POETICKS

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Dogma#1: a visual poem must consist of a significant graphic element significantly interacting with a significant verbal element. Dogma #2: a reader of the poem must experience the poem’s graphic and verbal elements simultaneously. There will come a day when neurophysiologists will be able to detect this simultaneous experience. Thereupon we will have an objective way of determining whether a not a given work is a visual poem–for a given person. (Bob Grumman, from Poeticks)

As to my method, it will be that of children’s guessing games, where the question is how two things resemble or differ from one another.(Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image )

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Again, intersections with Vispo? Yes, of course. And more. I’ll even go so far as to call it a prefigurement since Baker (with Cage, Corman, Grumman, & Perlman) were in a very real way there from the beginning & continue to be there now: silent partners in a developing form that the digital revolution really only helped to bring to everyone’s notice. A fact particularly true in regard to Bob Grumman. For all its strong pro-tech format, his (contribution to) SPIDERTANGLE:the_book, for example, is a particularly curious intermixing of  both Vispo and traditional pre-Internet visual poetics (a distinction which he denies): his superlative “Mathemaku” series, in particular, attests markedly to eclecticism and innovation both. But I’m inclined to believe Grumman’s work, while displaying impressive digital virtuosity, the only feature that makes it decidedly Vispo (in my view), is essentially a celebration of older styles. I believe he can be appreciated not just as innovator but as a member of an artistic and intellectual tradition attuned to changing cultural landscapes. Interesting critique always accompanies creativity. But first a word on the nature of origins and literary appropriations in general.

Is Vispo a verbo-pictorial (with primary ties to concrete poetry) or purely technical creation? Lines between them have been blurred almost to the point of non- recognition. I’ve said before that means of literary production may have meshed so completely with artistic form after the Internet revolution that Web 2.0  has made it necessary— in regards to literary work— to speak of ‘image’ (after Rancière) rather than the purely visual: in fact, literariness these days seems to have suffered the same fate as commoditized Art, or is well on its way. Or, more interestingly, that product may be virtually indistinguishable from product-line: artistry from the directives of not just a commercial but an academic marketplace where writing curricula & the publishers (and academics) who propagandize acceptable styles through them are part of the same sales pitch.

The recent Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, for all its claims to being a literary love-in, reveals writing for the trade show and clearing house it’s recently become and attests (like nothing else can) to the way literary works cater for a growing bourgeois mainstream appeal. Seeing Vispo as both the putative form of a new Web art or Webism and the successor to all the preceding visual arts (as its post-avant practitioners seem to do) perhaps calls into question artistic integrity itself.

that the one ideology is a convenient cover for the other. The reveries of artisans reconciled with the fine craftsmanship and collective faith of times past is a spiritualist mystification concealing a quite different reality: submission to the principles of capitalist rationality. When Peter Behrens becomes artistic advisor to AEG and uses Ruskin’s principles to design the firm’s logos and adverts, the neo-Gothic idyll reveals its prosaic truth: the production line. (101)

It’s the mixtures of Vispo practice (clean, dirty or otherwise) I’m interested in—all the slippages, shifts and creative dissonances 
evident in practice and the two distinguishable ways now of doing visual poetry online to which the one name Vispo supposedly refers. Vispo is where Art (and its theories) and a growing Webism co-exist; where the old forms seem otiose to the wildly diverse visual poetries and the growing number of software specialists-poets who now write them into being. Web 2.0, software-proficient and all too eager to erase any traces of old-school language identity theory, seems to have made an even greater parody of traditional mimetic poetry, of Art as chronicle of significant human experience.

I have  rejected the idea that Vispo is at best a so-called generic term for visual art: reasonably certain also that the gap beginning to widen between visual poetry rooted in Dada and Fluxus (among others) & a burgeoning Web version of it I’ve identified with Vispo (& said to be “digital to the core”) threatens to make visual poetry of any description essentially “unpresentable”. Art that cannot even stand to imitate itself. Just a wavering image, dissolving perhaps in the “original gap” (132) between genre purity and the “dirty” realities of artistic production Rancière says (in a different context) it’s the fate of avant-gardists to witness to in their work. And if not unpresentable, then perhaps digital art’s become bland to the point of having lost its own creative impulses: a cultural obscenity. “It is the obscenity, ” Baudrillard says in his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, “of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.” The obscenity of art reduced to a name (Vispo) or Webism.

