Small Magazine Review, Volume 1, Number 7, December 1993

 
     Core: A symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry A Special Issue of
     Generator Magazine in conjunction with Score Press, Summer, 1993;
     156pp.; 8139 Midland Road Mentor OH 44060. $6.

A couple of years ago I and some 200 other visual poets  throughout the world received copies of a 2-page questionnaire  from Crag Hill and John Byrum, poet/editors of magazines highly-  regarded in the field. About half the questionnaire concerned  visual poetry as a career; the rest had to do with its nature and  function.  Hill and Byrum got responses from some sixty poets,  mostly North Americans but with a sprinkling of Europeans and  South Americans (some of whose responses are in their native  tongues).  These they've now published as Core.    This is important for everyone interested in visual poetry, for  there has been no large-scale compilation of commentary on the  genre since 1978 when Peter Mayer and Bob Cobbing brought out  concerning concrete poetry in England--and no compilation ever  with material from so many practitioners.  It should also be of  interest to the world outside the narrow confines of visual  poetry as a fairly full-scale overview-from-within of what it's  like to be an otherstream artist in the contemporary Western  World.     As an amateur psychologist, I found it fun to divide the  respondents into "rigidniks" and "freewenders", the former  conscientiously trying to answer the questions as directly and  fully as possible, the latter wending widely, and wildly, astray.  Among the rigidniks I put Karl Kempton (whose contribution has 34  footnotes), myself, Geof Huth, Wharton Hood, David Cole, John M.  Bennett, Jonathan Brannen.  More fun are such freewenders as  Andrew Russ, who--under a pseudonym--defines poetry as a capital  I, and visual poetry as a dotted capital I, then answers the rest  of the questionnaire with various arrangements of i's--and eyes;  Avelino De Araujo, who does similar things with a little circle;  and Bill DiMichele, who simply overprints the questionnaire with  what appears to be two pieces of scrap paper, heavily splotched,  and with part of some kind of educational hand-out text on one of  them.  There are also Spencer Selby, whose answers consist of  amusingly pertinent found graphics--like a drawing of a little  girl at the top of a ladder trying to reach the bottom limbs of a  tree as an answer to a question concerning whether or not the  government should subsidize visual poetry; and Daniel Davidson,  whose response consists of a page containing a boxed text that  says "NONONONONON/ONONONONON/..." on one side and a similarly  boxed text on the other side that says, "ONONONONONO/NONONONONON/..."  So Core is, among other things, an intriguing collection of  visual poems.     The respondents took three positions on the nature of visual  poetry: (1) who cares; (2) it is just about any form of art that  combines text and graphics; and (3) it is a rigorously  ascertainable subset of the preceding whose characteristics vary  slightly from critic to critic.  The first two were by far the  most popular of these.  My (abridged) answer to those who took  position 1 is simple: all intelligent people care, because to  define is to make meaningful communication possible, and  communication is sharing, which is A Good Thing.     Karl Young, I think, stated the second position best: "Visual  poetry is a type of poetry that depends to a significant degree  on its visual form.  It cannot be fully understood if read aloud  to someone who can't see it, no matter how many times it is read,  or how it is read, or explained, or glossed."  Except that I'd  use "experienced" in place of "understood" (because I think it  possible for one person to tell another enough about something  visual for the latter to understand it without having to see it),  this seems sensible.  But it can't deal well with such mixtures  of the verbal and visual as illustrated poems and collages whose  textual matter everyone would agree is poetic.  Poems with fancy  lettering (can mere calligraphy make an ordinary poem a visual  one?), and paintings that have minor bits of text in them (that  someone somewhere might contend are poetic) would present  problems for it as well.  In short, it's too loose for me.     That's why I for a long time worked out of position 3, defining a  visual poem as a mix of verbal and visual matter whose visual  matter acts as a significant metaphor for its main verbal matter.  This hasn't caught on.  Consequently, I've backed into position  2--and made up the term "illumapoetry" from "illumagery," my word  for visual art, and "poetry" to stand for combinations of verbal  and metaphorically-active visual matter.  This, I know, will  never catch on!     As for the function of visual poetry, my impression is that the  respondents mostly agreed with Geof Huth that "visual poetry, as  art, brings pleasure to the world--pleasure different from that  possible through other artforms," though some would add remarks  like Harry Polkinhorn's that "visual poetry should promote clear  thinking and fresh perception, always needed in the world we  inhabit."     From others of the conscientious replies we learn (without  surprise) that just about no one makes any money from visual  poetry.  This doesn't seem to faze any of the contributors to  Core, though I'm sure that most of them have a normal amount of  extra-aesthetic ambition and hope, as I do, to one day become  established--without becoming establishment.  It will be  interesting to see if so substantive a publication as Core will  be much of a step toward Credibility in the Big World for visual  poetry.  If the volume starts getting cited by the academics (as  I notice some of Richard Kostelanetz's long disregarded essays on  the avant garde are now beginning to be with an almost frightening  alacrity, if not yet with much genuine comprehension), and inspires  follow-up anthologies of various kinds, visual poetry could at last  enter the mainstream.  If so, it will be fascinating to see if  it then becomes the first movement to avoid the defensive tunnel-  vision of all previous literary establishments.

Dear Whomever

 Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 9, September 1995

 
 
 
     W’ORCs, ALOUD ALLOWED, Vol. 10, Nos. 1, 2 & 3,
     January, February and March 1995; 24 pp., each;
     Box 27309, Cincinnati OH 45227. $36/yr.

