Marjorie Perloff’s Seminar on Visual Poetics

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Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Numbers 3/4, March/April 1998

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UB Poetics Discussion Group, SUNY, Buffalo; http://[email protected].

Nicholodeon, by Darren Wershler-Henry.
Coach House Books; www.chbooks.com

 

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Lately I’ve become a bit of an Internet-addict. As a result of that–and the fact that the publication of otherstream magazines (experioddica) is down of late–this will be another internet- related column. It will also be politico-vocationally squabbly, for it’s mainly about a seminar in “visual poetics” for grad students that Marjorie Perloff is teaching at Stanford this (winter ’98) semester. I found out about it at the poetics discussion group that Charles Bernstein hosts out of SUNY, Buffalo. Back in the fall Perloff had notified the group about her seminar and solicited suggestions as to materials to be taught. I posted a short list of things, notably the light & dust website, and Core, a Symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry–the website for its great selection of visual poetry, Core for its survey through interviews of what’s going on in the field–and both for their extensive lists of relevant zines and books.

That was where things stood until 12 January of this year when Craig Dworkin announced at the Buffalo site that Charles Bernstein would be the first poet in the reading series that had been set up to accompany Perloff’s seminar. Other language poets would later be reading. I immediately fired off a letter that said, “As a long-time participant in and follower of the American visual poetry scene, I have to say that I’m disappointed that Marjorie Perloff, who has the cultural weight to do a good deal for such under-appreciated visual poets as Karl Kempton, Karl Young, Crag Hill, Miekal And, Liz Was, Jonathan Brannen, G. Huth, Trudy Mercer, John Byrum, Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins, Bill DiMichele, Gregory St. Thomasino, Marilyn Rosenberg, Michael Basinski, Jake Berry, Scott Helmes, Harry Polkinhorn (and on and on, to speak only of those contemporary American visual poets whose names are on the tip of my tongue), chooses instead to kick off her graduate seminar in visual poetics with a reading by Charles Bernstein, who is a late-coming dabbler in the field, and needs no career boosts.”

Miekal And also complained. Then Luigi-Bob Drake posted a copy of Perloff’s syllabus, which he had found at the Stanford U. site. The only book in the field that I thought of any value that was on her list of required and recommended books was the out-of-date, never very complete Solt anthology of concrete poetry (which includes a number of pieces that are not by almost anybody’s standards, visual poetry). Not surprisingly, Perloff had not followed up on any of my recommendations.

A while later Perloff personally e.mailed me a greatly extended syllabus; it was pretty much the same as the one Drake had posted except for a quite long supplementary reading list. This, at least, did refer to the light & dust site (which had come up at the discussion group as central to current visual poetry and which I’m sure even Perloff realizes has to be recognized despite all the work on it by people she’s ignoring). On the other hand, just about nothing else that has anything to do with “my” visual poets was anywhere in her syllabus.

I responded after a while with a satirical syllabus of a seminar on language poetry that I’d have if the positions of language and visual poetry, and mine and Perloff’s, were reversed. All my visiting poets would be visual poets who have also done some poetry most people would agree is language poetry like Jonathan Brannen and Crag Hill. I ignored just about all the big names in the field. There was no immediate reaction to my piece.

One of the few genuine visual poets Perloff discusses in her course is Darren Wershler-Henry, a young Canadian who has a series of poems at the Coach House website. Johanna Drucker characterizes Wershler-Henry’s work as “a new synthesis of conceptual and visual poetics.” This is nonsense. He is merely a talented apprentice following, mainly, in the footsteps of bp Nichol. He acknowledges his derivativeness, and is even praised for it; but there is a difference between being derivatively derivative and being creatively derivative.

