Columbetry, cuh LUH beh tree,  from “Columbus” and “”poetry”: poetry which either does something important for the first time, or does something important effectively for the first time.

Magnipetry, maahg NIH peh tree, from “magnificent” and “poetry”: poetry of the highest excellence.

Textual Design, TEHKS chew uhl dee ZINE: synonym for “textual visimage.”

Textual Visimage, TEHKS chew uhl VIHZ ih mihj, from “textual” and “visual image”: a work of textual visimagery.

Textual Visimagery, TEHKS chew uhl vihz IH mihj ree, from “textual” and “visual imagery” : visual art containing textual elements but no meaningful words.

Visimagery, vihz IH mihj ree, from “visual” and “imagery”: visual art.

Visual Poetry, VIHJ yoo uhl PO eh tree: poetry containing visual elements whose interaction with its words results, in the view of the majority of reasonably knowledgeable, objective observers, in something of central significance to the poem’s full aesthetic meaning.

M@h*(pOet)?ica　– PlayDay, Part Three

How’s that for a happy start? From which I jump to a haiku by Wharton Hood:

This is not intended to have anything to do with mathematics but is here as a near-perfect interpretation of the algebra preceding it. And also as a terrific haiku¹ by another of my under-recognized friends in poetry. It’s here, too, finally, because I just happened to read it while looking for something else to put here—a poem actually having to do with numbers (which I still haven’t found).

To tell the truth, the Hood poem is not “a near-perfect interpretation” of the algebraic poem—which is by LeRoy Gorman. I do think that its wonderful image/concept “absolute morning” is pretty close to that. But its top line will put half of the poem strongly in what I call a reader’s “anthroceptual awareness” (i.e., people-related perception area) of the brain whereas the Gorman poem is equally strongly half in the “matheceptual sub-awareness” of the brain.² Half of each poem will inhabit the brain area all poems must (to be poems), the verbal area (oops, I mean the verboceptual sub-awareness).

I need to point out that LeRoy’s poem doesn’t quite make sense throughout. Adding an s to un quite logically results in “sun,” but how, I wonder, can s be something that can be subtracted from up? Wait. Inside up is a compressed s which I now say verbally stands for “secret.” Release this secret and up becomes an “un.” Actually, it’s inside the p—which becomes an n without it. In some secret manner.

I know, I know: we don’t need this kind of analytical rationality to enjoy the sun as ultimately that which is up, and a representative of “no” being the sun with the secret of its yesness ripped out of it. I contend that those who appreciate the poem, very likely as soon as they see it, as I did, will have experienced the reasoning I’ve confusedly described in a better way than mine unconsciously, as I also did, but being a critic had to try to translate into something my consciousness could deal with.

Here’s another by LeRoy:

This is unarguably both verbal and mathematically logical—that is, if any mathexpressive poem is. The two terms shown are verbally equal because consisting of the same letters. They are mathematically equal because us taken to the power of any integer (“n”) obviously equals the source of all life, the sun. Oh, Apollo, hear me and grant me thine agreement!

I mistyped “hear” as “here”—then mine brain bubbled into what “here me” would mean, what—that is—can we make of “here” as a verb? I say “to give one who is somehow unlocated a place to be, as the sun, or Apollo representing it, can be said to do.” If it’s a PlayDay and you have a weird brain.

Okay, hold onto your hats, we’re now going into a fearsomely philosophical discussion based on an exchange I had with Kaz Maslanka over at

http://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot. com where Kaz runs what I believe is the only blog primarily devoted to what I call mathexpressive poetry. The initial subject concerned the following work, a copy of which Marko Niemi sent Kaz, first in German, then in Marko’s translation, which Kaz turned into the estimable visimagistically-enhanced work³ below:

Here’s what Kaz said about the German version: “Marko tells us it was written by the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel in the 19th century. Even though I can not translate it, I do know the beauty of dividing by zero. Although mathematically dividing by zero is undefined, the limit as you reach zero approaches infinity. In other words if you graph 1/x you can see the asymptote blow up in your face right at zero and it is a wonderful sight!”

