dbqp: visualizing poetics

If we are serious, we find it difficult to assess a work of art, because the art is in the concealment of its meaning, its manner, and its purpose. Because of this, I allow the pieces of a work of art to accumulate upon me, like dust in a room left closed for decades because someone dear to me died there and I do not wish to experience that death again, let alone forever and again. 

So it is with trepidation that I strew a few words about Dawn Nelson-Wardrope's “Remnants of the Red Ribbon Sect.” I will begin by noting I have no idea how two visual poets of such mastery as Dawn and her brother Stephen can be birthed from the same spring.

calamity is the whisper of a heart 

still throbbing after all these many forgotten years 

precarious, you might say 

thinking of cavities 

the sweetest being

the wettest 

my monsoon thoughts elapse across perimeters 

kinda like kissing a kat and the consequences thereof 

what is right is whatever it is we ever do 

I sing with the slightest voice so 

you might not hear it 

unless you lean into the breadth of it 

and the whole sense of it 

close enough to inhale 

its slightly putrid

The word comes rough out of the body. A wind. Constriction. Friction makes the sound. We all hate speech because it forces us to believe we are human, because we are forced into the human horde. The only way to control it, to control the word, is to write it. To draw it.

Last night, I attended the opening reception for a retrospective of Robert Grenier's poetry at Southfirst in Brooklyn.

The poem, an isolated fiction, doesn't breathe, but it sings.