One of his poems on the net, “Grain,” consists of a square with a horizontal line crossing it about a quarter of the way up. While we watch, g’s appear and fill the square; then they cluster under the line; next their stems “sprout,” hoisting their heads above the “ground”; their heads fill with tiny g’s that are soon dispersed–to become the scatter of g’s that the sequence began with. This is nice, but visual poets, beginning visual poets, have been doing similar things since the sixties or earlier. Wershler-Henry also has a one-liner called “The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein by Marcel Duchamp” at the site: “a rose is a rose is a rose,” with all the letters black except the last, which is red. He has a nice Spencer Selby imitation there called “The Cutting Room Floor,” too. Nothing wrong with spotlighting Wershler-Henry, who does have potential, but why not spotlight a few of the host of older, better American and Canadian visual poets around, too, in place of people like Bernstein? Why not spotlight jwcurry, for instance–to name someone who, like Wershler-Henry, is a Canadian strongly influenced by bp Nichol, but who is many many-directioned miles beyond Wershler-Henry as a visual poet? Or . . . but I’m sure my drift is clear by now.

 

Out of the Ultra-Otherstream

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2008

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      Text Loses Time
      By Nico Vassilakis.
      2007; 180 pp; Pa; ManyPenny Press,
      1111 E. Fifth St., Moscow ID83843. $18.95, ppd.

 

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I coined the term, “otherstream,” over twenty years ago to stand for art that is outside the understanding, and probably knowledge, of all but a few college professors who teach some form of art. At the time I coined the term, Nico Vassilakis, in his early twenties, was already doing major otherstream things in Seattle, then perhaps the top city for otherstream poetry in the U.S., thanks to him–and to Trudy Mercer, M. Kettner, Ezra Mark, Joe Keppler, Jim Andrews, Jim Maloney, Nancy Brush-Burr and a number of others. (It wasn’t until the nineties that Port Charlotte, Florida, moved into first place.) Even then Vassilakis was active as a poetry-organizer and publisher as well as a poet, co- founding the Subtext Reading Series, which he still curates.

His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review–and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. Among his many chapbooks are Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (gong press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others. He’s even got a DVD out called CONCRETE: Movies. In spite of all this, it wasn’t until quite recently that Vassilakis had his first full- length collection published thanks to Crag Hill’s new outfit, ManyPenny Press, but that’s what you get for being otherstream.

Here’s its author’s statement about this collection, which is called, Text Loses Time: “This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word – however arranged – contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto- historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.”

“Dear appliance, Dear container port,/ Frayed edges of a soluble fish/ Uninvited on arrival and completely soaked/ Investigates misspellings throughout the city./ Shows little regard for the pond./ The hair draped on purpose/ Something ecclesiastic in conversation./ Refrain from smoking please.” Thus goes the first poem in Vassilakis’s “Dear This, Dear Ampoule,” sequence of seven eight-liners to give you an idea of the wily-witted verve of the solitextual work that takes up a little more than half of Text Loses Time. To give you a very incomplete idea of what he does vispoetically, consider his Negative Alphabet Alphabet. His subject is, yes, the alphabet. He sets it down, two letters to a page, over thirteen pages–with each letter altered. For example, he removes the middle horizontal of his B, along with a bit of the curves it is attached to, and shifts the detached piece to the left of the B, but keeping it at the same height it was. Simple, right? Nonetheless, when Vassilakis does tricks like that to every letter in the alphabet in order, shifting back and forth between white letter on black and black letter on white, the result is a veritable symphony. This sounds like gush, but it’s not–because of alphabetization.

Alphabetization came after the invention of letters, needless to say. The latter was a primary landmark in the advance of civilization–but I claim that the invention of alphabetization was of great importance, too–however overlooked by most cultural historians. I don’t know when it occurred, but–well, think what it’s done just for orderly use of the computer. For infraverbal poets, it has provided a wonderful, accessible metaphor for Order, and Sequentiality, both of which Vassilakis has maximally exploited in Negative Alphabet Alphabet.