Kaz provided Karl Kempton’s take on dividing by zero, or—in the following case—by nothingness, to suggest (as I interpret it) the Taoist/mobius mysticism one of the right temperament can follow the division into:

Taoism, Wikipedia says, is a Chinese doctrine that “the (eternal) tao is both the source and the force behind everything that exists.” It is undefined, like infinity—and, I’m afraid I’m evil enough to add, non-existent, since it is a relationship, not a material entity.⁴

That the Schlegel equation was formulated so long ago brought up the question as to whether or not it may have been the world’s first mathematical poem. I said in my blog, where I posted Kaz’s version of it with some comments of mine, that it was not, because it was not a poem. “It seems mostly informrature to me–i.e., intended to inform rather than provide beauty, as literature is intended to do (in my poetics),” said I. I conceded, however, that it was “a marvelous step toward what Kaz and I and Geof and Karl⁶ are doing, perhaps a pivotal one (although I don’t know of anyone who was inspired to create mathematical poetry by it).”

Kaz discussed my comments at his blog, continuing to hold that Schlegel’s work was a poem because of the beauty he found in it. I wasn’t aware of what he wrote until I much later visited his blog to steal the Schlegel for use here. I then amplified my stand, slightly, this time specifying that the “beauty” a poem aimed for was aesthetic beauty, which in my philosophy is sensual, not ideational, although the latter can achieve a kind of beauty. For me, the Schlegel work is a philosophical attempt to state what God, the Poetic Ideal, is the same way Einstein’s E = MC2 is a scientific attempt to state what energy is. I simply can’t see/feel/understand it as something for us to enjoy sensually the way Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion is. Yes, perhaps it is intellectually beautiful the way Einstein’s incredibly compressed (to some, transcendent) equation is. But that one will experience that beauty in a different part of the brain than one will experience oratio or poem.

I did not give Kaz a chance to reply to the above before publication for fear of a back&forth that would make this entry too long, but I’m sure we’ll go another round or two after he sees it. In any case, the Schlegel whatever is certainly potent evidence of where a mix of math and words can uniquely transport you.

For a change of pace from all this heavy thinking, here’s another piece by Karl Kempton:

Next, several pieces by Václav Havel at http://www.doctorojiplatico.com/2013/04/vaclav-havel-antikody-1964.html> that Irving Weiss sent me to. The pieces there are basically concrete poems, published in 1964—and incredibly capable for a man who went on to win an important political office. The first is all plus signs, which gave me the excuse I needed to post it here:

 “Decadence?” I’m sure there are many ways of looking at this but I see it as the essence of the totalitarianism all nations eventually degenerate into: a perfectly regimented set of positive conformists—”positive” in being sure they’re right, but also “positive” in requiring the perfect happiness that modern totalitarians capture them with promises of—the communists in Havel’s time, just about every political party in ours.

On the other hand, it can be taken much more simply as a satire on art at its most decadent: entirely symmetrical and, again, positive. The “satirical construction” that follows seems a variation on “Decadence”:

The next piece is all numeric, so also qualified to be here:

A bit sardonic, yes? I left the lettering small (and blurry) because more expressive of what it’s saying that way, I think.

I liked the two remaining pieces in this collection of Havel works too much not to include them although neither is mathematical or even simply numerical:

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Each, however, is conceptual, so will probably appeal to someone in science more than one not.