As 1995 began, I had such a stack of unanswered letters (over 50) that I decided to summarize what was going on with me in a form letter of the kind many people write to friends and relatives at Christmas. It bothered me to do it because a letter, for me, is usually very one-on-one, but I was desperate. I needn’t have worried, though, for I almost immediately, without really thinking about it, began to answer my correspondents personally, one after the other, instead of all at somehow once. To orient on-listeners, I preceded each answer with brief notes about the letter I was replying to, and its author.

This, of course, was just like writing 50 or more separate letters–except that I didn’t have to repeat information: once I’d told Harry, say, about my one-time near-love Susan, I didn’t need to repeat the story to everybody else I replied to. (Susan had recently phoned me from San Diego, ten years and two electro- shock treatments [hers, not mine] after we’d last seen each other. When I didn’t immediately accept her offer to come share my Florida home, she started a correspondence with a stranger who was serving time and married him a month later though she’d never to that point seen him in person. It didn’t turn out well: she panicked on the eve of his first scheduled out-of-jail conjugal visit, and divorced him. “All of a sudden it hit me,” said she.

“He’s a felon! I can’t have him in my house!” She dropped me as a correspondent due to the insufficiency of my celebration of her restored availability, so I don’t know if she ever got back with the convict or not.)

The letter was fun to write, and besides the poop on Susan and other bits of personal gossip included responses to poems and drawings various correspondents had sent me, some wacked-out philosophizing about Art and the Unconscious, a defense of one of my mathematical poems, and so on. When I finally finished it, it was something like 8,000 words long.

The response to it was satisfying. It boggled the few people I wasn’t all that interested in writing to out of replying, and seemed to entertain the others. A couple of recipients even reviewed it in zines they edited! Perhaps the most flattering result was Ralph LaCharity’s reprinting something like three- quarters of it in his zine, W’ORCs. This was quite a surprise to me, though I knew he liked to publish letters in W’ORCs.

LaCharity also responded at length to what I’d said in my letter to him personally, starting Very Perceptively with words about my “evoking of the pith & breadth of Otherstream Praxis.” He also favorably mentioned the author’s explanations with which I sometimes accompany the crazier poems I get published–as in a recent issue of Juxta, whose editors are trying to encourage such help-for-readers, so many of its poems being decidedly off-putting in their strayngeness.

Then LaCharity ascended to a self-exegesis of his own “Rupan,” an essay/letter in an earlier issue of WORC’s that I’d spent a few words in my letter on. LaCharity might be as nuts as I am. He certainly pulled out all the stops in describing how his (and my) kind of poetry dons “in its radical outwelling: the Hummed, the Mimed, the Written, the Diagrammed, the Encoded, the Concretized, the Mumbled & the Recorded, the Algorhythmized & the Amplified, the Drumbed & the EverDanced, that which is Accompanied & Collabial & Simultaned, on & on . . .” Much of his inspiration, he pointed out, comes from Jack Foley’s prime, priming, reflections on the shallowness of conceiving poetry as something written on a page only. The manner in which LaCharity is achieving his own main goal, “How to Tongue MultiValently” is clear from such lines as “dreamerrily omphalo star-fishery’d y shell-tonic” from “Rupan” itself. It was a Yow of the First Order to have triggered such a brave rant from so valuable a culturateur as he.

I had been meaning to review W’ORCs here even before LaCharity’s pr move on my behalf, for it’s just the kind of stapled-in-the-corner lit zine that I most enjoy calling attention to. Read, I’m sure, by just about no one in the mainstream media, or in academia, but twenty years or more closer to what’s going on in literature today than they are, it’s also good breezy fun, full of news about readings past and upcoming, gossip, and poetics. It also reprints all kinds of poems and other artworks from other zines, and as far as I can tell, covers the full range of poetry in English today.

Some of the reprinting is (I’m sure) sardonic, such as the copy of a dominant-mode piece of plaintext verse by James Laughlin from the New Yorker that reflects on “the happy shouts of children/ Romping from room to room,” that’s in the March issue.

Much better poems are printed in the issue and the other two under review, such as January’s excerpts from Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi, Part Two and Jim Leftwich’s Khawatir, which LaCharity thinks rhymes with Brambu somehow, and I agree. Think a moment on Berry’s “independent attractors/ & their shadow knowledge” on a page with six occurences of the word “idylye” stacked in the lower left corner; the page swarms with chemistry, archaeology, and “Pan, joyously electric, dancing hoof and cunt in paradise.” Does Berry mean “shadow-knowledge,” or knowledge that is but some greater essence’s shadow? Berry’s work is intimidatingly noisy, but teems with questions the blood can exult in, like the preceding. Leftwich rhymes with Berry by focusing also on existence’s shadow knowledge, and doing so in a world in which “particular means prayer” and one views it with “the eating eye” and other similarly aptly misused senses. Their two poetries are unconfusably their own in form and style, but one in the elations they dance out of. The wonderful thing about W’ORCs is the inclusion with Berry’s and Leftwich’s poetry letters about it from them, with LaCharity’s equally charged feedback. Also in the January issue is a pertinent essay by Jack Foley, “Light, Breath, and the Empty Page.” Foley, I suspect, is the clearest critic writing about this stuff; certainly he’s clearer than I!

The February W’ORCs has some fine material, too, including an essay by Ron Silliman on “Wild Form” that but wrong-headed, because he claims that “form” is “structure that proves generative and inherent” rather than mere “pattern, exoskeletal reiteration.” But the latter, objectively, is what form is; to claim that only “good” scaffolding qualifies as form, as Silliman seems to, is simply to subjectify form for political purposes, something the language poets are too wont to do. Nonetheless, his essay is a great read. There’s a fine rant by Ron Androla in the same issue. I wish I had space to discuss it, and the excellent poems (often much more straight-forward than Berry’s and Leftwich’s) that are also in the issues I’ve skimmed over for you here. To find out more about them, you’ll just have to writer LaCharity.