As his alphabet moves inexorably to its climax, the Z, each letter has a part of itself jolt out in an unexpected direction. I’m reminded of dance steps. The aesthetic key is that each “step” is just slightly different from the one before, just different enough to jar, but not different enough not to seem almost instantly “reasonable”–due in large part to the fact that each letter, being in alphabetical order, is–in the gross–fully expected. The sequence is thus a flow of the standard melody of the standard alphabet jazzedly accompanied by riffs off it that form a “negative alphabet.” Both flows reach the same destination–a Z that can pass for three Z’s–whose zing is set up by all the other letters’ seeming like fractured single letters.

I wish I had space to say more about Negative Alphabet Alphabet, and something about the many other equally ingenious but never even slightly superficial works in Vassilakis’s new book. I’m actually a little glad, too, if truth be known, because it’s hard to say just what it is about them that makes them so effective. Nick Piombino helps in that task with a fine afterword, however. My final word is a common one in my columns: if you have any interest in poetry beyond what you can learn from the academics, this is one of the books you really ought to have.

 

Last Column?

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Small Press Review,
Volume 32, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2000

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Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry,
edited by derek beaulieu. 56 loose sheets,
post cards, chapbooks, etc., in a manila envelope
(in a collector’s edition of 115 copies);
housepress, 1339 19th Avenue NW, Calgary, Alberta,
Canada T2M 1A5 ([email protected]). $60.

O!!Zone 99 – 00, Fall 1999, edited by Harry Burrus.
100 pp; O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View,
Houston TX 77057-2204. $20.

 

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Here’s the scoop regarding the title of this installment of my column: two days from now my doctor will be telling me whether my prostate cancer, for which I had apparently successful radiation treatment a year-and-a-half ago, is back–seriously back, that is. There’s concern because my last PSA reading, the main indicator, was higher than it ought to have been. If the cancer is seriously back, that’ll be it for this column, for I’ll soon be either too dead to continue it, or too devastated by the extreme endocrinological abuse to which I’ll be subjected to keep me alive. So if I’m not here next issue, you’ll know why.

That out of the way, I have two new anthologies to discuss. The first especially pleases me, for many of its contributors, and its editor, are of the latest generation in visio-textual art–people in their twenties and early thirties–though there is a wide, wide range of artists represented in it (including me). And it looks like derek beaulieu, its editor, is well on his way to becoming the jwcurry of his generation of Canadians. Not only is his selection first-rate, but it looks like he put a lot of thought, aesthetically-sensitive thought, into the packaging of each of the items in it (for instance, pairing my mathematical poem with a similarly-shaped one by Karl Kempton). What follows are some notes about a few randomly-selected pieces from the anthology to give you an idea of what it’s like.

Problem Pictures, by Spencer Selby. Frame 1: “refuse/// to see,” in crisp, large lettering, formal & clear, over/under an indeterminant background that looks like a detail, hugely blown up, from a conventional representational photograph. Frame 2: here the textual layer is cut off at the sides, the graphic layer enlarged beyond the ability of its printed dots to blend to become just-decipherable as possible trees filling the far edge of a possible field with a certain, albeit very roughly represented, woman in it, between the textual matter, a second kind of woods . . . Frame 3: another enlarged reproduced photograph over/under “Ludicrous pro-/ portion between immense possiblity,/ and the result.” An explanation, to a degree, of the frame to the left, with the woman in it. Frame 4: the text here is, “below the/ burden of/ our choice”; the graphic, two men shown from the rear who seem to be moving forward through what may be high grass; it is distortedly over-expanded like Selby’s other graphics and, also like them, in vigorous tension with the crisp print of the textual layer over or under it. So, two on foot, into, or out of, or through, textuality, toward some “immense possibility”; and we have jump-cut textcollagic poetry, developing sudden by-images of some force as it depicts, at the same time that it draws us into, an archetypally tangled search for meaning.

