The State of North American Vizpo, Part Five

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2010

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      October is Dada Month
      Edited by Marshall Hryciuk
      2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
      30 Laws St., Toronto ON
      M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.

      Visio-Textual Selectricity
      Edited by Bob Grumman
      2008; 44 pp; Pa; The Runaway Spoon Press,
      1708 Hayworth Road,
      Port Charlotte FL 33952. $50 ppd.

 

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Eleven of the 88 works in October is Dada Month are by jwcurry by himself or in collaboration with someone else. They are all a challenge for a critic, all Dada mysteries on the verge of some consequential meaningfulness just out of sight. Or, to put it less pretentiously, they are expressions of strange, hard-to-define moods. His “stigation,” for instance, has the “word,” “STIGATION,” printed sideways down the piece’s left half against some kind of mottlely who-knows-what background. “Instigation,” needless to say, comes to mind–someone’s been goaded to do something shady . . . Like make art?. Art? This particular piece of art?

I ask, because most of the small words on the cut-out rectangles that are pasted here and there either parallel or at right angles to “STIGATION” speak of actions related to making a collage, like this piece: “he glued,” “rearrangement,” “he constructed.” Another rectangle has the phrase, “the text does not minimize.” Other words in an oval near the center of the piece have undecipherable words–except for several instances of “seem.” The muddiness of the rest of the entirely monochromatic piece contribute a feeling of mystery and illicitness to it. Along with the “stagnation,” “stigma,” defective sight (stigmatism), and (for me, at least) the Styx that the piece’s title-word hints of.

Is what I’ve said of any help? I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I spent over a month looking at the work and thinking about it before trying to critique it. Most of the better works in the anthology had the same effect on me. Something about them makes them impossible simply to dismiss, but near-impossible, too, to be cogent about.

Not quite from the same realm is Guy Beining’s “Upper and Lower Translation of Text for Beige City.” Beining has several varieties of signature poems to his credit, and this is the four quadrants one. I doubt the set-up is unique to him but he makes unique, uniquely

resonant use of it: it is merely the division by two crossing lines of the page into four sections, each containing a text or graphic or combination of the two on the piece’s central theme. In the piece’s upper left quadrant (but overflowing into the quadrant below it, the text, “BEIGE COPY/ THAT THATCH/ THAT TUFT/ THAT BLONDE BEIGE/ TERRITORY OF HER/ COMMINGLED EDGES/ FRAMED BY HER/ FOUNTAINED SELF.” Strange, but coherent. The other three quadrants contain texts that act as variations of the colors in the first text, blond and beige–for instance, “spit white on/oven fat/ bis/ bise/- – -/ yelowish-grey” in the upper right quadrant.

I’m going to cheat here and not try for a close reading of the above. That would require a full column by itself. I will simply tell you that I think I could come up with a plausible interpretation that made sense. Hence, the “not quite from the same realm,” for I believe the mystery here can be cleared up as well as the mystery in every halfway-decent (modern) poem can be. But you need all the text, and the extra elements in the piece such as the font selection, the intentionally low-grade resolution, the larger bold black “BLOND” off to the side of the upper left text (whose “blonde” has a line through it) to be able to follow me. One impression; that the piece is a rough draft of an attempt to capture some blonde, and each of its texts is a rough draft of a fraction of that attempt.

Beining has several other fine pieces in the issue, some of them in gorgeous full color. Another contributor with well more than one excellent piece in the collection is Daniel f. Bradley. One, “after,” resembles curry’s “STIGATION” in being a monochromatic Dada mood piece. At the top of it is a rectangle that suggests a blackboard with lots of old chalk on it. The words “after” and “air” in white type are super-imposed on it, “after” high and to the left, “air” lower and to the right. Oh, and a white comma is under “after,” with a white period below that to the left, a little higher than “air.” Underneath is a big 50’s televsion set, with a cat perched on it, looking a bit lost. That’s it.

Note for the finicky: the author of this piece considers it poorly reproduced. I find it

imperfectly but certainly sufficiently well-reproduced. There are many in visio-textual art who remind me of the kind of people who write authors of detective stories when they get some detail of a hero’s handgun wrong. Who cares? Not that I would not love everything to be perfectly reproduced, it’s just that perfect reproduction is trivial compared with the over-all design and meaning of a piece (and most everything else about it).

I find it hard to explicate the Bradley piece, but here’s an attempt: some event has happened whose aftermath the poem is describing, or trying to describe, but what it presents is a . . . well, a sentence that peters out after one word, hits a pause after a good deal of blankness, then stops when its period appears after much more blankness. What happened is hard to communicate. What follows is air. But air can transmit the electronic waves responsible for the information on a television screen. So here there’s a strong intimation of meaning inside the air spoken of. But the screen it apparently is being transmitted to is . . . blank. Waiting to be turned on? The cat is indifferent, but gives the scene an ambiance of Total 70’s Normalcy. Life goes on whatever in this case it is after. And it is serene, hakuable.

Another lame grapple, this explication of mine? Who knows. It’s as good as I can do at the moment. I hope it will at least suggest ways into an appreication of this piece–and others like it Melody Wessel’s charming visual poem, “Gossip,” I had less trouble with, for it’s a black-and-white design in which typography (many question marks and commas) suggests something I see as a lighthouse in the midst of a confusion of mad non-language. Its beacon seems a mad swirl from which a jumble consisting of the letters, G, O, I, S, S, P tumbles out.

There are many other first-rate works here, particularly Marshall Hryciuk’s “History of the Marketplace, 51st performatif,” Karen Sohne’s suite of entirely nono-verbal, non-representational artworks, and John Vieira’s “two strains of music.” The price of the collection is considerable. I would suggest trying to get the nearest college library to buy a copy, and visit it there every few months. Unless you’re more affluent than I.

