Nostalgia Break

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2002

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With this issue, my column beings its tenth year. Hard to believe. From a negative point of view, I can’t believe I haven’t yet been picked up by one of the big boys by now (although I surely, out of Grand Loyalty, would have continued contributing to ); from a positive point of view, I can’t believe I’m still managing to turn out a column every other month, and that Len Fulton is still allowing me to.

Every once in a while someone mentions in a letter to me that he’s seen one of my columns, and a couple of times a reader has written a letter-to-the-editor complaining of the obscurity of the poets I champion or, in one case, getting on me for my grammar, so I know the columns are not going entirely unread. Nonetheless, I feel pretty solipsistic when I write them. That has its good side: it means I don’t have to worry about satisfying anyone but myself. Hence, this column, which may well be the most self-indulgent one I’ve yet written, which is saying a lot.

I’m just too beat, who knows why, to even pretend to review anything this time around. I do hope no one will be cruel enough to write me that it’s therefore my first good column. Anyway, I’m just going to shoot the breeze about me and Small Press Review. I first came across it in some kind of rack in what I remember as a college library somewhere in LA, where I spent the seventies and a few years at either end of them. I was taken by (1) its coverage of literature not mentioned in the mainstream and (2) Robert Peters’s pungent column. This was some thirty years ago. I was around thirty–not that young, but unpublished and with no literary friends, so I fantasized about someday being a Robert Peters, read by a slew of high-level readers, the way some small boy watching a light- years-out-of-reach baseball star on television daydreams about one day playing on his team.

I didn’t keep up with SPR too well, as I was moving around a lot, and not fully committed to Poetry. Of more pivotal importance to me were the Dustbook directories, one of which was what finally got me into the Literary Scene. From it I got the address of Karl Kempton This was in the early eighties. Karl was then and still is the editor of Kaldron, the number one American visual poetry periodical of the last century. He rejected the apprentice visual poems I sent him, but via a real letter! And he gave me names of other editors and writers of visual poetry, such as Crag Hill, with whom I just recently co-edited the first volume of Writing to be Seen, the only serious (300+ large pages) anthology of visual and related poetry published in this country in the past thirty years. I’m not bothering to indicate where it can be bought because, amazingly, there are just about no copies left for sale. Perhaps not a surprise since we only had (only could afford) to have 500 copies printed, but a surprise considering it costs $24 and nothing else I’ve ever been involved with has sold more than 200 copies–except, I guess, Richard Kostelanetz’s A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, now out in paperback, to which I contributed a dozen or so short entries (some of them re-using material first published here, I might add). Oh, there was also the volume of the Gale Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series that I had an essay in, but that was sold in bookstores, I don’t think.

I apparently started my still-continuing subscription to SPR with the June/July 1985 issue, for that’s the first one in my file. Odd to find names of people I barely noticed at the time but later corresponded with such as Arnold Skemer and Bob Black in my earliest issues. By 1990 Jack Saunders’s name popped up! I only noticed one reviewer early on, even before she became a regular columnist (in the September 1986 issue): Laurel Speer. She had a verve most of the other reviewers lacked–and seemed almost as distant from my part of the galaxy as Peters had. As far as I can tell from my records, my first contribution to SPR was a guest editorial about infraverbal poetry called, “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry” in the April 1992 issue. It is still one of the best things I’ve written on poetry. A month later, my first review appeared–on the front page! It was on da levy, “Cleveland’s Warrior Poet.” These two publications were a highlight in my literary life.

A mere year and a month later I had a column in Small Magazine Review! It was a continuation of one I had had in Factsheet Five, whose editor had departed, leaving it with another editor, who soon sold it to someone else. Along the way, everyone or just about everyone, who had been writing for it was dumped, including me. So, for me, SMR came along at just the right time.

My column appeared every other issue for a while, but then SPR and SMR combined and became a bi-monthly. Since then, I’ve had a column in every issue. My hope, aside from getting discovered, was to establish the kinds of poetry I write about here in the Big World. That has not yet happened, but there’s still hope. Writing To Be Seen has recently had book launchings in the Miami area at Books & Books, and in New York at Printed Matter. In September there will be a similar event for it at The New York Center for Book Art. It was also featured at a visual poetry show in a gallery in Cincinnati and at the end of July it will be part of the festivities at the Ohio State Avant Garde Symposium. So we’re making progress. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging along with this column–and hope at least a few young writers think of me the way I used to think of Robert Peters.

