Archive for the ‘Karl Kempton’ Category
Entry 1712 — Ground Hog Day
Monday, February 2nd, 2015
This morning, at 4:48 A.M., I turned 74. My Facebook Timeline is swamped with birthday greetings, which is very nice, but it bothers me that Mary Worth hasn’t yet wished me well on my day. The card below from Karl Kempton almost makes up for that, though:
I was delighted with this when I first looked at it. A gorgeous design, yes? After a moment with it, I realized that the message at the top was in code, and quickly decoded it, now doubly delighted, for I love codes. Moreover, this use of a code made Karl’s design not just a birthday card, but a veritable birthday poem! Karl had secreted his message in an underground that had allowed it to wend its way back into sight as little flowers, celebrating their secret message’s meaning! What’s more, the two lines of sheer garden swirled into a single, three-dimensional super-blossoming: I had been given a master-poem with three levels for my birthday.
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Entry 1344 — A Constellation
Saturday, January 18th, 2014
The piece below is the fourteenth frame of Karl Kempton’s sequence, “Constellations,” which is from his Black Strokes White Spaces (Xerox Sutra, 1984), which is one of my favorites of his many books:.
This piece is composed, like all the works in Black Strokes White Spaces, of repetitions of a single typographical symbol. The symbol in this one is the comma, an ideal choice for so soothingly serene a nocturnal seascape, as I perceive it, at any rate) because of its verbal meaning as “pause here.” Consider, for instance, the commas’ slowing of the wave depicted. True, maybe what I’m calling a wave is something botanical. But I like the idea of an ocean wave in slow motion better than the idea of a plant slowed in a downward curl. . . . Karl would probably have made it in 1983, thirty years ago! It still works.
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Entry 770 — “HA AM, 2″
Friday, June 15th, 2012
“HA AM, 2,” My favorite work from Karl Kempton’s gorgeous sequence, Chewed, avantacular press, 2012:
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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah. Fortunately I remembered I had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:
mindless x ( ) = less mind
The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:
old pond
frog
splash
!
Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that. Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.
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Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M. Tough day. A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40. I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago. Then marketing followed by the delivery of “The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present. After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore. I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much. But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore. Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty. Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.
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