 

 

Out of the Null Zone   Small Press Review, Volume 28, Number 12              Taproot Reviews, #9/10, Summer, 1996;      edited by Luigi-Bob Drake. 40 pp.;      Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107. $5.      A.BACUS, Number 96, February 1996;      edited by Peter Ganick. 6 pp.; Potes &      Poets Press Inc, 181 Edgemont Avenue,      Elmwood CT 06110. $4.      Avec, #10, 169 pp.;      Box 1059, Penngrove CA 94951. $8.50.      Antenym, #8, December 1995; edited      by Steve Carll. 50 pp.; 106 Fair Oaks St. #3,      San Francisco CA, 94110. $4.50.      Bleeding Velvet Octopus, #2, October 1995;      edited by Mike Halchin. 12 pp.;      Box 25760, Los Angeles CA 90025. $1.      Bullhead, #4, 56 pp.;      2205 Moore St., Ashland KY 41101. $5.   “The featured poet this time around in this one-poet-per-issue zine is deservedly Nortonized language poet, Ann Lauterbach, with twelve jump-cut, surrealistic poems that start with a ‘Harmony Clown/ from his seat on the shelf before Is,’ or situated in some kind of Ur (also mentioned here) of pre-perceptual imagination. ‘Is this field’s dementia, its prow?’ the poet asks. Next comes a strangely vivid list of situations and their colors–having ‘no boots to hike thru Jerusalem,’ for instance, ‘would be Black.’ Blake, Rilke, Stevens, Roethke and more.” Here’s another review of mine I want to quote from so I can claim to have reviewed a review of a review. It’s about Mike Halchin’s zine, Bleeding Velvet Octopus, which consists of “around 50 capsule reviews by editor Mike Halchin of (1) music, (2) zines/comix and (3) books/chaps. Halchin is usually informative in a breezy way. Here’s a sample line, about a Dave Alvin chap with a title too long to quote here: ‘Poems that hit across deserts, highways, small towns, relationships on their way to a hearse, and other intense such adventures.’ Of interest to zine- publishers is that Halchin sells ads to his zine and–from his list of rates–seems to have made $65 from them this ish, which should have been enough to pay for its publication. (And the ads are all about worthwhile otherstream stuff, so definitely do not detract from the zine.)” Among the other reviews in the issue is one about Antenym, which reviewer Jake Berry describes as “An excellent collection of poetry that seems to come out of the Language school, yet follows no approach absolutely. The poets’ names are given in the table of contents yet not on the page, which encourages the reader to see the work for what it is rather than who it is by. In that spirit, this sample: Dead attention is where I hang my hat, but for us to change seats you’d have to make the first motion. the book is a brick. these ripped oranged stuffed with hurry. drunk and lolling in the pools of shinning yellow paint. The work here is rarely so far out as to defy logical approach, rather it illuminates that approach, and expands the possibilities of analysis. Besides that, it’s simply a joy to read.” I singled out this review not only as one more sample of Taproot reviewing but to call attention to one of the dozens of worthwhile zines of the 115 or so reviewed here that I was unfamiliar with. 143 chapbooks are also reviewed. And the material covered goes, in editor Luigi-Bob Drake’s words, “from punk to pomo to LANGUAGE to dada to visual to even some pretty normal stuff.” I consider it near-final proof of the wretched state of contemporary American Poetry, in spite of what the hype artists on PBS and elsewhere proclaim, that Taproot still has less than a hundred subscribers. A second significant virtue of Taproot is its concern with not just printed poetry but with poetry on the net, and on video- and audiotapes. Berry’s review, for instance, also includes the e-mail address of Steve Carll, the editor of Antenym, and the website from which one can bring up back issues of his zine. My main reason for quoting Berry’s review, though, was to call attention to the wonderfully misused language of “these ripped oranged stuffed with hurry,” and the rest of the poem it’s from. Andy di Michele is equally adept at quoting, giving us Laura Moriarty’s “ordinary red precedes! imaginary yellow follows” and Rosemarie Waldrop’s “Milk weeds my thoughts” from Avec, #10. Outside its reviews Taproot more prominently displays a number of full excerpts from books and zines reviewed. Among them is a fascinatingly infra-verbal work from Bullhead, #4 by Joe Napora, complete with a fine accompanying illustration by Pati Scobey. In his poem Napora rearranges “heart” through “heat” and the like to “head,” which, he observes, (is) “too near to dead; then he precedes to the following magical juggle of the “each” in “reach”: “love we know/ within/ reach// each/ ache/ is fire”. Before leaving Taproot (far too soon), I want to praise one more characteristic of it, its remarkable stable of reviewers. Among the almost 30 in it are Karl Kempton, John M. Bennett, Ben Friedlander, A.L. Nielson, Karl Young, Nico Vassilakis, Cheryl Townsend, Ann Erickson, Peter Ganick, and on and on. So it’s a great place to meet superior poets from all schools in prose.

Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)

YES

NO

Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.

The Coming of The New Millennium

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Small Press Review, Volume 31,
Numbers 9/10, September/October 1999

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Unwrapping Spheres of Cloud & Skulls, by Guy R. Beining.
102 pp (with matter on one side of a page only);
62-65 Saunders St., Apt. 3I, Rego Park NY 11374. $35, ppd.

Valley, by Mike Daily. 224 pp;
Bend Press, Box 886, San Pedro CA 90733. $13.

Chiron Review, Number 57, Spring 1999;
edited by Michael Hathaway. 48 pp;
702 N. Prairie, St. John KS 67576-1516.
Website: http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Nook/1748. $4.

Comprepoetica, Sitemaster: Bob Grumman.
website: http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492.

 

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BEINING, Guy R. (26 September 1938). A major post-Eliot/Olson word- and field-jumbler early in his creative life, most signally in his long series, Stoma (to this day incompletely published), Beining turned painter, as well, in his forties. The result has been an outburst of master-collages that combine texts (his own and found or appropriated), photographs (ranging from porn to high science) and his own inimitable, often figure-based doodles, in which Pollockian splash-strokes unexpectedly achieve a Matisse-like elegance, with hints of Joseph Beuys and Marcel DuChamp prominently in the background. In most of these pieces, varied fragments jar against and/or flow from one another (e.g., on the first page of his 1994 Unwrapping Spheres of Cloud & Skulls where the list, “clodde/ clott/ kloz/ ie./ block/ clud/ rock/ hillock/ clod/ clot/ klut/ ie./ lump,” flanks a photograph of a stairway up to a circular opening into a sky from which an over-sized man–probably Beining–looks down, and a photograph of some kind of modernistic dark-glassed container of candles).  Such works seem to be Beining’s present specialty.