 
 

Visio-Textual Round-Up   Small Press Review, Volume 28, Number 6, June 1996            Carved Erosion, by Guy R. Beining. 1995;      48 pp.; Pa; Elbow Press Box 21671,      Seattle WA 98111-3671. $7.95.      The Experioddicist, No. 14, July 1996;      edited by Jake Berry 4 pp.;      Box 3112, Florence Al 35630. SASE.      Score, No. 13, Fall 1995;      edited by Crag Hill and Spencer Selby. 74 pp.;      1015 NW Clifford St. Pullman WA 99163. $10. ——————————————————————————– Quite a lot has been going on in visio-textual art of late. Two key events were the publication toward the end of ’95 of a new issue of Score and of an anthology called CORTEXt. I’ve been madly reviewing both everywhere I can, which means–basically–in Taproot Reviews and Lost & Found Times. In neither of these have I been able to say as much as I’d like; in fact, I wasn’t able even to get to CORTEXt in my Lost & Found Times column. So I’m going to continue my coverage of these publications here. Score, after publishing a dozen issues in the eighties and early nineties, and becoming one of this country’s two leading magazines of visio-textual art (Kaldron being the other), went dormant for several years–and was even declared dead by its editors. But last year one of the latter, Crag Hill, decided to revive it, in editorial partnership with visual poet Spencer Selby. The result is every bit as good as the previous issues of the magazine, featuring work by long-time leaders in the field like Dick Higgins and Arrigo Lora-Totino, but also material from new-comers like Patrick Mullins and Adam Gamble. To give some notion of what Score–and contemporary visio- textual art at its best–is like, I’ve chosen to two representative specimens to concentrate on. The first of these, “fluxion modulus 9,” a visual poem by Guy R. Beining, uses random rhyming (of “obsidian” with “meridian” and–somewhat– “rubidium”). This seems purposeless, even with the unifying word “lapidary” (in caps) positioned between “obsidian” and “rubidium” (both also in caps), since “lapidary” has to do with, among other things, engraving on stone–like obsidian. Also positioned between those two words, with two-piece clumps of “LAPIDARY” distributed to its four corners, is a large rectangle. Part of the collage within this is an architectural rendition of an open doorway with a door-sized rectangle tilted out of it on which something that looks to be a Wright Brothers Era biplane is depicted. Behind these two images is a lot of micro-speckly xerox-grey that suggests granite. Quite a bit below them a person in what may be a jester’s outfit is smiling, the word “POP” just over his hat. The biplane and doorway immediately give the rhymes and “LAPIDARY” high lyrical purpose as a title for a diagram of the idea of flight. “Obsidian” is what The Creative Imagination carves that idea into or through, crossing a Rubicon–somewhat but not entirely arbitrarily derived from “RUBIDIUM”–in the process. Playfulness is part of this, or so the smiling figure suggests, and it is a high point, or so one lesser meaning of the word, “meridian,” suggests. I should add that there is also a set of “ow-phrases” in the piece: “eye shadow,” “bay window,” “over shadow” and “black widow.” It refers back to similar sets in others of Beining’s “Fluxion moduli”–such as #5, also in Score,” which has “whitlow,” “shallow,” “airflow” and “hueglow.” The four words or phrases of each set are distributed among the four compartments of a cross. The poetry-sequence within a poetry sequence Beining thus brings about I tentatively take to be expressing a “quadchotomy” of North, East, South, West, the same way that the collage of “fluxion modulus 9″ expresses the dichotomy of closure/opening. There is, needless to say, much more to the moduli that I lack space to discuss here. Beining, by the way, has a great new book out, Carved Erosion. It’s full of sur-haiku like “blueness of birds bones/ within/ an asian red nightmare” that are often enhanced with visual elements, and the wrenching of lines out of standard orientations. In the past year Beining has also had an issue of The Experioddicist devoted to his work, #14, which is well worth sending for. The second of the specimens from Score I’m treating here is Irving Weiss’s “From Here to There.” This seems at first doodling, then coalesces as a compendium of lines–with wiring, or a system of nerve-ducts, or a river and its tributaries thickly down the center of the page. The latter finally announces the higher meaning of the work as a consideration of Nature versus Symbol, or some similar dichotomy, for the–let’s call it a river-system–cuts off a number of abstract lines approaching it from the left. The topmost of these is straight, the next depicts sine waves. The third looks like a brain- machine’s output. A micro-scribble and some kind of nameless fissure follow, with a line that tries to spell “line” but stutteringly achieves only “lllliiinnnnee” at the very bottom of the stack. This latter runs into a tributary of the central river, coming out on the other side properly spelled, in longhand. Sharing the other side with it are a single line rectilinearly plotting an “L” from whose leg an “I” rises which is also the far-left vertical of an “N” whose far-right vertical is also the vertical of an “E.” The latter’s highest horizontal is drawn but nothing else, the rectilinearly-moving line only able to go forward, apparently. Lower on this RIGHT side of the page is a typed list in upper-case, of the four letters of “LINE,” starting with “LNEI.” What Weiss has achieved, then, is a demonstration of how much universe lines are responsible for, in a subtle lyric concerning–did I say, “Nature versus Symbol?” It is that, but also, deeper, emotion versus reason. Oops, I see I’ve just about run out of space. And once again I’ve failed to get to CORTEXt. I wanted to discuss a first-rate annual that’s devoted to America’s first visual poet, E. E. Cummings, and a great visio-textual anthology from South America, too–as well as shamelessly plug Al Ackerman yet again (because of the kickbacks he’s been sending me). It looks like I’ll need a part two to handle these duties.