If the original graphics-with-language ideal goes by the wayside, what’s left? Anti-art may soon turn into anti-artist at the rate we’re going, poetry surviving in name only, left in the end as some unsalvageable (irrecoverable) trace of a discarded hope. To be permanently erased from literary consciousness. There’s a lot at stake in the tendency to reduce things to a name or look (Logo). And it’s why if I choose to read contemporary Vispo, it must be work of the very best kind, associated not with techno-brands and Web 2.0 ideologies (which are legion) but authors who are too strong for any of that current radical decentering that’s still in  vogue.  Forms do not crumble in Grumman’s hands (as they do elsewhere). I believe a forcefulness of  personality will outshine the work itself so that if the latter ever falters, it may continue as an abiding authorial presence at least.  Faithfulness to a non-Western sensibility and Baker himself will never make his work Vispo in any sense.  And nor does a penchant for mathematical notation & neologisms, what amounts to a complete  “Lexicon Grummaniacal” , ever keep Bob Grumman far from his own ties to tradition and intelligent design.

As I’ve said, if visual poetry continues along its present path it will suffer the fate of the “image”. But Grumman’s work is not purely Vispo, to be interpreted along the lines of, say, Jim Rosenberg’s depersonalized “interface technologies” or Dan Waber’s wildly multimedia Vispoets.com site; it’s a lot of things that make it interestingly complex (Examples are from Grumman’s Poeticks blog). Conceptual, by which I mean poetry in the service of a distinctively mathematical and neurophysiological vision (not visual); minimalist- and haiku-based, every letter and syllable skilfully set into place; a little traditional, as in the case of his “linguexpressive” Keatsian-style lyrics, sonnets and haiku pieces; and perhaps even polemical, experimenting as it does with new attitudes towards language & reality, even daring enough to write its own dictionary of artistic production or explore uncharted regions of brain topography.  Grumman’s succeeded, I think, in keeping a writing project free from the noisy & cluttered dissonance of wildly untrained styles. He never strikes me as self-reflective or self-aggrandizing as many Vispo practitioners do. The axis of established (minimalist & visual) form is always nicely balanced (never upset) by that of a pure and reasoned  integration of poetics, theoretical psychology and digital technology.

Grumman is among the poets who attribute the effectiveness of poetry to the potential of language for radical rearrangement, with the result that work can look creatively rococo and, under the right digital conditions, even engagingly superartful. Attributes I give only to artists with feet planted firmly on solid artistic ground and imaginative heads suited to changing means of literary production. In his case, the “dissemblance” between genre purity and actual work never draws too much attention to each other, the elements of his craft always  expertly combined and presented. To begin with, his typology (from what I’ve seen) is fairly simple, breaking poetry down into infraverbal (such as Geof Huth’s pwoermds), linguexpressive (the latter including haiku, minimalist & sonnet forms) and the mathematical poetry (mathemaku) for which he’s best known. Not afraid to speak of the nature of human creativity in purely psychological terms ( see his “Knowlecular Poetics” and “The Nature of Visual Poetry” pieces),  hypothesizing that “neurophysiology will be the basis of all theories of poetics”, Grumman is speculative as well as artistic. Transposing brain physiology into discourse on the nature of visual poetry can be seen as the attempt to give a materialist basis to art: making even the bare bones lettering & software imagery of digital writing (what I’ve called the first principle of digital poetics) reducible to an even more basic grammar of poetry perceptions in the brain.

A positive (not the usual reductive hypertext) poetics is what you get in Grumman: traditional, intellectual and dynamically experimental. As I’ve said, emblematic of Grumman’s style is the mathemaku, a genre and mathematical notational mix that’s also interestingly haiga in presentation (though it looks as though in the “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World” the Basho haiku’s been slightly inverted for effect).

“Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World.”

The complex feeling, made up of image and a direct reference to haiku origins, of having to solve a problem and admire a visual artifact at the same time, makes Grumman’s mathemakus artistic delights: the materials never drawing too much attention to themselves, giving  them both experimental and aesthetical charm. The medieval lute “quotient” in the “Andrea Bianco” piece is particularly striking. A medieval age of Christian lutes, ecclesiasticism and an unenlightened world view as represented by Bianco’s crumpled pond-shaped map, underscored by classical haiku, are all food for the “thinking eye” (Silliman). Reflection, mental alertness and simple pleasures of viewing are essential prerequisites of a Grumman visual.

.                                                                                                                                           –Conrad DiDiodato