– Bob Grumman, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Schirmer, 2000

Beining, Guy. Stoma 1322. Toronto: Curvd H&Z
(#2 – 856 Somerset W., Ottawa, Canada, K1R 6R7), 1984.
______. Piecemeal I through VIII. Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon, (1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952), 1989.
______. Stoma: selected poems. Huntington, WV: Aegina Press,
(59 Oak Lane, Spring Valley, 25704), 1990.
______. Carved Erosion. Seattle: Elbow
(Box 21671, 98111-3671), 1995.
______. too far to hear. Morris, MN: Standing Stones
(7 Circle Pines, 56267), 1997.

 

Ho, the third millennium of the current era will be here soon (at midnight, 1 January 2000, not 2001, according to my definition of millennium: a period of time equal to one thousand sanely-countable years unless some fool or group of fools has played around with it, in which case it may be only 999 years in length, as with the first millennium of the Christian Era). I have taken its arrival as an excuse finally to go completely off-column, possibly for good. That is to say, I plan in this and at least two more columns to write whatever I wantz to, and call the mess an end-of-the-millennium round-up. Except that I will mention at least one piece of genuine Experioddica–or something close to it–in each installment. Hence the mention at the top in the list of items I’m reviewing of Guy Beining’s highly satisfactory collection of collages and text, and drawings and text, and drawings and collages and text, Spheres. It’s as expensive as hell but what isn’t, and besides, there are only a few copies of it around, and a little of it is in full color. Each copy, too, is autographed by Beining and has a unique colored artwork glued on its title-page. Its being mentioned here guarantees its price will hit six figures by 2002 at the latest (and is, of course, why Beining gave me a free review copy of it).

Actually, I got the free copy because Richard Kostelanetz was preparing a second edition of his Dictionary of the Avant Gardes (for Schirmer’s, believe it or not) and had invited me to do some entries for it, one of them to be on Beining. So I wrote to Guy for some information about himself and what he’s most recently done to add to the much I already knew about both. He sent me some great photographs of full-color works I have to return, alas, plus the review copy of Spheres, and lots of other nice stuff. And I made the entry at the start of this column. I did entries on ten or twelve other people, too, but feel bad because I didn’t do ten or twelve–or fifty–more, mainly for lack of time, and insufficient data (mostly having to do with such trivial matters day, month and year of birth). So, apologies to all I ought to have written into Richard’s book but failed to.

So far this column doesn’t seem that different from my previous ones to me but here’s where everything changes, for I’m jumping into my next subject without one of my wonderfully professional transitions! It’s a novel called Valley about which I wrote its author, “It reminded me somewhat of Bukowski (as novelist) but a Buk of a different generation/slant/style . . . mostly because usually so to the point, understated–a sort of bumming around into minor epiphanies. . . . I liked the collage-effect” (Warp Magazine accurately spoke of it as jumping “from genre to genre . . . (by using) a pastiche of journal entries, newspaper clippings, poetry and screenplay scenes”–graphics, too, I would add. Oh, the valley it’s about is the San Fernando Valley and its characters are mostly twenty-somethings–sort of Hemingwayesquely feeling their way into literature and life as in The Sun Also Rises, it now strikes me–but it’s been a long time since I read that (without the enjoyment that I read Valley), so who knows.

My poetry website, Comprepoetica, is in the list at the head of my column because I was going to get into a millenniatical spiel about all that’s happened this century and all that will be happening next century which I expected to deposit me into some Serious Reminiscing about things like my SMR column, which first appeared in June 1993 and, with this, has now reappeared 36 times, and started to appear early this year at Comprepoetica, too. I was a little leery of rereading them, as I had to, to get the website editing right, but after I did, I felt okay about them. Enough to say more about them in my next installment of this series of columns.

Because I thought I ought to list some magazine above, too, and had a bunch mine editor, LF, had sent me lying around, Chiron Review made this column–even though it’s not at all out of the experioddica universe. It’s half contra-genteel, half mainstream poetry and prose–Marge Piercy, for instance, and an essay on Sharon Olds by Ron McFarland, some neo-Bukowski (very funny) lineated prose by Joan Jobe Smith about Bukowski, and several short reviews of books and magazines, including a good-heartedly supportive one of Lee Thorn’s Fuck, which is out of the experioddica universe–at least to the degree of having poems in it by John M. Bennett. For that alone Chiron Review deserves this mention.

 

A New Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art, Part 1

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2011

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Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia
Guest-Editor: Andrew Topel
Script, Issue 2.2, June 2011,
Edited by Quimby Melton, with 8 Associate Editors

http://scriptjr.nl/issues/2.2

Andrew Topel has recently done visiotextual art the signal service of gathering large samples of some of the best work in the field (the international field, I should emphasize) from the past thirty years or more, and putting it on display as an issue of SCRIPTjr.nl, a wildly far-ranging Internet publication (“cyberzine?”) devoted to . . . well, the intro to the zine starts out, “The editors started SCRIPTjr.nl to explore literature’s last frontiers. Primarily interested in the theory and interpretation of filmscripts and teleplays, SCRIPTjr.nl nevertheless recognizes that these literary artifacts exist in a hinterland populated by other abject textual forms.” Such as visual poetry and what I call “textual visimagery” (for visual designs featuring textual elements sans significant verbal meaning like those of Fernando Aguiar I’ll soon be discussing ).

The artists represented are Fernando Aguiar (Portugual). Dmitry Babenko (Russia), Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany), Márton Koppány (Hungary), Hassan Massoudy (France), Constantin Xenakis (France), Ebon Heath (USA and Germany), and Americans K.S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton, Loris Essary, Kaz Maslanka, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Carol Stetser, Andrew Topel and Paul Zelevansky. Karl Kempton provides an introduction which my friendship for Karl prevents me from saying much about–except that his term for calls the works gathered, “Sound Illumination,” is the least helpful term for such art I’ve yet come across.