I also have some more poems by Ed Conti. The first is about prerithmetic (i.e., counting), which I hope you remember from my last entry:

It’s from Ed’s Hic Haiku Hoc, a book I liked so much that I’ve been telling people for years that my press published it. Actually, I now learn it was actually published by an outfit called The Poet Tree—back in ’94. So was the next one:

FOUR OUT OF FIVE CAN’T READ ROMAN NUMERALS

fIVe

Roman numerals have inspired quite a few infraverbal poets. An infraverbal poets gets his effects from what he does inside words rather than from their external interactions with each other. Another example of Ed’s infraverbality but this time using the alphabet, something else often inspiring infraverbal poets, while not in any way mathematical or numerical is scientific:

THE PARTY’S OVER

Galaxyz

The fraction below is by the late Bern Porter, a fascinating poet/scientist whom you should look up on the Internet. It, too, is infraverbal, allowing a reader to disconceal⁷ all sorts of words, my favorite being, “posit.” It seems to me to represent any work of art as a ratio of its adherence to a formula (like the unifying principle I wrote about in my last entry) to its creativity, or that portion of it that exceeds rote expression . . . but it’s upside-down!

To conclude, I will turn now to a piece by Márton Koppány

I have it here only to set up a second poem of Márton’s that I hope to discuss in wonderful depth in my next blog installment. Its title is “Almost A Question.”  I’m not up to the commentary on it that it deserves now, but do feel obliged to give you one hint about it: Márton makes many poems with an ellipsis at their core; there is one in this poem. And that ends this PlayDay, except for the footnotes—but you’ve already read those, right?

* * * * *

¹ Because some of you may be bothered by this poem’s breaking the supposed rule that a proper haiku must have two five-syllable lines with a seven-syllable line between them, I need to point out that the more sophisticated American haijin, as composers of haiku are called, have for many years been breaking it, sometimes even more radically than Hood has here. As have Japanese haijin—including some of the very earliest. A haiku has probably five or six highly significant characteristics, of which brevity is certainly one—but the exact size of the brevity is not at all important. My From Haiku to Lyriku discusses this matter in detail.

² Now you’re finding out the real reason I’ve made this and my other two recent entries playgrounds: to let in my loony thoughts about the brain!

³ “Visimagistically,” as I hope most of you will recognize, is the adverbial offspring of “visimagery,” my term for “work of visual art.”

⁴ According to my philosophy, scholarly ethics requires me to say—but my philosophy is the only valid philosophy!⁵

⁵ Sorry for the outburst. I know all of you know this . . . but there are some who deny it! Ergo, I’m a bit touchy about it.

⁶ Four poets I know of that have dealt poetically with nothingness and infinity.

⁷ One of my very earliest poetics coinages, meaning to take some word partly or fully inside another out of concealment.
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Pembroke Pines Dating

Mad Poet Symposium, Part One

Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 9/10, August/September 2002

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.

An American Avant Garde: First Wave:
An Exhibit Featuring the William S. Burroughs Collection
and Work by Other Avant-Garde Artists
John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators
48 pp; 2001; Pa;
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library,
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.

It began with an afternoon open mike poetry reading on Friday, 26 September 2002, in one of the rooms in the main library at Ohio State. I was pretty out of it–a 30-hour trip on a

Greyhound bus can do that to you, and it was little more than an hour behind me. I recognized the first reader, though–Mike Basinski. He was grunting and howling–with a big smile. According to Dave Baratrier, who posted an impression of the proceedings to an Internet poetry discussion group (and kindly put me up the two days I was in town), Mike’s poem involved “all kinds of packing materials.” I remember things being thrown into the audience, I think, but it’s now hazy. I should have taken notes, but didn’t. I do know that ten or fifteen poets besides Mike eventually read something. Most hesitated to do so until it looked necessary, no one else seeming to want to. I hesitated near- maximally, myself. I had come thinking I would read something but got spooked by how far out the material being presented was. The poem I’d chosen for the occasion was text- only. It was purposely agrammatical at a few points, and used a number of portmanteau Joyceanisms but did not seem very unconventional. The ones who read seemed awfully good, too–and polished. So I quickly got the worse case of stage fright I’ve ever had. I even started feeling ill. That saved me, though, for it made me angry enough at myself to decide I had to read to prove I could. So I pushed myself up and did okay.