The Coming of The New Millennium, Part Two

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Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Number 11/12, November/December 1999

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Koja, #2, Fall 1998;
edited by Mikhail Magazinnik. 60 pp;
7314 21st Ave., Brooklyn NY 11204.
Website: http://www.monkeyfish.com/koja. $12/2 issues.

 

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In my last column I spoke of going “completely off-column . . . to write whatever I wantz to”–except to mention something having to do with experioddica–“and call the mess an end-of-the-millennium round-up”. The idea, successful for that column (which I knocked out in less than two hours), was to break me out of the partial writer’s block I’ve been in and out of for the past few years. I say, “partial,” because I’m generally able to force out something when a deadline is on me. The trouble is getting anything written reasonably well in advance of a deadline, or without a deadline.

I’ve decided this happens to writers for two basic reasons: their writing’s having come to seem a chore, and fear that what they write will be crap. Yeah, not the most original analysis, but still valid, I think. In any event, it leads to a sure-fire solution: just write for fun and not care whether it’s any good or not. My age helps take care of the fun part for me, for it’s responsible for my having a lot of opinions to air, and a large repertoire of word-games to play. So all I need to do is spout off on any subject that takes my fancy, and/or spin my output through some word-game or other (e.g., use slang, use one part of speech for another, work a metaphor, invent a new word). Naturally, the funnest thing to do is say something enduringly right in some way, and there’s always a chance of that, too. I just have to avoid making it my exclusive, or even major, aim, and risk succumbing to worry about the value of what I’m writing.

Avoiding the latter is easier said than done for most of us, but one way to accomplish it is to focus on quantity–keep in mind how much you’ve written, not what you’ve written. This has helped me quite a bit in the past, and still does, but I now have something even better to focus on: the certainty that too few people read me, or ever will read me, for it to matter what I say. The latter, of course, is a ridiculous lie in my case, but it still works for me, as I’m highly susceptible to self-doubts, no matter how irrational.

There: over four hundred words, I’ve had a ball sapiencing, and I’ve blasted through my writer’s block for the second day in a row. Now all I have to do to finish my column is be mass mediatric and come up with some kind of millennial list of best or importantest whatevers of this century, or millennium. Generally speaking, I’m contemptuous of such lists on the grounds that it’s way too early to judge either time-period. Saner would be to consider the nineteenth-century or, at worst, the first half of this one. But in my main field, American Poetry, who have you got from the nineteenth century to list besides Poe, Whitman, Dickinson and Emerson? The first fifty years of this century had a lot of good names in it (Cummings, Roethke and Stevens are tied at the top of my list of best American Poets of the period), but I have to admit that I’d much rather rattle a list of current poets around than bother with long-dead poets. Moreover, no matter how much I try exclusively for fun in this column, I ought not forget that it is about contemporary poets–unless I can’t enjoy writing about them, and that will never be the case so long as I don’t have to say anything of substance about them.

