 62656.
www.modernhaiku.org
1-yr. sub. (3 copies) $21.

Sack Drone Gothic
Al Ackerman
16 pp; 2003; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6.

Writing To Be Seen: Book and Related Arts by Visual Poets
K.S. Ernst and Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Curators
20 pp; 2003; Pa;
Kathy Ernst, 13 Yard Avenue, Farmington NJ 07727. $12.50.

First off, let me apologize for not getting my column for the January/February issue of Small Press Review in on time. I somehow got it into my head I had an extra month to do it in that I didn’t have. My column should be in every issue from now on, however: I’ve instructed Len to just re-publish one of my old columns sdrawkcab if I’m ever late again.

Okay, now to the catalogue for the “Second Wave” exhibit my recent columns have been about.. I had hoped to spend the rest of the year praising it, but new Important Announcements I have to get to have intervened. Hence, I must finish my review of it with just few randomly-chosen samples from those of its pages I didn’t cover before: (1) a quotation from Richard Kostelanetz’s One Night Stood: “I didn’t// Again, later”; (2) a poem from Larry Tomoyasu’s Between: “in tornado weather the sheets stay out/ to field, curse sudden against the/ electrified smell of the sky.” and (3) a poem by Mikhail Magazinnik from the first issue of the magazine, Koja: “March bride the groom/ Kill bugs the spray/ Bell toll the wed/ Sky land the grey.” The rest of the catalogue’s contents are at the same level as these (whatever you think that level is), trust me.

My Important Announcements will also reduce my return to the symposium in the title of my series to this single paragraph. Its subject: Saturday, 27 September 2002, the day of the presentations. They were given simultaneously in two different rooms, so I missed the following: a talk by Robert H. Jackson about William S. Burroughs’ Influence on Recent Writing; Bill Austin’s “Against Formalism: Experiments with Internality,” which Dave Baratier described to the Poetics List on the Internet as a “poetic tribute to (the) Avant-Garde (which) deconstructed major paradoxes of its eternally vanishing identity, and its relation to form and desire”; one of Michael Basinski’s amazing performances “smoothly mining all visual, semantic and sound associations from the dense texture of his quite funny visuals, made with/from the most “democratic” materials like regular markers and cereal boxes,” according to Baratier; Geoffrey Gatza’s, “Tantalum: The Congo War Interpreted Through Consumer Acuity,” which mixed corpo-speak, langpo and visual poetry; a John M. Bennett reading; a Jesse Glass reading which included sound pieces influenced by the Japanese white noise scene; Michael Peters’s “Wholesale Form: An Attack on the Corporate Form” which Igor Satanovsky described on the Internet as “a sonic assault and atmosphere of serious nervous restlessness and paranoia, moving on to dissect means of corporate invasive mental domination”; a talk by Columbus small press editor, Jennifer Bosveld, on “Poetry as Extreme Sport: Difficulties on the Road to Invention”; and readings by Peter Ganick and Joel Lipman that I was unable to find out much about except that they went well. More next issue.

There. Now, finally, my Important Announcements. My first is “Whether you are out of work or suck/ Gush/ On, gush on, you loofa belt. E.g. the air.” Which is to say that Al Ackerman got loose again, this time in the pages of a thing called Sack Drone Gothic, which is a “‘Heroic’ Hack . . . drawn from various John M. Bennett poems.” And very funny while farthingaling any receptive mind hostier for burstnorm poetry by being in a weird rich way poetry its own self. (Note: a farthingale, which I was writing about just now in something for another literary magazine, is a young shoot of a tree that was used to make skirts jut out at the hip in Elizabethan times.)