Steve McCaffery has contributed two wrynesses, one of them a cartoon of the left half of an H which is thinking, “form,” while its separated right half thinks, “content.” This happens, as the title tells us, at the specific time of 4:46 PM 8/11/77. McCaffery’s other piece shows what looks like a not-too- interesting design of squares and short, wide rectangles, the latter mostly to the right, the former mostly to the left and growing larger as they descend. The words, “see,” and “sea” cross the page in fairly large type. Toward the bottom is a third word, “seize.” To its right the lowermost and largest of the squares encloses the lowermost of the rectangles. With reflection one should SEE the puzzle turn lyrical-deep as vision assimilates–as well as contains like a sea–the sea . . . at the same time that “seize” does something verbally comparable.

Jennifer Books’s piece here consists of fragments of letters that move in and out of identifiability. The main draw here (for me) is the use of color, for Books delicately forms her partial-letters via cross-hatching in various colors, sometimes using one color for a letter’s vertical lines, and another for its horizontal lines. The result is not only pretty, but (literally) vibratory. And we have what seems to me a textual illumage (although I can make out, I think, the word, “MAP”) in which a merely arresting non-representational design is kept marvelously from dissolution–is held at its center–by just-enough-textuality . . . or a sense of some language which underlies all things drawing chaos toward meaning.

Another exciting, however simple-seeming, use of color occurs with three texts excerpted from Johanna Drucker’s The Public Life of Language that Jill Hartman of Semi-Precious Press in Calgary has printed on three different-colored transparencies. The use of color hints at what printing on colored transparencies, and reading various combinations of the texts, one on top of another, against the light, might do for poetry–which Drucker’s near-prose isn’t. But I did enjoy the following punwork amongst its jump-cut condescensions toward mass-taste and mass-thought: “brought straight into the CAPITAL from the outlying districts/ FRESH AS/ PAINT/ nation state/ the brain aches/ looking in its/ pockets for/ change.”

There is much much more in this collection, enough for one of the commercial or university culture magazines to devote five to ten thousand words to reviewing, if there were a commercial or university culture magazine with any genuine interest in what’s going on it poetry using techniques that weren’t in wide use fifty or more years ago.

The latest O!!Zone anthology of what its editor calls “visual poetry” is au currant, too, but I have space only to say it’s a fine collection, some of it textual and graphic, some of it graphic only, but little of it both verbal and visual enough to qualify as visual poetry.

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And now the report from two days after I wrote the above–isn’t the suspense killing you? It is, happily, that my PSA level is down, so it looks like I may get through this year without croaking, or having anything major done to me medically. And mine column shalt continue. Urp.

A Visit to Pottersville

 

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Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 9-10, September-October 2007

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      Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3:
      Adventures in the Underground.
      Edited by Jack Saunders. 212p; 2007; Pa;
      Pottersville Press, Box 35038,
      Panama City FL 32424. $18 ppd.
      http://Pottersville Press.

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In the November/December 1994 issue of Small Magazine Review, I wrote that Jack Saunders, who will soon have written ‘100 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood,’ has a simple mode of operation: every day he sits at his computer for 37 hours or more and, like his hero Jack Kerouac, writes whatever comes into his head– which is mostly a defense of writing whatever comes into his head. Much of this is repetitious–but mythically so, and vastly reassuring to his fans (I’m proud to be one) who, my guess is, are similarly “marginal” writers who won’t give up in spite of NY and Hollywood, and are grateful to find Jack’s leaky but still somehow seaworthy dinghy bobbing along with them no matter how many time zones left of the closest shipping lane they find themselves in.”

I seem not to have mentioned Jack in SMR since then, probably because he is mainly a novelist, not a poet (and not what I’d call burstnorm). I’ve tried to keep up with his ouevre, though, and exchanged a card or letter or two with him every once in a while. Sometime last year he invited me to send him a piece for an anthology of writings about what I call the otherstream he’d been commissioned to edit. I threw together a half-assed bit of megalomania about how I compared with Shakespeare as a writer (not unfavorably) and when the anthology, Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3: Adventures in the Underground, duly came out, it was embarrassingly in it. Actually, I’m not too mortified by what I wrote, but will be making a few changes in it if I ever have it reprinted.