Among the other readers were mIEKAL aND, Peter Ganick, Lewis LaCook, Andrew Topel, Tom Taylor, Michael Peters, William Austin, Dave Baratrier, and Igor Satanovsky (who used a bullhorn for what he read, which included a hilarious harangue against “ski’s” or “sky’s” we could do without–like Stravinski, Kandinsky and . . . Basinski).

After the reading came an hour or two of visiting, and snacking on the excellent food provided, though I now forget what it was. Then, John M. Bennett, main organizer of the event, led us out of the building and across a few lawns to the Grand Lounge of the OSU Faculty Club. There we heard Marvin Sackner’s keynote address, which turned out to be a presentation using Powerpoint (a computer program for presenting computer images as though they were slides). He was very entertaining about his collecting activities, showing some of the works in his archive as he discussed them. Then he presented a survey mostly of work he owns by presenters. It took him worrisomely long to get to something by Me, but he made up for that at last by showing three pieces of mine! Among them was a visual haiku about a boy on a “s.wing.” This, he noted, was from 1966, which indicated how long I’d been doing visual poetry. After his speech, when we happened to be leaving at the same time, I thanked him for saying how long I’d been doing visual poetry, meaning I was pleased to be thought someone there in “the early days.” He took me to be jokingly annoyed with him letting out how ancient I was, so I’ve decided now that that was how I intended it.

So ended the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit, which was at the library from 20 June through 3 September. I’ll be writing more about the symposium in my next few SPR columns, for I believe it, and the exhibit it was part of, were Of Signal Importance To American Culture. The catalogue that was published for the exhibit was a wow, too, and I expect to spend at least one full column on it. It, and the catalogue for the exhibit that preceded it last year, are well worth the money asked for them.

Note: to see pix of participants in the symposium, and some neato photographic impressions of the exhibit by Thomas Taylor, go here.

So far in this section is a discussion by Joey Engelhart of my mathemaku.

A One-Zine library of Visual Poetry

Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Number 5/6, May/June 1998

Xerolage, Numbers 1, 25 and 26,
Winter 1985, Fall 1997 and Winter 1998; 24 pp., each;
Xexoxial Editions, Route 1, Box 131,
LaFarge WI 54639. $4.50 ppd., each.

QUERY, QUEST, & QUASI, by Marilyn R. Rosenberg.
Winter 1998; 24 pp; M. Rosenberg,
67 Lakeview Ave., West, Peeksill NY 10566. $10 ppd.

DiMichele’s work, in my terminology, is visiocollagic poetry, which is to say that its verbal and visual elements are separate on the page but blend in the mind as opposed to the verbal and visual elements of visualloyic poetry, which are merged on paper as well as in the mind. Throughout DiMichele’s still-not-out-of- date romp through the possibilities of poetry are micro-triumphs like the combo “briarsand brains” (sic), “molybdenum of the nightingales,” and “pain and space.” Most of his graphic images are from iconophilic religions and mysticism. Do-re-mi charts of consciousness development (or whatever they are) occur–in about the only crisp print in the generally misty/mysticky sequence. On the next-to-last page, “of purpose making” is printed with “purpos” upside-down, “em” sideways and going up from “purpos”– and turning into “aking,” with “of” sideways and going down just right of “em.” The letters of this text are blown up to about quadruple normal type size, and parts of them are missing. The “r” and “u” of “purpos” are joined to give the upside version of it a shape recalling both “sound” and “sodium,” while the “po” of “purpos” continues naturally into “em,” the “s” moving a little past the line “em” is on. Then there’s “aking” as “aching” and as “a king.” “Sodium” might seem a little out of left field here, but to me it suggests salt, which I deem a major secondary element of human existence, behind the primaries, fire, water, earth and air. The main text on the last page says, “sing, perplexing and bewildering to an honest”–and there it stops.

