Visual and Digital Poetries :: Artistic and Academic Lives

Chris Funkhouser, whose essential Prehistoric Digital Poetry I have to review soon, has recently been interviewed by Kareem Estefan on his avant-garde poetry radio program Ceptuetics.* (You can go straight to the interview/performance here.)

Two features of this interview interest me:

First, Chris spends most of his time performing sound poetry (and sound and performance are often important aspects of digital poetry conferences), but he is also a scholar of the form. I'm no scholar myself, though I might be accused of having aspirations in that direction, so I wonder what the limitations are of being both a scholar of and a practictioner of a specific art. There seem to be plenty of advantages, one being that a scholar acquires deep knowledge of an artform, knowledge that might inform the creation of art.

Second, Chris spoke only briefly--and too briefly for my interest--about the division (if any) between digital and visual poetry. Chris mentions this blog in the interview and seems to imply that I make no distinction (but I may have misunderstood him). I see quite a distinction, but Chris and I use different definitions:

For him, any poem created by digital means (and which could not otherwise have been made--thus eliminating the mere typing of poems) is a digital poem in his definition in Prehistoric Digital Poetry. This means that he includes any static visual poem created by any digital means (coding, text generation, simple layout), whereas my definition confines digital poetry to poems that are created for digital presentation, created for the computer screen, created with movement and sight and sometimes even sound as parts of their gestalts.

Maybe I misunderstood Chris in the interview, where he kindly referred to my blog and then seemed to imply that I didn't make a distinction between visual and digital poetry. Chris and I have had this discussion a few times. I just see the term used in a much narrower way than he does, so I stick with the definition that appears to fit the term. I understand Chris' thinking, just don't agree with it.

But all this posting is really trying to do is point you to a simple, though interesting, interview with Chris Funkhouser.

_____

* "Avant-garde poetry readings/ interviews every Wednesday night from 7:30-8:00 on WNYU 89.1FM in the NYC tri-state area and www.wnyu.org worldwide, or directly through iTunes (Radio--> eclectic-->WNYU)"

ecr. l'inf.

bindithoughts 10

•
Esperanza Mansion, Room 1 (Chardonnay), Branchport, New York

•

•
With the onset of night, the once sturdy wireless connection at this inn has all but disappeared, leaving me to wonder if I’ll ever be able to post this concatenation of ideas tonight. I may have to predate the posting and load it sometime tomorrow.

•
I have been called to jury duty next week. For that week, in Schenectady’s Supreme Court, I am designated Juror Number 123—an opening sequence, a counting, an incomplete infinitude.

•
Today, I finished reading Robert Creeley’s collected poems, which are divided into The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 and The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005, each volume encompassing three decades—sixty years of writing poetry in something over 1600 pages of relatively small type.

•
David Daniels, the new pattern poet for our age, died last week. Now that he is gone, I can consider only the opportunities I missed talking to him more about his work. (Regrets are a part of life we never tire of even though we never lack for them.) Fortunately, he left behind ample evidence of his capacious ingenuity for us to enjoy: hundreds of ridiculously complex pattern poems that he somehow created with that bluntest of tools, Microsoft Word. Sometime soon, I’ll try to recall what made David Daniels someone to miss.

•
“Esperanza,” the first name of this inn, means “hope” in Spanish. Sitting at the top of a hill that looks down at the northern tip of the western branch of Keuka Lake, the crooked lake, I am wondering how much hope actually governed the activities of the family that built this mansion.

•
We need ugliness so that beauty has meaning.

•
The idea of the ear in poetry continues to interest me because I continue to find examples of poetry where the sound of the poem is not dull but jarring. Of course, the concept of the ear and its use is more complicated than whether or not it is jarring. Sometimes, the reader needs to be awakened by the wrenching of sound.

•
I was called to serve as a juror only once before, six years ago. The case at hand was a lawsuit by a man who had fallen on ice in the parking lot of a supermarket. As I sat listening to the same set of questions a number of times, I memorized them and sped up the vetting of myself by quickly rattling off the answers to the generic opening questions. Then the lawyer for the plaintiff asked me if I’d ever been sued. I answered as I’ll answer next week if the question arises: truthfully, by saying, “Yes. The woman who drove into my mother’s car killing her sued me for damages.” When I first said this line, I was summarily excused from serving as a juror.