To continue being cranky, I feel I need to mention that I found getting around the exhibit somewhat difficult at times. It would have helped me if instructions like “click here to return to first page” were provided–instead of, or along with the icons that one can click to get around. True, the latter will tell you where a click of them will take you if you rest your cursor on them, but one as computer-unfluent as I may take a long time to figure this out.

My one other general gripe is that I found most of the show’s participants over-represented. This is a subjective view. As Karl told me when I complained that the site quickly wore me out in spite of–actually because of–all the good things in it, I could easily have dipped into it for a short time, left, then come back later. But that’s not for me. I would prefer a carefully edited collection of, say, five or six superior works from each artist with links to where one can view other works of theirs–at the end of the full exhibition so as not to distract from the central viewing.

Okay, mostly positive thoughts from now on, thoughts that will sprawl over two columns,  so much is here to discuss, or at least mention.

The most prominent form of art in the show is the visiotextual collage. There are two kinds of such art here. One consists of atextual graphic images seamlessly merged with textual elements to make a unified, usually surrealistically arresting whole. Among the very best of those composing this kind of collage has long been Fernando Aguiar, with 26 samples of his work here. Rarely if ever do the textual elements he uses make words. They generally represent language or something made up of language rather than act as language, as in one of my favorites of his works in this collection in which the sonnet rhyme scheme, “abba abba cdc dcd,” crosses a river out of a young girl’s mouth.

Another first-rate example in the show of such collages is Dero Abecedarius, a 31-frame sequence by Klaus Peter Dencker. Dencker describes this as having “two principles of order: it develops alphabetically and uses New York’s Statue of Liberty as a primary motif. (It) presents the statue, a sort of public-relations symbol, in several variations.” These allow him collagically, with long flowing lines of cursive script in German, to treat freedom versus “the somewhat absurd representations of it that abound in consumer culture.” Also in the show are eight of his selected works, all of them equally effective combinations of graphics and text–in the way of the best magazine advertisements, which I don’t mean as a criticism (since they treat much larger issues than ads, much less predictably–and since many ads are extremely interesting aesthetically).

The other kind of visiotextual collage consists of what seem to be cut-ups thrown together to suggest haphazard spontaneity–that nonetheless (“accidentally”) result in often wonderfully unexpected sensibility- enlargers. Two exponents of such collages are represented in the show, Dmitry Babenko and Paul Zelevansky (albeit the work of neither seems truly “thrown together”).

Babenko’s image-packed work reminds me a bit of the packed eruptions of Wisconsin wildman Malok (who just about never has work in collections like this one, which I can’t understand). Each of Babenko’s 15 pieces consists of more than one closely inter-related frames, and all of them together very likely form a more or less unified sequence. Certainly their colors–browns, tans, greys and dark reds, for the most part–do not change much from one to the next. Not speaking Russian, I can’t comment on what they do verbally, if anything.

Paul Zelevansky only has 13 works here, ten of them illustrating different definitions of the word, “sweep”–amusingly–but, if one stays in each of his poems long enough, one finds them vividly insightful as well, and even more amusing. In the first, for example, he depicts a sheet of paper rising out of a typewriter with the line, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES,” five times, starting about an inch or two below the piece’s title, which is also, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES.” About an inch below the rising sheet of paper is a huge “ALL” in a box next to a second box containing a version of “THE GAMES” with the E of “THE” repeating downward in a stack, then sideways, then back up to its place in “GAMES.” There a hammer is giving it a good smack. The need not merely to win but dominate absolutely could not be more dynamically expressed. Nor how ridiculous it is, particularly considering the patently low quality of the typing. The rest of the sequence is similarly deft, and climbs into another level of amusingness via its interactiveness.

TO BE CONTINUED
.

aberrateur, aah BUHR uh TUHR, noun, from “aberration” and “teur” as it occurs in such words as “saboteur”: one who makes a significant but extremely defective contribution to world culture–Sigmund Freud, for example.

accelerance

accommodance

apollonian, AAH puh low nee aahn, noun, from “Apollo,” Greek god of the sun, whom I consider the ancient god with the most to do with clear thinking:  a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more logic-based than anything else.  OBSOLETE

behavraceptual awareness.

carticeptual awareness

charactration

compreceptual awareness

 

compreplex

contradiction

Long ago an animal’s ability to tell when something in the environment contradicted its expectations had to have evolved. Certainly, human beings have such an ability. In knowlecular psychology, it depends on certain antagonistic pairs of urceptual (i.e., innate) knowlecules called dichotocules. The ways it works is straight-forward. When one dichotocule of such an antagonistic pair is activated, it automatically suppresses k-unit release (i.e., transmission of energy to other brain-cells) of the other to the degree that it is activated. When both are activated at the same time, sensory-cells sensitive to that will turn on a contradiction knowlecule (also urceptual). That neither of the two antagonistic dichotocules can become active will cause frustration–directly or indirectly. As a result, the subject will (or should) lower into accommodance.

Most contradiction knowlecules are activated by some motor or endocrinal dispute such as an arm’s trying to raise and lower itself at the same time (e.g., a child’s parent says not to make a sound, then the child sees a man aim a gun at the parent and tells his vocal cords to yell at the same time that he is continuing to tell them not to yell.) Other natural contradictions may exist, as between black and white, night and day, male and female. . . .

crank,  kraahnk, noun: pseudosopher who draws on untenable premises to construct, with extreme logic, theories whose internal inconsistencies, however gross, and contradiction by external data, however damaging, his lack of exploratoriness prevents him from often encountering, his lack of critical intelligence prevents him from recognizing when he does encounter them, and whose inflexibility would prevent him from doing anything effective about if he did, yet never concedes he may be in any way wrong.

culturateur, KUHL chuhr uh TUHR, noun, from “culture” and “teur” as it occurs in such words as “saboteur”: one who makes a significant  contribution to world culture.