An even more important announcement is that Kathy Ernst’s Press Me Close has recently published a catalogue of the exhibit she and Marilyn Rosenberg curated at The Center for Book Arts in New York last fall. It has a picture of ME on the front (in full color!), so well worth the asking price. The catalogue has excellent color reproductions of most of the works in the show, two to five (usually three) from each of the following: Guy R. Beining, David Cole, Kathy Ernst, William L. Fox, Me, Scott Helmes, Crag Hill, Bill Keith, Karl Kempton, Joel Lipman, Marilyn Rosenberg, Carol Stetser and Karl Young.  I was on the cover as co-editor of Writing To Be Seen, the anthology of visiotextual art the show was promoting.

My final announcement is that the winter/spring issue of Modern Haiku has two fascinating full-color haiku-collages in it by Chris Gordon. It also contains an excellent long essay on the influence of haiku on the French between 1850 and 1930 or so. In other words, it appears that the new editor of Modern Haiku, Lee Gurga, is keeping it as superior to just about every other poetry periodical going as it was under the editorship of Robert Spiess (whose death in March of last year I regret taking so long to mention, for he was quietly a pivotal figure in American Poetry for a good many years).

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The Vislature Continuum

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 1/2 January/February 2013

Art = Text = Art, Rachel Nackman, curator. http://www.artequalstext.com

Identities. By Irving Weiss.
78pp; 2012; Pa; Xexoxial Editions,
LaFarge WI 54639. $20 ppd.
www.xexoxial.org

M@h*(pOet)?ica. Bob Grumman, Blogger.                   http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/28/mhpoetica http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/25/mhpoetica-summerthings                                     http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/22/mhpoetica-louis-zukofskys-integral

Repose and Reconstruction. By Bill DiMichele.                 http://tipchapknifebook.blogspot.com/2012/09/bill-dimichele.html

Yes, “vislature” is another of my coinages, an old one.  VISual art to literATURE. That’s what it means, and what the subject of this column is.

I’ll begin with a website featuring artworks close to the “VIS” end of the vislature continuum, but containing blips of verbal matter sufficient to make them visual poems.  They are “Repose” and “Reconstruction,” two inter-related sets of ten full-color collages, each, by Bill DiMichele, that I would term a diptych.  You’ll find a short introduction by me with it, too, with four complete works in that by Bill from books of his I’ve published.  From that you may assume that what I write here will be biased in his favor.  Fortunately, you can check up on me at Bill’s website for free (one of the really nice things about the Internet is how much of it is free).

Bill’s two sequences here are vibrantly opposed to each other.  The images of the first could not more effectively express the serenity of repose—which here is shown as a triumph achieved, not something subdued to.  At least to me, a person who finds happy lyricism in almost every artwork.  A representative sample image (the second in the sequence) practically sleeps out of beach-hues and beach-hints, with commotions of words just about entirely gone (just about escaped from?); all commotion of loud colors, too, just about absent; and almost no dramatic shapes, only a simplicity of rectangles somehow organically right despite their non-organic corners.  A holiday perfectly rendered, or a wonderful retirement . . .

“Reconstruction,” on the other hand, jitters the other way, loud wrong colors everywhere, torn fragments, a sense (for me) of things boarded up—but large-lettered ambition, possible stories rising to be told, and a buoyant confidence of a major synthesis under way.  Others will have different readings, which—finally—is the greatest virtue of Bill’s works, their multi-interpretability.  I think few will find ways to read them without exhilaration, though.

Similarly mostly visual, are the works in the Internet catalogue for the show curated by Rachel Nackman at Rutgers’s Zimmerli Art Museum.  It contains 109 works by 48 different artists, each represented by from one to three pieces.  They’re from the Sally and Wynn Kramarsky Collection. Few of the works are more verbal than DiMichele’s, a good number of them striking me as being fascinatingly just short of being visual poetry.   I was familiar with many of the contributors such as Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson, Alice Aycock and Ed Ruscha, but made a number of new discoveries, such  as Trisha Brown and Stephen Dean.  Brown was a big surprise to me because she turned out to do what I consider mathematical poetry, my specialty!  Hers explores much different territory than mine, though: graphs, and elegant strange wave-forms, the combination somehow emotively deep (reposefully deep, in fact!).  Stephen Dean makes interesting use of a kind of graphing with two daily paper crosswords overlain with magic squares reminiscent of Paul Klee’s.  Dean’s  squares are greatly different from Klee’s, however, due to their unusual interplay with what I’d call the overflow of the puzzles into the mornings of the thousands of people working them.  Emily Sessions, who has a commentary here on Dean, neatly sums up what they do: “His interventions into this quiet system—his reinvention of these puzzles and inscription onto them of the language of color—allows Dean to call attention to these (social) links. By maintaining their siting within the folded newspaper sections in which he finds them, Dean explicitly points to the puzzles’ social power.”  Similarly socially subtle is a help-wanted section Dean overlays with subdued magic rectangles.