In the visiocollagic poetry sequence Rosenberg has composed for Xerolage 25, she treats double-pages as the windshield of a car traveling through her life. Teeming with letters, words, drawings, occasional photographs, each page seems a summary of the possibilities of visio-textual art. Here are just a couple of the surface highpoints: the word “SILENCE”, large and in outline (i.e., nearly invisible), spent two letters at a time on the last four spreads save one, which is dominated by stop signs and the word “STOP,” and, amusingly, “STOPPAGE”; the first page’s “ST” towering above the word, “ART,” and soon making “STEP” and “STORY”–and, among other things, setting up the final ST-pages; a great ink&wash drawing of a fire hydrant; the footnoted relationship of “SHOUT” to “south” . . .

Incidentally, Rosenberg has recently put together a new artist’s book, QUERY, QUEST, & QUASI that I think worth publicizing. As a limited-edition collector’s item, it is a bargain at ten bucks. Here’s what I wrote Marilyn after receiving a copy of her book three days before my birthday (give or take a phrase or two): “Your mousefully delightful book picked a great time to get here. I have no brilliant first thoughts about it. I just like the design & (as always) the words within words (e.g., “sUPpose” . . . “supPOSE”), none of them ever not elegantly wedded to the overall thrust of the work. So many narratives to fun around in, the main one being–I take it–human querying, investigation, sniffing through existence like mice [several masterful drawings of which Rosenberg has scattered through the book]–but lots more.”

Steve McComas’s contribution to the Xerolage series, The Book of not Seeing Things, consists mainly of visual collages–but with enough texts mixed in for me to call it (barely) visiocollagic poetry. Close to its beginning it is actually visualloyic, for its second page consists chiefly of the large-lettered text, “GENE/ SEES” (a play on “genesis”/”geneses” and, illumagistically, symmetry and near-symmetry). On the page before an Assyrian-looking ancient holds a giant cut-away schematic of the human eye on one shoulder. The following label runs down his front to indicate the tone of much of McComas’s sequence: “i, atlas, never shirk or wear a shirt or jockstrap. i, atlas, supporter of lost causes. i, atlas, bearer of a new vision.” McComas takes a few comic swipes at the Bible, too, reproducing passages from “The Book of Genesis” with key repeated words replaced with amusingly inappropriate/appropriate ones, in an enlarged typeface of a wrong-looking style: e.g., “garden” three times becomes “DETAINMENT FACILITY”–as in “Therefore Lord God sent them forth from the DETAINMENT FACILITY of Eden.”

But as he wryly explores the nature of seeing and not seeing (with, for example, a series of pictures of various “texts”–such as Tarot card-faces, traffic signs, Indian sign language, bee- signals–crossing the page from a mouth to an ear), McComas is as thoughtful as he is comic, even occasionally approaching lyricism. I was particularly taken with one simple, precise but highly abstract outline of (perhaps) a Chinese temple with three tilted black lines that looked to have been finger-painted above the temple that made me think of Chinese ideograms (or the beginnings of writing) ascending from (and referring back to) the sacred. In short, The Book of not Seeing Things is multi- faceted and deep–as are just about all the specimens in the Xerolage project.

For well over a decade Xerolage has been giving one-man shows (on 8.5″ by 11″ pages) to top-notch visio-textual artists including, now, Steve McComas and Marilyn R. Rosenberg. The series began with a collection of work by Bill DiMichele, (Above) At The Meeting Of White Witches, which DiMichele describes in his introduction as “A study of the four-dimensional face of Humanity, a conjuring of higher functions, a practical monomyth, Gurdjieff-Ouspensky influenced, told in a Xerolage style.”

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Artist’s Statement

Comment on this poem in particular from Visiotextual Selectricity, 2008, an anthology containing Koppány’s poem:  “My intention was to write in light on the dusty canvas of sky a word which is illuminated by the small four quotation “lamps” — but also hidden by their unusual arrangement.  It is about the paradoxical nature of evocation.  The other dedicatee, in parentheses, is my late father who Hungarized his name before I was born.  I was tinkering (again) with the Cordelia-motive (an old fixation).  First came “‘aside’, but it was too descriptive; then “‘ash’, with my own family’s idea, but it was too direct; finally I found “‘dust’, which brought in my mind a close friend and his stance in poetry.”