dichotocule

dionysian, DAI oh NEE juhn, noun, from “Dionysus,” Greek god of wine (and, for me, of instinctual pleasures): a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more instinctive than anything else.  OBSOLETE

egoceptual subawareness

egosocioceptual subawareness

evaluceptual awareness

evaluceptual frustration

evaluceptual resolution

expressilyst, ek SPREHS ih lihst, noun, form “expression” and “analyst”: a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is primarily based on how the poem presents its content, or its manner os expression, rather than with its content.

freewender, FREE wehn duhr, noun, from “free” and “wend”: one of the three temperament types posited by knowlecular psychology, the freewender is characterized by superior accommodance.  Roughly similar to David Riesman’s “autonomous personality.”

frustration, see evaluceptual frustration

fundaceptual awareness possible obsolete

hermesian, huhr MEE jee aahn, noun, a person whose aesthetic appreciation is more experience-based than anything else.  OBSOLETE

heteroteur

human activities

     Art is the serious pursuit of beauty–by artists.  It is not the passive enjoyment of beauty.

     Verosophy is the serious pursuit of truth–the addition of understandings of existence to world culture, not merely the passive study of others’ understandings.

     Utilitry is basically, engineering of some sort or another–the active construction of things or understandings whose purpose is to facilitate other activities as opposed to being carried out entirely for their own sakes, as art and  verosophy are.

     Sustenation is simply what we do as animals to stay alive and reproduce.

     Quotidiation consists of such quotidian activities as gabbing with friends, taking a walk, playing with a dog, that are too trivial to count as art, verosophy or utilitry (but can include passive involvement with those).

     Dominantry is what politicians and warriors of various sorts do to achieve positions of power which allow them to tell others how to live their lives.

     Recreation consists of activities, mainly sports and games like Bridge and Parcheesi, that I consider more important than the activities covered by Quotidiation.

instacon, IHN stih cahn, noun, from “instant of consciousness”: the shortest unit of psychological time, or length of time it takes for a person to be aware of anything.

instinctilyst, ihn STIHNK tih lihst, noun, from “instinct” and “analyst”:  a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is based primarily on the amount of instinctive pleasure it affords by means of its attention to stimuli normal human beings are automatically attracted to like a 3-month-year-old happy baby.

Internet troll, IHN tuhr neht TROHL: a psychopath who intrudes on Internet discussions seeking solely to damage, or–better–utterly destroy, someone else’s self-esteem, probably out of jealousy over not having any of his own.

(the) is-flip

knowleplex

likenry

magnipetry, maahg NIH peh tree, from “magna” (large) and “poetry,” noun: the best poetry

 

 

maxobjectivity

milyoop

long-term remembering,

milyooplex

 

musclaceptual subawareness

objecticeptual awareness

objectivity

 

phobosopher

pre-sequevaluative process

protoceptual awareness another term for fundaceptual awareness

(the) pre-verbal Is

(the) pre-verbal Is-Not

pseudosopher, soo DAH suh fuhr, irrational seeker of truth

psychevent, SI kuh vehnt, noun, from “psychological” and “event”: all a person experiences during a single instacon–that is, the combination of percepts caused by sensory-cell activation by environmental stimuli and retrocepts caused by simulteneous activation of master-cells in the cerebrum.

reality, ree AAH lih tee, noun: that which causes a conscious mind perceptually to experience it; there are two kinds: subjective reality and objective reality; the former is what one person perceptually experiences or believes himself to have experienced but which few or no other persons have also perceptually experienced; the latter what many people have perceptually experienced.

reducticeptual awareness

repetiteur

resolution, see evaluceptual resolution

rigidnik

rigidniplex

 

sagaceptual awareness narrative-awareness. (This, to be very brief, has to do with a person’s awareness of himself as the hero of a saga and is the basis of goal- directedness, deriving from the
hunting-instinct that I believe even primitive organisms have; it also derives from the predator-avoidance instinct we all also seem to have–in which case one’s sagaceptual goal is escape from an evil rather than
acquisition of a good.)

scienceptual awareness

 

sequevaluative process

short-term remembering, noun, the use of the mnemoduct to awaken memories of recent experiences different in no way from the awakening of long-term memories, but favored by the brain because at the time of their creation, dot-routes are primed.

socioceptual subawareness

supra-apollonian, SOO pruh AAH puh low nee aahn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “apollonian”: an apollonian strong  either or both dionysianly and hermesianly.

supra-dionysian, SOO pruh AAH puh DEYE ow nee juhn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “dionysian”: a dionysian strong  either or both apollonianly and hermesianly.

supra-hermesian, SOO pruh AAH huhr mee jee aahn, noun, from “supra” (“above”) and “hermesian”: a hermesian strong  either or both apollonianly and dionysianly.

urcept

urceptual persona

dichotomous anthroceptual personic sub-awarenesses: 12

SELF AS                        OTHER AS

child/slave                        father/master

father/master *                 child/slave

nonconformist                  anti-model

conformist                        model

befriendee                        friend

friend *                            befriendee

vicariant                           hero

mother/nurturer **           child

child                                mother

combatant *                    enemy

pet-owner                       dog/cat

male or female                 sex-object

 

 

urwareness

verosolyst, vehr AH soh lihst, noun, from “verosophy” and “analyst”: a person whose aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is based primarily on its truth (according to its freedom from or contamination by contradictions).

verosopath

verosopher

viscraceptual subawareness

wendriplex

KNOWLECULE: a brain’s record of a unit of
knowledge (e.g., a single word in a poem, when taken at its simplest
face-value meaning–as “horse,” for instance, would be when
considered to mean the animal. It would include all that the word
connotes for the indicidual involved.

KNOWLEPLEX a brain’s record of any closely related system
or network of knowlecules–“horse,” for example, when it represents
all the make up a horse, such as a heart, lungs, legs, etc.