The artists at Art = Text = Art, by the way, have 35 perceptive critics commenting on their work, Olivia Kohler, for instance, insightfully increasing our enjoyment of what Trisha Brown has done.  Great to double the value of a show like this with critical commentary!  (And not just because lazy reviewers like me can get out of work by quoting some of it.)

Much more verbal than most of the work at Art = Text = Art, is the TERRIFIC work at M@h*(pOet)?ica, a guest blog I somehow managed to get space for at the Scientific American website.  As of this writing, three installments of it have been posted.  It’s basically an introduction to poetry that has to do with mathematics, although so far the focus has been on what I call “mathexpressive poetry,” which is poetry dependent on mathematical operations for its effect.  Many of the examples I discuss are visual poems as well as mathematical poems–in full color.  The fact that I’m the blogger and many of my works are on exhibit in it does not mean I’m at all biased when I say that the blog is the best thing to appear on the Internet ever!  Or anywhere else!!!

I will leave the Internet now to plug a fine new collection by Irving Weiss, who will soon be 91, so may be the oldest living American visual poet.  This collection of his is right up my alley inasmuch as it is strongly verbal.  One piece new to me (as a number were not, for this is a kind of “collected works”) especially appealed to me.  It shows three rectangles, each overlapping one or two of the others.  In the one at the top a t is printed touching an l.  Under the box is the title, “united.”  The middle box contains the same two letters but they are now separated; the title shown is, “untied.”  The final box, larger than the others, has nothing in it.  Title: “untitled.”  Think about it.

Irving is joyously conceptual almost all the time, and more times than not, pretty funny.  He can be dramatically high-hued, too, as in “Moishe! Moishe!” which I take as an overview of Jewishness from all sorts of angles, erupting from the flight of Moses and the Children of Israel to some Jewish mother (in Brooklyn?) yelling for her kid to come home.  Or so I take it, but may be way off.  Anyway, the collection is very nicely packaged and well worth its rather high price to anyone with an interest in visual poetry.
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multifunction machines

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Dogma#1: a visual poem must consist of a significant graphic element significantly interacting with a significant verbal element. Dogma #2: a reader of the poem must experience the poem’s graphic and verbal elements simultaneously. There will come a day when neurophysiologists will be able to detect this simultaneous experience. Thereupon we will have an objective way of determining whether a not a given work is a visual poem–for a given person. (Bob Grumman, from Poeticks)

As to my method, it will be that of children’s guessing games, where the question is how two things resemble or differ from one another.(Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image )

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Again, intersections with Vispo? Yes, of course. And more. I’ll even go so far as to call it a prefigurement since Baker (with Cage, Corman, Grumman, & Perlman) were in a very real way there from the beginning & continue to be there now: silent partners in a developing form that the digital revolution really only helped to bring to everyone’s notice. A fact particularly true in regard to Bob Grumman. For all its strong pro-tech format, his (contribution to) SPIDERTANGLE:the_book, for example, is a particularly curious intermixing of  both Vispo and traditional pre-Internet visual poetics (a distinction which he denies): his superlative “Mathemaku” series, in particular, attests markedly to eclecticism and innovation both. But I’m inclined to believe Grumman’s work, while displaying impressive digital virtuosity, the only feature that makes it decidedly Vispo (in my view), is essentially a celebration of older styles. I believe he can be appreciated not just as innovator but as a member of an artistic and intellectual tradition attuned to changing cultural landscapes. Interesting critique always accompanies creativity. But first a word on the nature of origins and literary appropriations in general.

