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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