KNOWLEXPANSE the representation (or recording) in the
brain of all the data a vocational field or the like, such as
literature requires

KNOWLECULINK a link between two knowlecules; used to
transmit energy from one to the other, or vice versa

NEOWLECULINK a knowleculink which is new for the
individual forming it

NEOWLEPLEX the knowleplex formed when a neowleculink is
laid down

MICREATIVITY (short for “micro-creative”), the creativity
that results in a neowleplex that is a neowleplex only for the
individual it arises in, not for society as a whole.

ALPHA-CREATIVITY the creativity that results in a
neowleplex which is new to the individual’s culture if the
neowleplex comes to be highly valued by the individual’s society

DELTA-CREATIVITY the creativity that results in a
neowleplex which is new to the individual’s culture if the
neowleplex never comes to be highly valued by the individual’s
society: the gifted amateur interior decorator, or the Sunday
painter of talent, for instance, but not most people, who are
generally micreative

CREATIVITY any of the three varieties of creativity just
listed

CULTURATEUR maker of culturally-significant works of art,
science or some other equally major cultural field; always
alpha-creative

ABBERATEUR an agent of large-scale cultural abberation

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The Latest from the Otherstream

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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 5/6 May/June 2013

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Addenda.  Márton Koppány. 2012; 56 pp. Pa;
Otoliths,8 Kennedy St., Rockhampton QLD 4700, Australia.  $24.95. http://the-otolith.blogspot.com http://www,lulu.com/spotlight/l_m_young

www.talismanmag.net
Richard Kostelanetz’s Fict/ions and This Sentence
(Blue and Yellow Dog, 2010)
www.talismanmag.net/finkkostelanetz.html

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Back-cover blurbs are usually useless, but Sheila Murphy recently did one for Marton Koppany’s Addenda, that I consider good enough to quote here.

“Conceptual art can be bountiful, spare, even beautiful. With an economy of presentation, Márton Koppány’s work uniquely captures, invents, and refashions installations on the page from unexpected sources. His works run the gamut of humor, politics, and philosophy. Each piece offers a genuine gift of perception. With signature purity, works such as ‘Asemic Volcano,’ showcase the potency of word-free realities.”

At this point, let me break in to say that in “Asemic Volcano” a red question mark is rising from a red volcano that looks like a pedestal–two objects only against a wide violet background–“word-free realities,” to be sure–utterly word-free, which puts them utterly beyond reason’s best explanatory means . . . except for the question mark elegantly labeling the volcano the final enigma at its most minimalistically reduced state that Nature is.  Reason may not be able to escape Nature’s eternal ambiquity, but neither can Nature ever free itself of conceptualization’s attempts to harness it.  Along the same lines, I might add, is “Utterance,” which consists of just an empty comic-strip word-balloon in a small grey rectangle inhabiting a very large all-white rectangle.

Then there’s “Emptiness,” which is a white page with “ness” in cursive taking up a small portion of it followed by any arrow going to the right. “Vibrant with lui-meme realization,” for sure, as Murphy has it.  “‘One Moment in Three Sections’ (or ‘Study’),” she goes on to say, ‘depicts a tiny triumph’” : that of a stick figure keeping a single moment’s “hurrah” (expressed by extended limbs rather words) in force for three frames of a little comic strip.

Murphy ends her blurb with an exuberant but, in my view, accurate reference to Koppany’s “Old Question,” and “Addendum.” In preparing us for ‘Still Life No. 2,’ these,  she says, are “a final reminder of the inherent interconnectedness among all things. The recombinant majesty of Koppány’s genius raises the bar for what is possible in the infinitely expanding universe of visual poetry.”

“Old Question” depicts a huge period wearing the kind of hat most American men wore 60 or 70 years ago. A hand is coming out of the period that clutches  the top of a question mark, using it as a cane.  “Addendum” depicts two question-mark-tops juggling colored balls (or periods).  The two, and others in the book, do indeed, set up “Still Life No. 2,” which may well be the most complex minimalist work in this long-ongoing series of Koppany’s, involving Nature, punctuation, colors, even arithmetic (so slated for an appearance one day in my Scientific American blog if I can afford the fee I’m sure he’ll charge me) and too much else for me to say more about it here.

As I was working out some close readings of Marton’s work for one of my Poeticks.com entries, I was reminded of my friend Richard Kostelanetz’s recently calling me better (ahem) than anyone at close-reading innovative poetry after a visit to one of my Scientific American blog entries.  I replied at the Internet discussion that Richard had made his remark in that if I was, it was only because almost no one else was doing close-readings of innovative poetry.  At that point others brought up names of quite a few who were, and were doing it well–although still not a huge number of them by any means.  Among those mentioned was someone I wasn’t aware of, Thomas Fink.

I got into a pleasant Internet conversation with him, learning of his having done a review of a book of Richard’s for Talisman, an excellent literary magazine that’s been around for quite a while, with now an online version anyone can refer to.  Because it gave me a good excuse to plug a work of Richard’s to pay him back for the compliment, but–even more important–to allow me to bring attention to a good critic of otherstream work, and to the value of close-reading, I thought I’d quote what Fink wrote.

“Blue and Yellow Dog Press has published two books in one by Richard Kostelanetz,” Thomas’s review begins. “Each starts on a different side and is upside down from the other.”  In one of them, Fict/ions,  words are shown infraverbally divided by slashes into two or three inner words–“boo/me/rang,” for example.  About this one’s narrative, Thomas says, “The sound of the flying object cutting through air is a ‘ringing’ (not subtle) denigration of the first-person narrator, perhaps because s/he is foolish to use such a dangerous implement.  Also in a reversal of  the startling transformation of ‘manslaughter’ to ‘Mans/laughter’ through a delayed slash, surprise is engendered by Kostelanetz’s decision to place the first slash one letter earlier (“boo”) than one would expect. I generally hear ‘boom’ in ‘boomerang’ but not ‘boo.’”

I tend to like most those of Richard’s fissional poems (as I call poems like his fict/ions) in which a change of punctuation is even more dramatic as in “Char/is/ma,” to which Thomas brings our attention a little later. “Similarly, the tangible result of a mother’s tragic (tragi/comic, I would say) burning in ‘Char/is/ma,’ he says, “is not evidence of the charisma that she might otherwise possess. The sonic disjunction echoes the thematic one. The juxtaposition of the single word and the three smaller ones indicates a displacement from a unified ‘hot’ or ‘glowing’ psychological quality to the disintegrative effect of actual heat.”