So, off the top of my head, here is a list of poets that ought to be on any list of the best American poets of the past fifty years but won’t be mentioned on any such list published by a commercial or academic press until 2050 at the earliest–and probably nowhere else in the small press but here: Guy Beining, with whom I start because I was just writing about him yesterday; John M. Bennett, who does more of technical interest in any one of the poems in Mailer Leaves Ham, his latest book, than all the poets in American Poetry Review or Poetry have done in all their poetry (except maybe two or three accidentally and briefly in one of those publications); Karl Kempton, who’s done the same but with a greater emphasis on visual devices; Karl Young, ditto; Will Inman, a traditionalist but a champion in the mystico-bardic line; Richard Kostelanetz, the most widely-innovative poet around but also the period’s top all-around man-of-letters–and top all-around man-of-arts; John Byrum, another major visual poet; Jake Berry, Whitmanesquely all-embracive without the slush; Bill Keith, the first visio-jivist; Harry Polkinhorn, super-translator, publisher and critic as well as poet (and novelist and who knows what else); Marilyn Rosenberg, Mike Basinski, Stephen-Pau–uhn, I’ve run out of descriptive phrases, and I just remembered that I did a list like this not too long ago for this magazine, and I probably shouldn’t repeat myself, no matter how much fun it is.

Anyway, I don’t need to, for it looks like I’ve gotten another column done (in no time at all)! If I can just keep concen- trating on quantity and fun instead of quality, I could get all my columns for the 21st-century done by 2002! Before starting on my next, though, I need to plug two new Kostelanetz collections. There’s a new magazine called Koja that features visual poetry and other conceptually-appealing work that’s worth a mention, too–but, Jesus, C. Mulrooney has something in it! What’s going on?! Never mind; it and the Kostelanetz books are still worth looking into. I’ll tell you why in my next column (if Editor Fulton hasn’t dumped me by then).

Z Rhlokd sqhbj

When I was a child, I spent hours developing codes and ciphers: mostly simple substitution ciphers based on following the pattern of the alphabet—but from the wrong point in the series. The letter A would be B, for instance, so B would be C. I read about ciphers all the time, I created invisible inks out of lemon juice, I accidentally burned pieces of paper trying to reveal the hidden messages they held.

Bob Grumman seems to have lived a similar life, since the first poem in his Cryptographiku 1-5 is about a boy sitting at a desk writing in code. The poems in this brief chapbook are so few in number that to quote one of them would be to quote 20% of the book, so I won’t write out this poem or break its code for you. Let me tell you that the imagination of Bob Grumman awakens at the thought of using weird xenographic techniques: making poems out of long division problems (in his famous mathemaku, which are legion) and making poems that carry ciphers within themselves (in his less well known and less well named cryptographiku).

Most of the poems in this collection end with brief ciphers, ruining the reader’s expectation of a clean ending. Instead of concluding with a few words that clarify or enlarge the vision of the poem, most end with a series of numbers or nonsense characters, and the reader must puzzle out the meaning alone. In some way, these are like ancient riddle poems (seemingly nonsensical poems that lead to a logical meaning the poem only hints at), but these poems of Grumman’s always reveal the key to their meaning.

Take the following atypical cryptographiku, which suggests a pattern and, thus, suggests a solution. It is the figuring out of the code that is the essential part of its reading.

Cryptographiku for Wallace Stevens

spsjpi

sxqqhu

cwuvmn

winter

If you decrypt this poem correctly, you will note an interesting inconsistency in the code, one that suggests how the four seasons flow into one another.

Against the wishes and claims of the author, I see these cryptographiku as visual poems because their awkward yet poetic visual presence is part of their esthetic, because the poems cannot be read straight through as regular text, and because they live on the page (as signs in space) rather than in the ear (as signs in time).

That last phrase was a little bit of code for those of you who know the most ancient city of Florida, a state I will begin to drive towards tomorrow.

(an entry to his blog 6 April 2004)

a post to Spidertangle, 17 September 2010, responding to the author’s request for feedbakc about two of his  cryptographiku he referred to as “gadgets”

As with most of the cryptographiku, this one depends on the simplest substitution cypher of all (A=1, B=2), etc., which can leave us with this resulting plaintext:

#####

a [b]i[rd]

a [p]oe[m]

a bird

a poem

a [b]i[rd]

a [p]oe[m]

a

all around the path

orange, yellow, red and brown

leaves in slow descent

You’ll note that I’ve removed all the decimal points and converting the octothorps (#s) to letters surrounded by brackets, [ ]. The plaintext, however, is not the poem, is pretty darn plain, except that I’ll note the title is undecipherable. The octothorps represent a missing letter but do not provide the letter, which can be deciphered only via context, but the title is without context except for the succeeding poem, so I’d guess the title could be converted to both “birds” and “poems.”