According the website of the anthology’s publisher, the writers represented in the book include “roots musicians, folk artists, and independent filmmakers who share the do-it- yourself ethic that inspired the civil rights movement, environmentalism, women’s lib, gay pride, the peace movement, clear on back to the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey’s bus, Fuurther, with Colored Power written on the side.” Names? There are twenty-six including Al Ackerman, Ron Androla, both John Bennetts, Mike Dean, Lyn Lifshin and Small Press Review’s Number One Alumuna, Laurel Speer.

Those who have been reading Jack since his sons were small will be pleased to find an interview of one of them, Balder Saunders, now grown and playing guitar for an apparently moderately successful reggae-bluegrass fusion band with three CDs to its credit, Dread Clampitt, Warck & Ruin, and Geaux Juice. Of his dad, who ran a website for the band for a time, he says, “Saunders is a loose can on the deck. We just hope he doesn’t get too far afield.”

Among the many interesting pieces in the collection is one from a Canadian point of view by Leopold McGinnis about the differences and similarities between Canadian and American otherstreamers, the former having the double burden of being misfits as innovators in a philistine society and as Canadians in an American society–when, as usually happens, they give up on their native country as writers and try to make it across the border.

Jeff Potter is especially informative about how a DYI (Do-It-Yourself) type can at least make a living in small press publishing. In 1990 he launched a bike magazine called Out Your Backdoor. Here’s how he describes what happened: “I typed up a few brief articles for my zine, scanned in some photos, printed out a master copy and made more copies downtown, stapled up the 5 doublesided pages and mailed it out.

“I realized that it was like a letter to a friend. I had been writing lots of big letters, so I sent this first issue to my usual pals. I also sent it to everyone else I could think of who might be interested.

“I then discovered the world of zines. And it discovered me.

“The underground anarchist types of zinesters opened a bunch of wacky windows of ideas for me. And there were outdoor adventure zinesters, too–quite a few bike zines, in fact. We all started sharing what we were doing. We swapped mailing lists, too. The zine scene boomed in the early 90’s, and OYB boomed along with it.”

Potter learned of Jack Saunders through Popular Reality, my old friend Rev. Nestle used to publish when he was still a male. Potter was sufficiently intrigued by Jack to visit him in Florida. This book was one outcome of the friendship the two and their families developed when Potter later created the Pottersville Press.

I rather doubt that anyone after National Acclaim and/or big bucks will model a career on that of any of the writers’ and other artists contributing to this book, but it presents material that should be of value to sociologists of the future interested in the near- invisible, as many sociologists are. And who knows, one of these long-shots may yet come in, and make reprints of the book mandatory reading in future university English classes. Best, it should prove entertaining for anyone interested in American Culture, and soothe others struggling against the gate-keepers the way the contributors to this book are with the knowledge that they aren’t alone.  Here’s how Jack ends the collection:

      

I had me some adventures and wrote about them.           That’s what the hero does, in myth.                     Sometimes, when he comes back, Joseph Campbell says, the           old men, the tribal elders don’t want to hear what he has to           say, because it throws their hustle into doubt, causes           confusion and unrest, disquiet.                    Nothing must change.           They try to make him shut his pie hole.           What can he do?           Again, Joseph Campbell says, quoting Nietzxche, “Behave           as though the hour were here.”           Disintermediate now.           Don’t wait for permission.           Start from where you are. Get better by doing it. By and           by, a cult will form around you. You’ll be respected by           your peers. You’ll be known in the narrow world of           what you do as a mensch. A stand-up guy. A soldier.           The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.           Red could stay, because Red was not a bugler. But           Prewitt had to leave, because he wanted most of           all to stay.           Prewitt had a call.

Who are Prewitt and Red? I read the book from cover to cover but can’t answer. It doesn’t matter: they are the generic company man and the Saunders alter-ego. Jack’s still strummin’ the strum in his dinghy–with me and the rest of the Prewitts trying to not get too far astern of him, or running along the shore, cheering him on.

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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