I would especially commend Thomas not only for his close-reading but for the many times he quotes Richard’s material–his “I/nun/dating.” and “Be/aches,” for instance. Or “Does not an encyclopedia of the world inhabit this sentence?” which is from the other book of Richard’s double-book, This Sentence, pointing out how effectively the word, “encyclopedia” in the sentence provokes a reader “to create a fragment of that encyclopedia.”  To put it banally, lo, the power of words–if a poet disturbs a reader’s expectation enough to make him truly reflect on them.

Here are three more of Richard’s sentences to finish pinning down what he’s doing, and because they’re fun:

This sentence is syntactically correct. . . .
This sentence correct syntactically also is. . . .
This sentence not correct is syntactically.

And then there’s possibly my favorite: “Clumsily is this sentence organized unfortunately.”  Thomas make several choice remarks on these and others of the “The Sentences,” but I’ve no room left to include them here.

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What’s New    Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 7/8, July/August 1995            Synaesthetic, No. 2, Winter, 1995; 100 pp.;      178-10 Wexford Ter., Apt. 3D,      Jamaica NY 11432. $15/2 issues.      Croton Bug, No. 3, October 1994; 76 pp.;      Box 11166, Milwaukee WI 53211. $8. In a review that recently appeared in this magazine, C. Mulrooney chided me for believing, or pretending to believe, that what I write about as a critic (or, as Mulrooney would have it, pseudo- critic) is a new art movement. While it’s generally a waste of time responding to the unsupported snap-assed views of people like Mulrooney, I’ve decided to do so in this case because of the importance of the question in poetry of what’s new. What’s new as far as I’m concerned is something I’ve dubbed “Burstnorm Poetry” because of its refusal to be restricted by any norm of grammar, spelling or symbolic decorum (by which I mean traditional poetry’s reluctance to incorporate non-verbal elements like computer coding, musical notation, drawn images, etc.). Some of the numerous strands of burstnorm poetry, principally “xenogrammatical poetry” (my name for certain kinds of “language poetry”), have been around since the fifties, or can be traced back further to Joyce, Stein and the Dadaists. Indeed, isolated precursors for ALL of its strands can be found in previous decades–or centuries–which only means that nothing is entirely new. Nonetheless, I claim that burstnorm poetry is a new art movement, because (1) as literary history goes, forty-years-old is not necessarily old; (2) a movement’s newness does not depend on the novelty of its product but on how long the movement has attracted a significant number of participants; and (3) many strands of burst-norm poetry have, in fact, been significantly practiced by no more than one or two scattered poets for as long as a decade–e.g., infra-verbal poetry (or poetry whose letters, punctuation marks and other elements below the level of words are expressively important), mathematical poetry (or poetry that literally carries out mathematical processes), sound poetry (or poetry whose extra-verbal sound is central) . . . Certainly burstnorm poetry is doing more new things technically than its two rivals, plaintext poetry (standard free verse) and songmode poetry (traditional formal verse), neither of which does ANYTHING new technically. In the final analysis, however, the newness of a given poetry is of minor importance; what it does and whether or not what it does is of aesthetic value is all that truly matters. Strong evidence that what burstnorm poetry does is of aesthetic value is provided by two recently-begun magazines, Synaesthetic and Croton Bug. Alex Cigale, the editor of Synaethestic, hopes among other things to “counter-act the self-absorbed poetic persona that has come to dominate post-war poetry in the public mind–the beat, confessional, language, and performance poetries that have gained prominence in each successive decade from the 50’s through the 90’s.” Hence, he showcased found poetry as a kind of anti-self public poetry in the first issue of Synaesthetic. The focus of its second issue, the one up for review here, is “The Intersection of Science & Art.” The prize work of this second issue is a set of four full-color illumages (i.e., visual artworks) by Kevin Clarke in which representations of dna coding–or, once, something that looks like an eeg print-out–are superimposed on photographs to produce what Clarke calls “genetic portraits.” In one of these, Clarke portrays Jeff Koons, the parodistic painter, with lines of a’s, g’s, c’s and t’s on top of a mostly brown negative photographic print of an old-fashioned slot machine, its wrong colors making the result seem not a mere snapshot of Koons’s conscious mind but an x-ray of his soul! And the super-abstract scientific dna coding conflicts richly with the tackily-decorated, nostalgic slot machine further to bring Clarke’s conception of Koons to life. Work of another master of the verbo-visual double-exposure, Spencer Selby, is also here. In one of his pieces what look to be wood-cuts from a medieval guide to alchemy are overlaid by a large-type text skewedly about mind, freedom and similar philosophical matters, the whole seeming to me both satire and celebration of the quest for truth. On the page next door is a collage by Guy Beining that depicts science as scribble, lunacy, artwork, game, and exalted mystery to really get viscerally into what it is. Elsewhere Laurel Speer contributes an evocative text about 20th- century mathematician Kurt Godel’s eating habits that undersimmers with questions of body versus spirit, and there is much else of value in this beautifully-produced publication (which even boasts a table of contents with pix of the contributors!) I hope it can keep going. Croton Bug is also a well-produced publication with a table of contents (though no pix of contributors) and a wide range of front-line burstnorm material. Among its choicest items are a meta-mathematical poem about “sentient geographies” by Jake Berry, a compound idiolinguistic poem called “‘v-effect’” by Peter Inman (that is as formidable as my name for it would suggest, with lines like “drench. krip. neural. teal. than. he. can. think. elbow. about.”), and an ingenious-but-moving verbo- visual tribute to the non-representational painter Ellsworth Kelly by John Byrum. I regret that I lack space to say more about this excellent new magazine.

More Voyages into Cyberspace

 

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Small Press Review, Volume 32, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2000

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Absurdistische Liga. SiteMaster: Rainer Gobchert.

clear-cut: anthology. SiteMaster: Nico Vassilakis.