Is Vispo a verbo-pictorial (with primary ties to concrete poetry) or purely technical creation? Lines between them have been blurred almost to the point of non- recognition. I’ve said before that means of literary production may have meshed so completely with artistic form after the Internet revolution that Web 2.0  has made it necessary— in regards to literary work— to speak of ‘image’ (after Rancière) rather than the purely visual: in fact, literariness these days seems to have suffered the same fate as commoditized Art, or is well on its way. Or, more interestingly, that product may be virtually indistinguishable from product-line: artistry from the directives of not just a commercial but an academic marketplace where writing curricula & the publishers (and academics) who propagandize acceptable styles through them are part of the same sales pitch.

The recent Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, for all its claims to being a literary love-in, reveals writing for the trade show and clearing house it’s recently become and attests (like nothing else can) to the way literary works cater for a growing bourgeois mainstream appeal. Seeing Vispo as both the putative form of a new Web art or Webism and the successor to all the preceding visual arts (as its post-avant practitioners seem to do) perhaps calls into question artistic integrity itself.

that the one ideology is a convenient cover for the other. The reveries of artisans reconciled with the fine craftsmanship and collective faith of times past is a spiritualist mystification concealing a quite different reality: submission to the principles of capitalist rationality. When Peter Behrens becomes artistic advisor to AEG and uses Ruskin’s principles to design the firm’s logos and adverts, the neo-Gothic idyll reveals its prosaic truth: the production line. (101)

It’s the mixtures of Vispo practice (clean, dirty or otherwise) I’m interested in—all the slippages, shifts and creative dissonances 
evident in practice and the two distinguishable ways now of doing visual poetry online to which the one name Vispo supposedly refers. Vispo is where Art (and its theories) and a growing Webism co-exist; where the old forms seem otiose to the wildly diverse visual poetries and the growing number of software specialists-poets who now write them into being. Web 2.0, software-proficient and all too eager to erase any traces of old-school language identity theory, seems to have made an even greater parody of traditional mimetic poetry, of Art as chronicle of significant human experience.

I have  rejected the idea that Vispo is at best a so-called generic term for visual art: reasonably certain also that the gap beginning to widen between visual poetry rooted in Dada and Fluxus (among others) & a burgeoning Web version of it I’ve identified with Vispo (& said to be “digital to the core”) threatens to make visual poetry of any description essentially “unpresentable”. Art that cannot even stand to imitate itself. Just a wavering image, dissolving perhaps in the “original gap” (132) between genre purity and the “dirty” realities of artistic production Rancière says (in a different context) it’s the fate of avant-gardists to witness to in their work. And if not unpresentable, then perhaps digital art’s become bland to the point of having lost its own creative impulses: a cultural obscenity. “It is the obscenity, ” Baudrillard says in his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, “of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.” The obscenity of art reduced to a name (Vispo) or Webism.

If the original graphics-with-language ideal goes by the wayside, what’s left? Anti-art may soon turn into anti-artist at the rate we’re going, poetry surviving in name only, left in the end as some unsalvageable (irrecoverable) trace of a discarded hope. To be permanently erased from literary consciousness. There’s a lot at stake in the tendency to reduce things to a name or look (Logo). And it’s why if I choose to read contemporary Vispo, it must be work of the very best kind, associated not with techno-brands and Web 2.0 ideologies (which are legion) but authors who are too strong for any of that current radical decentering that’s still in  vogue.  Forms do not crumble in Grumman’s hands (as they do elsewhere). I believe a forcefulness of  personality will outshine the work itself so that if the latter ever falters, it may continue as an abiding authorial presence at least.  Faithfulness to a non-Western sensibility and Baker himself will never make his work Vispo in any sense.  And nor does a penchant for mathematical notation & neologisms, what amounts to a complete  “Lexicon Grummaniacal” , ever keep Bob Grumman far from his own ties to tradition and intelligent design.