Begun on 5 February 2011

Grumguage GRUM gwidj: words and phrases created (or redefined) by Bob Grumman in the arrogant belief that the glorious English language is insufficent for the kind of incredibly full-scale understanding of each of the many significant fields of knowledge that Grumman has achieved in spite of the mediocrities and submediocrities in (mostly unconscious) opposition to him

Subjective Maxolute Reality (that reality whose existence comes closest absolute certainty): my mind plus all that it can directly experience through my body’s sensors.

Subjective Probsolute Reality (that reality that exists beyond reasonable doubt): the constituents of maxolute reality according to logic (pure rationality), and is not contradicted by anything I know about maxolute reality.  It is not necessary for it to parallel what I know to be maxolutely real, but it helps.  Others’ minds, for instance.

Objective Maxolute Reality: That portion of my maxolute reality that (I believe) a majority of others accept as maxolute reality.

Objective Probsolute Reality: That portion of my probsolute reality that (I believe) those (I consider) knowledgeable about the portion involved agree with me about.

Metaphysical Reality: Anything outside the above realities; fun to think about, but irrelevant

The Otherstream 19 Years Ago, Part 3

Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 9/10 September/October 2012

Poeticks.com, Webmaster: Bob Grumman http://www.poeticks.com/bob-grummans-small-press-review-columns/june-1993

My fifth column (March 1994) for Small Press Review (actually it was for Small Magazine Review, which for a short time was separate from SPR) concerned a Small Press Review guest editorial of mine that had appeared a year before in SPR about the number of different “schools” of poetry then extant in America.  I listed some, then invited others to send me names of schools I’d missed.  Two others wrote me complimentary, encouraging letters–but no names of schools.  My column was a rant about the situation (which continues).  Here’s one paragraph from it:

“That’s about it. Dana Gioia, on the other hand, got so many responses to the Atlantic article he wrote a year or two ago on the state of American poetry that he can’t even begin to reply to them, or so he claims. Since Gioia’s appreciation of poetry stops at around 1900, and even his academic knowledge of it is only up to 1960, I conclude from the opposite receptions given our articles even taking into consideration the relatively large circulation of the Atlantic) that the poetry community in America has almost no interest in poetry, or even mere discussion of poetry, that uses techniques not common by the fifties or earlier.”

Eighteen years ago, and the situation hasn’t changed!  To illustrate it back then, I turned to an issue of Poetry USA just out which was devoted to just about the entire spectrum of contemporary American poetry.  About Mike Basinski’s, “Odalisque No. 4,” I told how he circles an O with twenty words containing a v–or V, many of them not normally spelled with v’s–”vords,” for instance. This would undoubtedly seem a silly game to Gioia and his Atlantic readers, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a ‘down’ sharpened to ‘dovn,’ a ‘water’ turned Germanic and fatherly as ‘vater,’ and such unmodified words as ‘wives’ and ‘aggressive’ as suddenly alien objects, speared into or downward.  Or, best of all, to find between ‘wildevness’ and ‘festival,’ and opposite “wives,” the wonderfully expanded ‘luVst.’”  (See my blog, entry 7.)  Then I lamented that slickzines like the Atlantic would no doubt “continue forever to ignore publications like Poetry USA,” as, of course, they have.

In my next column, I spent some time on Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes–because he had an entry in it on me–as “a major critic of avant-garde American poetry,”  no less!  So far as I know, Kostelanetz’s dictionary failed to make much of a splash, but Schirmers around ten years later published a much fancier edition of it (that I contributed several entries to), which was an advance of sorts.  I wrote some editor of a new edition-in-progress of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics recommending he check it for data available nowhere else.  He didn’t write back.  Their edition has just hit the market.  I’m curious to find out if it covers any aspect of poetry discussed in Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia.  Visual poetry, yes, for it has covered it (poorly) in previous editions.  Infraverbal Poetry, perhaps, although not by that name.  Mathematical poetry.  No way on earth.