Comprepoetica. SiteMaster: Bob Grumman.

Light and Dust. SiteMaster: Karl Young.

mudlark.

Qazingulaza. SiteMaster: Miekal And.

Rain Taxi Review of Books.

The Sackner Archive. Sitemaster: Marvin Sackner.

Schirmer Books.

Small Press Review. SiteMaster: Len Fulton.

Syberia Nova Kultura.

Trudy Mercer’s Eclectic Editions. Sitemaster: Trudy Mercer.

VisPo-Langu(Im)age. SiteMaster: Jim Andrews.

 

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I hadn’t toured the Internet for a couple of months, so I decided to assign myself a column on it as an excuse to do so. It was fun. My best stop was at the Small Press Review site. It’s only a one-page ad for SPR, but it mentions me as a “notable,” the only place on earth that does that! I also visited the Schirmer Books site where I’m an unmentioned notable–as contributor to Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, which it published as the millennium began, and which, I’ve now decided, is the best thing Gale, its parent organization, has ever published.

Not that anyone would be able to guess that from what is at the site. Its two blurbs are fine, but its sample of entry subjects is the pits. It includes just about nothing one could not find more than sufficient information about in any standard encyclopedia. The mainest virtue of Kostelanetz’s tome, of course, is its coverage of subjects no other reference so much as mentions–like many of the people and poetries I write about here. But you can’t expect a corporation to think any reader would want to find out about anything uncertified by either the academy or the marketplace.

I have to admit that I went to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive site, which consists mostly of a catalogue of the archive’s holdings, almost entirely to find out how many entries the catalogue has for my work (17) among its 32,000 entries (with occasional illustrations) for items like, well, the Sackner collection’s original Tom Phillips paintings. 30,000 other items in the Sackner collection await cataloguing. Since only 3000 new entries were made last year, and since the Sackners probably acquire or are sent a dozen new things a day, it doesn’t look like the catalogue will ever be complete. But even incomplete, it’s a huge resource for any serious student of visual poetry and related arts.

I bring in the mudlark site even though it’s not what you’d call experioddical because a section of it is devoted to Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet, which consists of over twelve dozen breezeful brief pieces of evocature by Runaway Spoon Press Poet Diane Wald. “Cyclist in the Fields” is representative: “It would be easy for us to ignore him, to skirt the cornfields around him, to fly over him as the geese do, to act as if he were silly as lint. Yet there he is freely, as a book does.” Almost every one of Wald’s texts gets a brain-lifting shaft of hunh? like the last four words of this one.

There is other good work, in large servings, at the site from such as Andrew Schelling, Henry Gould and Sheila E. Murphy.

Trudy Mercer’s Eclectic Editions (a model of elegant web-design, I might point out) is another site I visited. It is primarily a resource for feminists (with interesting material on feminist theory, feminist sci-fi and such authors as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child and Zora Neale Hurston) but more for me is its list of links to sites like clear-cut anthology, a fine anthology of (mostly orthotextual) works by Seattle poets; Qazingulaza, the site of a “hypermedia/permaculture rural community called Dreamtime Village” which includes among its many eclectic pieces of “crossmedia beliefware,” a fascinating animated verbo- visual “interwriting” by Maria Damon and Miekal And called “Literature Nation”; Absurdistische Liga, which is interesting chiefly for its links to ABSHURTLING COUGH: a cyberzine that claims to be of visual poetry but, as far as I can tell, only has mixtures of words and graphics–but they’re easy-to-like; VisPo-Langu(Im)age, Jim Andrews’s collection of essays about webart, and poetry, mostly conventional, but some of it visual, and some of it possibly entirely new in technique, such as the clever pop-up poems about which all I can say here is that they do pop up; and my own Comprepoetica, which has long been in a state of torpor, I have to admit–but here’s something terrific about it: if you e.mail me from any posting-box there, your message will reach me anonymously, so you can tell me what you really think of this column with no fear of reprisals, such as my seeing that you never get another NEA grant; seriously, I’d love it if someone would post me about this column pro or con; I never get any feedback except thanks from people about whose work I’ve said nice things).

Another stop I made was at Rain Taxi’s website. Here are first-rate reviews not in its print version, but which give the flavor of those that are. It specializes in mainer-stream poetry than I do, most of the time, but seems pretty wide-ranging. At the time of this writing it had a particularly readable review by Mark Terrill of a new four-hundred page collection of Bukowski poems, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire, that sounds like something any Bukowski fan should be interested in.

Then there’s Syberia Nova Kultura, a full-color Russian website in English and Russian that has all kinds of fine visio-textual art from all over the world including 9 images by Ruggero Maggi that I couldn’t figure out but liked; five lovely pastel collages by Harry Burrus that combine ancient Egypt and other classicismry jolted together with a today that seems out of the NY Daily News; and an illumage by Mike Dyar featuring drawings of frog, cow, grasshopper, flower, etc. that seem random but somehow capture the wonderfully serene mood that Nature at its homeliest can mend us into. In short, Syberia Nova Kultura is a site worth spending a day at.

A site worth spending a week at is Light & Dust, which I’ve plugged here before but which deserves continual plugging. A recent Mike Basinski contribution to it is, by itself, practically worth buying a computer and a hook-up to the Internet for: it’s called “The Coming of the Circles,” and consists of big crossword grids with all kinds of words, near-words, and non-words scribbled into them, in color, with circles of varied sizes and hues invading them–and sometimes squeezing text out of the squares it was occupying. The mishmash breaks into gibberish and poetry about equally–and sometimes simultaneously! Something else at light & dust worth getting on the Internet for is the survey of work by David Cole just begun, which includes a series of “Envelope Poems,” which prove Cole (who, I regret to announce, recently died of a respiratory illness) to have been one of our country’s master colorists–as do his two collaborations here with Marilyn Rosenberg, in which each artist (impossibly) improves the other! How is it that the bigCity critics have missed his work? Or hers? But I’m always asking questions like that. It’s easy enough to answer: the bigCity critics are idiots.