That’s the easy part. The hard part begins with the idea of two gadgets. Do you have two poems here? I don’t think so. So does “gadgets” refer to the octothorps and the numbers? the two ways of converting the poem back into plaintext?

Everything else I might say is fraught with peril. The octothorps, which have a natural italic tilt to them, remind me of a flying bird, so it is possible that they represent flight, and thus birds, which are then also equated with poems in this poem. So birds are things of flight, and poems are things of flight as well, things that fly us away, let’s say. Second, the octothorp is also called the number sign (as well as the pound sign), but as the number sign they work just as numbers do in this poem, but more cryptically.

The poem gives us a hint to its decipherment, of course, in a pleasant way: the .1’s that open the poem, convert to .a’s after a few lines, making wonderful use of the a’s primary purpose as an indefinite article. What I don’t understand, though, are the opening decimal points. Those before the 1’s and the a’s are separated from those characters but a space, causing us not to read them as decimal points, and hardly as periods, since they open the lines. So I read them as starting points. The point is the simplest symbol, a dot that might be a decimal point, a period, a tittle, the lower or upper half of a colon, etc. Simple, but filled with meaning. From that point everything grows. Every line grows out of that starting point as does every word that follows the opening counting symbol.

A sequence of numerals or letters in order (numerical or alphabetic) suggest a listing, a moving forward, but this poem subverts that expectation by never proceeding past the first item in the series. We are always stuck at 1 or a, always beginning, held essentially in a moment. I also think it interesting that the 1’s and a’s work this way even though they would naturally precede the periods, rather than follow them, to carry this meaning. Meaning is both subverted and supported simultaneously herein, then, and in the entire poem, which seems unreadable at first, but which is a simple coded text, something simple to crack.

Finally, what do the dots mean within the words? First as separators, so that we can tell the difference between the numerals 1 and 6 and the number 16. Second, though, the opening dots, just as with the dots that precede the 1’s and the a’s, these dots suggest that anything said, anything seen, anything real before us, such as a bird, and anything conceptual yet present, such as a poem, is merely a fraction of something larger and is made up of fractions. Whatever we see or hear or write about is never the whole thing–always a part of an unswallowable whole.

The poem as a whole now seems simple: An autumnal view, from among trees, birds inside the trees, and they can be seen through the leaves (obscured by #s and numbers). They seem to the viewer either poems or grist for poems, so the birds are the same as a poem to the reader, and maybe because birds sing and poems were first sung things of the mouth that connection is even closer. Suddenly the focus becomes clearer because the viewer focuses on the trees, in which the birds are hidden, and he sees the leaves falling from the tree, which may be leaves or may be the feathers of birds.

The importance of song is heightened, I’d say, by the fact that four of the very few lines of this poem are reduced only to vowels, which are the sounds of song, the sounds we can hold through the singing of a song. And those vowels are the vowels for “bird” and the vowels for “poem.”

Here is my blog on the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question).

djjg

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Internet Samplings, Part Three

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2011

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      Serif of Nottingblog
      Blogger: Gary Barwin
      http://serifofnottingham.blogspot.com

      Illegitimate pREscriptIONS
      eMTeVisPub
      Blogger: Matthew Stolte
      http://illegitimateprescriptions.blogspot.com/
      http://www.freewebs.com/matthewstolte/

      The Art of K. S. Ernst
      Webmaster: K. S. Ernst
      http://ksernst.com
      http://ksernst.com/links.html

      Otherstream Unlimited
      Blogger: Jake Berry
      http://otherstreamunlimited.blogspot.com

      staring poetics
      Blogger: Nico Vassilakis
      http://staringpoetics.weebly.com/

      Text, Textile, Exile
      Blogger: Maria Damon
      http://hyperpoesia.blogspot.com

 

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Now 70, I think about my decrepitude too much. May is ending as I write this. When it is over, I’ll be getting hip replacement surgery–because I’ve been limping for over a year, and tired of it, especially on the tennis court. I’m not too bad off otherwise, except mentally. I feel that my brain is still in good shape, but that my energy level is rarely high enough for me to make good use of it. It’s depressing, and–as you’d expect–my being depressed about it lowers my energy level even more. Ergo, this installment of my column will be the laziest one yet! Just brief notices and two quotations. But the notices should get you to places on the Internet worth going to, and the quotations will be as good as anything I ever write.