I went on from Kostelanetz’s encyclopedia to another work just out then by him, WORDWORKS.  I complained about its not yet having been reviewed in either the academic or the popular media, despite its being a landmark collection of Kostelanetz’s most clearly major works and part of a series that includes collections by such certified poets as John Logan, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass and Carolyn Kizer.  I think I may be the only one even now who has reviewed WORDWORKS.  Nor has anyone, to my knowledge, written a book-length critique of all his work yet.  Which is disgusting.  Even more disgusting is the fact that, so far as I know, no such book has been published about any genuinely otherstream poet.  I’m too poor myself to take on such a project with no chance to make anything from it–WHERE’S MY PATRON?!?!

After abandoning Richard without the 70,000-word treatment his work deserves, I discussed three otherstream microzines of the time, Texture (language poetry plus a commentary on Gertrude Stein by Julia Spahr that didn’t work for me), The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee (which I described as having “a wide selection of collages, and visual and electrojunctive poems–what the latter are I now have no idea), and Grist On-Line, the first online zine I’d come across with otherstream material (poems by Andrew Gettler and Jurado, neither of whom I’ve seen work by since–but Grist is still online).  Its editor, John Fowler, set up an electronic poetry bookstore, I see from my column.  I had books at it, happy to get in on the ground floor of such an enterprise.  Nothing whatever came of that, needless to say.

My columns for the next two issues of  SPR had to do with work at what I then considered “the Literary Cutting-Edge.”  Alas, except for interesting computer- and Internet-related poetry, it remains the literary cutting-edge.  I tackled two issues of Peter Ganick’s microzine, A.bacus, in one column and an anthology Peter’s press published, The Art of Practice in the other.  Amusingly, the poetry in these was mostly by the langpo crowd that my vispo crowd–most of it, anyway, including me–was on bad terms with, but I not only gave my best critical attention to it, but was positive about it!  I do believe I can be objective as a critic, and focus on whatever poem I’m analyzing, putting aside petty rivalries.  And I didn’t actively dislike anyone in the vispo crowd, just wasn’t happy about the way some of them left us out of shows and anthologies they might have included us in, as we included them in ours at times, and–more important–failed to write about us, even as little as I wrote about them.

Anyway, in my encounter with the issues of A.bacus and the anthology, I did what I considered (and still consider) cutting-edge explications of poems I considered genuine language poetry.  Not now though, for I’ve come to the end of what I consider my allotment of column-space.
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Yahoo Dating Personals

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The Latest Visiotextual Art Anthology

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 3/4 March/April 2013

the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008
Editors: Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis.  331pp; 2012;  Pa;
Fantagraphics Books,
7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle WA 98115. $40.
www.fantagraphics.com

Toward the end of 2012 Fantagraphics, a well-known mainstream publisher of full-color, beautifully-reproduced graphic novels and the like, came out with the last VISPO anthology: visual poetry 1998 – 2008, marking the first time to my knowledge so commercial a press was responsible for anything having to do with visual poetry.

The anthology is divided into five (not very helpfully-labeled) sections, each with a group of three to six essays to the fore: “Lettering,” “Object,” “Handwritten,” “Typography,” and “Collage.”  Boasting 148 contributors from 43 countries, it is clearly intended to display the full range of recent visio-textual art (from 1998 to 2008, according to its title) rather than highlight the best such art from that period.

When I dipped into the first section, “lettering,” which consists almost entirely of textual designs employing mostly distorted letters, I found very few I could say much about.  Take Daniel f. Bradley’s “White Witch 10,” which consists of white letters of varied sizes and fonts scattered across fragments of black rectangles in a small patch way up at the top of an otherwise empty page.  A witch’s effect on language, a white witch’s?  The hint of the magic for good or evil of language is nice, and the design itself seems masterful to me.  That I can’t say much about it is not its fault.  But . . .