As I’ve said, if visual poetry continues along its present path it will suffer the fate of the “image”. But Grumman’s work is not purely Vispo, to be interpreted along the lines of, say, Jim Rosenberg’s depersonalized “interface technologies” or Dan Waber’s wildly multimedia Vispoets.com site; it’s a lot of things that make it interestingly complex (Examples are from Grumman’s Poeticks blog). Conceptual, by which I mean poetry in the service of a distinctively mathematical and neurophysiological vision (not visual); minimalist- and haiku-based, every letter and syllable skilfully set into place; a little traditional, as in the case of his “linguexpressive” Keatsian-style lyrics, sonnets and haiku pieces; and perhaps even polemical, experimenting as it does with new attitudes towards language & reality, even daring enough to write its own dictionary of artistic production or explore uncharted regions of brain topography.  Grumman’s succeeded, I think, in keeping a writing project free from the noisy & cluttered dissonance of wildly untrained styles. He never strikes me as self-reflective or self-aggrandizing as many Vispo practitioners do. The axis of established (minimalist & visual) form is always nicely balanced (never upset) by that of a pure and reasoned  integration of poetics, theoretical psychology and digital technology.

Grumman is among the poets who attribute the effectiveness of poetry to the potential of language for radical rearrangement, with the result that work can look creatively rococo and, under the right digital conditions, even engagingly superartful. Attributes I give only to artists with feet planted firmly on solid artistic ground and imaginative heads suited to changing means of literary production. In his case, the “dissemblance” between genre purity and actual work never draws too much attention to each other, the elements of his craft always  expertly combined and presented. To begin with, his typology (from what I’ve seen) is fairly simple, breaking poetry down into infraverbal (such as Geof Huth’s pwoermds), linguexpressive (the latter including haiku, minimalist & sonnet forms) and the mathematical poetry (mathemaku) for which he’s best known. Not afraid to speak of the nature of human creativity in purely psychological terms ( see his “Knowlecular Poetics” and “The Nature of Visual Poetry” pieces),  hypothesizing that “neurophysiology will be the basis of all theories of poetics”, Grumman is speculative as well as artistic. Transposing brain physiology into discourse on the nature of visual poetry can be seen as the attempt to give a materialist basis to art: making even the bare bones lettering & software imagery of digital writing (what I’ve called the first principle of digital poetics) reducible to an even more basic grammar of poetry perceptions in the brain.

A positive (not the usual reductive hypertext) poetics is what you get in Grumman: traditional, intellectual and dynamically experimental. As I’ve said, emblematic of Grumman’s style is the mathemaku, a genre and mathematical notational mix that’s also interestingly haiga in presentation (though it looks as though in the “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World” the Basho haiku’s been slightly inverted for effect).

“Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World.”

The complex feeling, made up of image and a direct reference to haiku origins, of having to solve a problem and admire a visual artifact at the same time, makes Grumman’s mathemakus artistic delights: the materials never drawing too much attention to themselves, giving  them both experimental and aesthetical charm. The medieval lute “quotient” in the “Andrea Bianco” piece is particularly striking. A medieval age of Christian lutes, ecclesiasticism and an unenlightened world view as represented by Bianco’s crumpled pond-shaped map, underscored by classical haiku, are all food for the “thinking eye” (Silliman). Reflection, mental alertness and simple pleasures of viewing are essential prerequisites of a Grumman visual.