The first of the latter is from Maria Damon’s excellent blog, which features her visio-textilic poetry. In her 18 May entry she speaks of having “been thinking of the seeming decorousness of textile arts, especially as feminized as they are in our culture, and how this often displaces, or plays a strangely adjacent role, to inner wildness. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ hints at this but in a compensatory, diminishing way; Aunt J is clearly less than she should/could be. Why should this be? The sock-yarn named Iggy Pop (see, for example, http://www.flickr.com/photos/berthacrowley/2341363413/) seems sorta ridiculous, but then think of the lady knitting far into the night, listening obsessively to Raw Power, as i did when weaving at the IAS a few years ago; it’s trance music for a trance activity. It’s creative and violent in its own way. The dark night of the soul becomes the cute baby socks or the dangerous punk fashion style accessory, lovingly made with artful design. Tragic histories are hidden behind sumptuous textile creations. The drama of rock and roll sublimates as much as the lace, linens and embroideries of altar cloths and torah covers….

“The people writing such texts as ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,’ or Henry James, who, in a devastating last sentence, condemns a ‘spinster’ to disappointed, bitter life-solitude (‘Catherine,… picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again — for life, as it were.’), are writers. Maybe they see their own activity as superior to, or more expressive than, these women’s ‘fancy-work,’ in a typical gendered division not only of social prestige (writing is ‘head-work,’ needlepoint is ‘hand(i)work’), but of the permission or assumption of the right to express anger or any powerful emotion. But perhaps I’m being unfair and it’s more the case that there is a positive–or, more likely, ambivalent and ambiguous– identification at work: that Rich and James understand themselves and their subjects as involved in the same kind of sublimation that constitutes this kind of hobbyist, minor manual labor, concentration, freeform improvisation, cultural expression.”

Maria’s blog is unlike those of the others I’ll be writing about here for having many discussions of art as well as art, and I feel we need more discussions of art than art. That is, we have too much art, and not enough anchoring discussion of it.

At Matthew Stolte’s Illegitimate pREscriptIONS, for instance, we have a wonderful selection of his own and others visimages (i.e., visual art images), some of them with words, many of them arrestingly abstract-expressionist, just about all of them worth more than a single visit, but no commentary. With this blog and his local activities, he’s been engagingly and super-effectively energetic at promoting his (and my) kind of art, though, so he has my permission to be imperfect. His eMTeVisPub is a sort of catalogue of his own works–no commentary but a few blurbs and ordering information. I have to mention my favorite of the pieces, which is also at his other site: the word, “SEA,” in a wonderfully splashy carnival of colors the orange-opposite of the expected blue/green.

K. S. Ernst’s site is also more a collection of catalogues than a blog, but is full of great art, including one of my all-time favorite visual poems by anyone, “Little Boats,” and visiopoetically painted plates, wall hangings, sculptures mostly of wooden letters that I have no name for (her most outstandingly original achievements being in 3-D visual poetry, in my view), and now classic books such as Sequencing, the original edition and a new, added-to version. Another piece I especially like is “Rainforest”–except that I can’t make out its words at the site. The colors are wonderful, though.

Then there’s Nico Vassilakis’s staring @ poetics. It began as a blog but is now also a book, available at the blog. It is also viewable there, and down-loadable from there. Here’s one of Nico’s always lyrico-trenchant comments from it:

“Through Through. The thread finds its optic hole.  

“How to speak about vispo? For one, the relatable denominator is how we see. How language affects us visually, how staring at language is essential to reaping functionality out of vispo. In this case, we’d consider a stare to be an elongated gaze, and staring the hyper-focused verb from which we gain further insight.

 “The alphabet is continually morphing. It is both evolving and devolving into a periodic table of speech elements.

“Staring your way into and through the letter as object.”

“Staring textually into/through preverbal pieces of alphabet color splendvidly to places neither words nor colors and shapes can take us by themselves” is my translation of the above and the artworks at Nico’s blog, and in his book. That has a higher gush to rationality ratio than my critical pronouncements usually do, and as I like them to do, but remember, I’m slowing down.