Perhaps my favorites in this section (except for two visual haiku by Scott Helmes whose work I’m always plugging so will say no more about here) are two side-by-side wonderfully colored scatterings of letters by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen that seem views into the living inhabitants of the microscopic realm from which language originates.

In the next section, “Objects,” I began noticing the excellence of the editors’ choice of pairings, and longer sequences of images: for instance, on  pair of pages here Chris Joseph’s “Hair” on the left, and Michael Basinski’s “ZERZOUR” flow gracefully from one to the other, both centering on a female face, both warm with flesh tones.  Each has verbal content, too.  In “Hair” it is fused both visually and conceptually with the piece’s image of a woman’s face, one of its words being, “ringlet,” for instance, another “blonde.” The words in “ZERZOUR” are employed mainly as discrete visual elements in the collage the piece is, thus presenting chances for the discovery of unexpected interconnections–or interdisconnections–making it harder to get to the poem they and the visual elements eventually cohere into than it is to reach the poem “Hair” quickly becomes.  The poem “ZERZOUR” becomes will also vary much more from reader to reader than the one “Hair” becomes.

I can’t leave “Object” without mentioning one of the real objects by K.S. Ernst in it: a sculpture in which wooden letters spell “VIOLET” downward (in violet)–with a red N  jammed like a shelf between the word’s E and T: the verbal and visual as one, and wonderfully expressive.

The “Handwritten” section consists mostly but not entirely of hand-written pieces, two of which I especially like on facing pages, Robert Grenier’s “AFTER/NOON/SUN/SHINE” and “RED W/OOOD/RED/WOODS”  (with the extra O intentional).  Each consists of large skinny printed letters spelling its text in red, green, blue and black ink in what you might guess was a homeless person’s calligraphy–very crude-seeming–but carrying (it seems to me) all the visual charge and fun of the asemic art it resembles plus a haiku-deep semantic resonance–rising from a firmly denotational archetypal basis.

John M. Bennett has two works in this section that similarly, and differently, demonstrate the way words and graphics can combine in paths into the importantly new out of the importantly old of the concrete poetry of fifty or sixty years ago.

Skipping around a bit, I opened the “Typography” section by chance to Karl Jurgens’s amusing “For bp” (bp being the famous Canadian visual poet, bp Nichol).  It consists of two rectangular layers of bp’s, one superimposed on the other, with blank in the shape of a huge H left in the middle. Included in its title is the information that no H’s were harmed in its production.

In the final “collage” section, Two pieces in particular caught my eye, one called “Florescent Hunting Knives” by Andrew Abbott and, next to it, E y, by Alberto Vitacchio, even though I found both of them verbally hermetic.  Intriguing shapes and colors. Abbott’s seems some kind of manmade block extending into a waste land, or waste sea.  On it is what may be a mailbox with four newspaper clippings pasted on it bearing the message, “WELCOME ASSORTED FLUORESCENT HUNTING KNIVES.”

The background of Vitacchio’s piece seems to me either a sky with wispy clouds over some kind of greenery, or a portion of a lily pad on a pond with some kind of white scum on it.  Two vertical strips take up most of the piece’s middle, one labeled at the top, “E,” the other labeled at the bottom, “y.”  Green vines connect them.  I like them both, but fail to see the point of calling them visual poetry–i.e., I can’t read them.

I understand that several mainstream big city bookstores are carrying the anthology.  One disappointment is that no reviews, to speak of, even as short as this one, appeared in the first three months or so that it’s been out.  Nor has it made any list of “notable books of 2012.”  But it compares favorably with the two great concrete poetry anthologies of 40 or so years ago, edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams.  No one with any interest in art combining text and graphics should be without it.

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