.                                                                                                                                           –Conrad DiDiodato

Guest Editorial

Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry

Among my many otherstream enthusiasms is a form of poetry I’ve
dubbed “infraverbal” because of its focus on textual elements
smaller than words such as letters, numerals, and even spaces.
Such poetry has been around for quite a while, at least since 1966
when Aram Saroyan’s much-reprinted “lighght” first appeared (and
got a small award from the federal government the memory of
which is still infuriating Philistines).  Perhaps the leading current
master of the genre is Karl Kempton, the author of the following,
which is from a book called To Taste (Laughing Bear Press, 1983):

.                        some roman math, c ion z
.
.                        Listen
.                        l
.                         is
.                            ten
.                        timez
.                        5
.                        iz
.                        the
.                        number
.                        of
.                        chanj
.                        loose
.                        and
.                        klinking
.                        pocket
.                        full
.                        of
.                        pennyz
.
The repetition of the poem’s first word might seem puzzling at first.
But the sentence it yields should become apparent.  That sentence
makes no sense, however–the “one” that Kempton has punned out
of the letter, “l,” can’t equal ten.  Is his stunt only clever, then?  I
say no, for to me it buoyantly shows, even as it asserts, the
multiplicative power of both “listen,” the word and listen, the act: if
only we listen, truly listen–not only to a text (on paper or
elsewhere) but into it, down to its very letters, and the cracks
between them–our world will increase tenfold.

No, wait.  Not tenfold, but fiftyfold!  Or so the poem goes on to
state, whereupon the poetic rightness of Kempton’s claim suddenly
marries the counter-poetic rightness of a Roman numeral l’s equaling
fifty.

Through this rich interplay of the intuitive and the rational, the
poem draws us into the concrete heard of “loose and klinking
chanj” (like the loose and clinking letters in Kempton’s repetition of
“listen”)–and at the same time into the high generality of change, as
a (boy’s) pocketful of pennies becomes its owner’s magico-
economic version of the magico-aesthetic transformation device
that words and letters are in the pockets of poets.  Thus does
Kempton’s trinket deepen dozens of colors beyond mere cleverness
into a full-scale lyrical celebration of boy’s pockets, coins, letters,
Latin, mathematics, English–and the secret of listening things into
High Poetry.

A shorter but equally effective specimen of infraverbal finesse is in a
recent issue of the magazine, Alabama dogshoe Moustache (#11,
just out).  It is by George Swede:

.                                      graveyarduskilldeer

Here three words are spelled together not only to produce the
richly resonant “double-haiku,” graveyard/dusk/killdeer//
graveyard/us/killdeer, but strikingly to suggest the enclosure
(like letters by a word) of two of more people (a couple–or,
perhaps, all of us) by an evening–or some greater darkening.

In a poem called “Birth, Copulation and Death,” that was recently
published as a chapbook (dbqp press, 1991), Jonathan Brannen is
infraverbally concerned with similarly final things.  Take, for
instance, its second section:

.                                          bentrance
.                                                 *
.                                        intereruption
.                                                 *
.                                           nowledge

Most of the copulation-related analogies that Brannen’s spellings
bring to the fore should be fairly clear, but note in particular the
stutter that the extra “e” in “intereruption” adds, and the way the
excised “k” suggests fertilization’s being not only a ledge to Now,
but only a silent letter distant from Knowledge.  It is through such
subtleties that infraverbal poetry most excitingly proves its value.

My final specimen of the genre is another piece by Karl Kempton:

.                                     antique question
.                                           anti question
.                                               a we
.                                               awe

Here it is especially vital to read the poem both as words and
letters, and to watch as well as read it.  In such a reading, and
watching, the poem should make almost tangible the idea of a
question’s congealing into a serenity beyond irritable answer-
seeking.  And the subsequent parallel drawing together of “a we”
into “awe” should have an even more electrically almost-tangible
impact.  Indeed, I don’t know how a poem could better celebrate
that sense of overcoming the we/they-ness that “a we” implies, and
achieving Final Sharedness, than Kempton’s does.  Nor can I
imagine what more I could say to prove the point of this essay: that
infraverbality, especially as used by the poets I’ve been discussing,
is as formidable a technique as any in poetry.

from the April 1992 issue of Small Press Review