Finally, there’s the recently begun Otherstream Unlimited Blog Jake Berry honored me by using my term, “otherstream” in the title of. Then did me the further honor of using six mathematical poems of mine in the blog’s first entry–with my commentary! Joel Chace’s “Periods, 91-100″ is the worthy follow-up. It consists of fascinatingly disjuntive paired sentences, such as “95”: “.His notion sprang from sheer force of imagination, by virtue of which he lifted himself from the earth into the sun, overlooking the planets./.Even with that awful taste, she got by.” Yes, each sentence begins and ends with a period.

 

The State of North American Vizpo, Part Six

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2010

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      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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I didn’t expect this overview to go on for a full year, but it has. With this installment, however, we should be to the end. It will be about an anthology I edited that had work by the following, in order: Peter Ciccariello, mIEKAL aND (the same piece he had in Poetry), David Baptiste Chirot, Marton Koopany, Nico Vassilakis, Karl Young, Myself, John Vieira, Cecil Touchon, Larkin Higgins, Karl Kempton, Sheila E. Murphy, C. Mehrl Bennett, K.S. Ernst, Endwar, John M. Bennett, Jefferson Hansen, Geof Huth, Michael Basinski, Joel Lipman and Marilyn R. Rosenberg, a reasonably representative cross-section of the best visio-textual artists currently being published in America. 21 pieces, 16 in full color. The production values of the anthology are close to down and dirty, but my readers will remember what I think of production values–great when you can afford them, but essentially not even secondary compared to all that art can do beyond look nice to the status-conscious.

In compensation, this anthology does something important that the other collections I’ve discussed in my series don’t do, particularly the Poetry gallery: it showcases works that are among the best its artists have done rather than the latest they’ve done. Another feature I was pleased to get so many of my contributors to take seriously (and for the most part illuminatingly) was its inclusion of one-page artists’ statements about the works–which were favorites of the artists’ from their own works (albeit not always in each case the a given artist’s number one favorite).

I liked just about all the pieces in the collection. Among the ones I liked most were those by Endwar, Marton Koppany, Karl Kempton, John Vieira, Karl Young, Cecil Touchon and Marilyn Rosenberg, so those are the ones I’ll comment on now in hopes of conveying a reasonably accurate idea of the collection as a whole.

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Endwar’s piece is just one-word in length, “speed.” But it’s spelled with 46 e’s and drops

down a space just after its 23rd e. The letters in its upper half are blue, those in its lower half red. All of them are italicized. A simple dramatization of something speeeeeeding but with an embedded onomatopoeia? Well, yes. But also containing the step downward and change of color at that point to both auditorily and visually suggest the Doppler effect. And, perhaps even most significantly, a rendering of an image, paradoxically of speed, in slow motion enough to give it haiku-duration.

Marton Koppany provided a pwoermd, too–unless you count the quotation marks he uses as extra words, and you probably should. He calls it “Poem – for Karl Young (and Laszlo Kornhouser) – December 2006.” If you take my 6’s as the quotation marks that look like 6’s , and the 9’s as the other kind of quotation marks, his poem reads in full as, “669dust9.” So: righthand and lefthand quotation marks with a word in between the two 9’s of the second of these. The background is nighttime blue, the “dust” is a bare white outline, the quotation marks gold–lamps, Marton calls them. A barely perceptible image caught in a quotation but in the process of escaping it . . . Evanescence? The starlit glory of something as commonplace and scorned as dust? In his artist’s statement, Marton tells us the poem is about the paradoxical nature of evocation. Yes, that–and much else.

Karl Kempton’s, “Sound of One Hand,” particularly interests me because it is a meditation on an older work, which is what I often do in my poems but feel too many current visio-textual artists rarely if ever do. In his artist’s statement, Karl quotes his triggering poem: “In the mountains deep/ Places, the moon of the mind/ Resides in the light serene:/ Moon mirrors all things everywhere./ Mind mirrors moon . . . in satori now.” The poem Karl is triggered to is a wonderful visiopoetic combination depicting in five narrative frames Basho’s frog/pond haiku and the famous Zen question about the sound of one hand clapping, metaphoring together to . . . “m1nd.” (Where frog and understanding of frog and one hand clapping enter satori–or so I interpret it.)

Also cerebral (as I’m realizing most of my favorites are–and so much of current visio-textual work is not), and minimalist is John Vieira’s “Street (Sheet) Music (Nocturne).”

Really a drawing whose verbal matter consists of a bass-clef, staves, and a treble-clef, the staves suggesting telephone lines above a street–containing somewhat dark, heavy communication, due to the bass-clef drawn on the staves where they begin. The telephone pole of the scene has what looks like a quarter-note with its stem stuck in it, and its “bulb” emitting another set of five staves, or rays of light, which a g-clef makes cheerful. One of his most popular pieces, John tells us in his statement. I can see why.

Like Karl Kempton, Karl Young makes potent use of another’s poem: the top half of his diptych (which is from Stellar Dreams Above the Middle Kingdom) is a soldier’s lament at missing his wife in a time of senseless war by Li Shang-Yin in the original Chinese, with a translation into English in small letters at the bottom of the piece. In the bottom half is an elegy for lost love by Karl, printed in small clumps of words lineating after just two or three letters–e.g., “RA/DIA/NT” is the first word of the poem, with “IN/O/UR” to its right.

Hence, the typography seems as visually resonant as the Chinese characters of the text above it, and the far-awayness in time and place, and the slow ethereality of the mood of

the over-all piece (exquisitely enhanced by the colors of the background and text) gradually make a permanent spell of the poem.

Cecil Touchon, is represented here by a piece also in Anthology Spidertangle–but here it is full color, the colors being gorgeously sensual greens against clays. In Anthology Spidertangle I described him in this and many of his pieces as “specializ(ing) in rectangular cut-outs of letters rectilinearly collaged into non-representational arrangements that remind me of both Mondrian and Kline.” Since the piece has no words, I can’t give much more of an explication.

The final work in the collection is Marilyn Rosenberg’s diptych, “VOYAGE.” Playful but not minor, Marilyn’s piece swirls stenciled words like “encourage” and “disadvantage” through what seem to me two versions of the same pure design of field mice she says she hates but expects to return to her house yearly, and circles of divers sizes and colors. Result: a colorful unpredictable adventure carnivalling who-knows-where. We know what it’s about, though, for all its words contain either “age” or “old.”

Begun 9 November 2009.  Just thrown together to start, but I hope to alphabetize it, and add comments about each link or citation.    –Bob G.

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Marton Koppany

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http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2005/11/selvages-of-poetry.html

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-poetry-but-excuse-to-play-with.html

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/03/investigating-concept-of-whiteness.html

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/10/dreamin.html

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2006/12/eyes-is-ayes.html

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2009/01/winter-white-black.html

http://galatearesurrection10.blogspot.com/2008/07/endgames-by-mrton-koppny.html

http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/endgames-by-marton-koppany.html

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/bookshelf-st.thom-king.html

http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/koppany/MK-PO.HTM

http://galatearesurrection11.blogspot.com/2008/12/short-movies-by-jukka-pekka-kervinen.html

http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/from-annual-records-of-cloud.html

http://comprepoetica.com/newblog/blog01354.html

Small Press Review Nov/Dec 2003

Small Press Review July/August 2008

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nico vassilakis

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http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/vassilakis.html

http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/diptychs-visual-poems-by-nico.html

http://www.critiphoria.org/Issue1/Nick_Piombino.pdf

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/10/longhand-into-tiny-notebooks-i-carry.html

http://galatearesurrection.blogspot.com/2006/03/concrete-movies-by-nico-vassilakis.html

http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=604

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2009/06/protracted-life-or-kind-of-staring.html

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Peter Ciccariello

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The Landscape Poetry of Peter Ciccariello By Geof Huth
http://orelitrev.startlogic.com/v1n2/OLR-huth.htm

Ron Silliman – November 09, 2007
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-shouldnt-whine.html

In the Land of Words By Geof Huth
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-land-of-words.html

The Geography of the Imagination By Geof Huth
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2006/09/geography-of-imagination.html

Not Wordlessness but a Tendency towards Illegibility By Geof Huth
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2006/01/not-wordlessness-but-tendency-towards.html

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Karl Kempton

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intro to kaldron on-line by karl young
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kal-note.htm

recent overview by karl young at new big bridge 2008
http://www.bigbridge.org/young/kk-esa.htm

UNTYING THE NOT: Karl Kempton’s Visual Writing
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/hpsp10.htm

intro to rune, a survey
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kempton/le-ky-kk.htm

revu of last book
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/01/mathematical-poetry-visual-and-verbal.html

intro to minimalist concrete poetry published works
http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/archives/cat_kempton_karl.html

Karl Kempton’s ‘Kaldron’ & Katue’s ‘Plastic Poetry
http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=326