•
It is always dangerous to believe that a poem tells us anything about a poet, but I find it difficult not to see Robert Creeley’s sixty years of poetic output as a fragmented autobiography. We can see the friction in his first marriage, sometimes viscerally. We hear about his friends. He dedicates poems to these same friends—and many to his wife Bobbie and his wife Pen(elope). Some poems are baldly autobiographical. His last two books of poetry (If I were writing this and On Earth) include a number of poems that, in one way or another, begin to address the prospect of death—that settle the accounts of his life or mark the difficult passage he was making into decrepitude and final nothingness (which a poet tries to avoid by leaving words behind).

•
Twenty-one years ago was the last time I saw Hayden Carruth, who was one of my poetry writing professors—though that term hardly suited him—at Syracuse University. He is now 87 years and quite frail, as Bob Arnold of Longhouse makes clear in a short account of a reading by Carruth on the fourth of this month. I will sometime, maybe sooner than I wish, recall a few of my stories about Carruth, but for now let me point you to Bob Arnold and provide a few extracts from his story:

We saw Hayden Carruth yesterday at Marlboro College - probably the sorriest human animal I've seen in quite awhile. But don't get yourself too upset - it's one naturalist looking upon another naturalist. Wheelchair, tubes to his nose, oxygen gasps to get him to speak, his eyes all cockeyed from lord knows what. He throws his head back slowly to look at me with one eye that bobbles for clarity as if an old pirate, then he bellows, "That you, Bob?" What hair is left, down to his shoulders.

When I put down my copy of Hayden's book For You to sign (he signs nearly blind, almost like swinging a small sword; I have to fingertip point where to attach the pen) he stops a moment and asks, "Did I write a book called For You?"

He's reading his poetry off a book that is projected onto a screen in large point type. He has a helper sitting beside him maneuvering the book so it can all project onto the small screen so he can read. Being Hayden - both crusty and curious - he stops a moment and asks the helper beside him what his name is. The man answers. Hayden reads another poem. He asks the kind man again what his name is. Robert Frost would have never been able to do this so blind, so he stopped, or read and rowed from his heart.

•
When I was at Vanderbilt University at the very beginning of the 1980s, a friend of mine told me that a friend of hers could never commit suicide by jumping from a tall building because to do so would be to suffer from “fourteen stories of regret.” I have kept that phrase and that idea with me for going on thirty years without doing anything with it. My original plan was to write a collection entitled Fourteen Stories of Regret, one of which I would call “Fourteen Storeys of Regret.” (That plan requires of me a meandering outside the normal bounds of American spelling, but I’m willing to do it.)

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The only time I realized my own ability managing sound in poetry was when I was in the twelfth grade at Father Ryan High School (named after a priest, Confederate supporter, and poet) in Nashville, Tennessee. We were given the ostensibly simple task of writing a rhyming accentual-syllabic poem in class—simply, employing the classic, though outdated, concept of what a poem is in the English language tradition—and only I could do it quickly and without trouble. When people asked me how I did it, I simply told them to listen to what they were doing, that the sounds were in their heads.

•
The second volume of Robert Creeley’s collected poems is a bit of a disappointment. There remain, to be sure, fine poems within its xiv + 665 + [8] pages, but these are rare nuggets in a stream full of stones. His ear loses its balance, and he is writing poems out of habit (which I well understand) instead of a necessity borne out of having something to say. His writing conventions begin to lose their purposes: his awkwardly article-less nouns proliferate and jar against the ear, his use of rhyme—always quirky at best—becomes more frequent and less refined, and his concomitant use of meter leaves us with ditty-like lines that stumble into an unbalanced drunkenness. Yet by this time in his life he was writing with more facility, so he said, than earlier in his career, when his poems were intricate capsules of concentrated syntax fighting against the linguistic norms of “the man” and winning.

•
Nancy and I are spending the night in a room named after a wine, chardonnay. I am not much of a drinker and have begun in recent years to drink a bit of wine only to pay Nancy back for her years of living with a total nephalist, and I don’t much care for most white wines, but today we (coincidentally, I suppose) tasted quite a few unoaked chardonnays. Though neither of us liked any of the chardonnays much, this experience quickly taught me where the taste of oak sat in a tongueful of wine.

•
Sometime last week, I devised a personal motto and swiftly informed Nancy what it was: “Better than Hitler.” She remained a little less than impressed. As I told others of my new mantra, a friend of mine pointed out that my motto actually covered quite a bit of ground in the realm of individual accomplishment and worth. That’s exactly what I was going for. I don’t want to be pinned down too much by a motto.

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In our room in this inn, I have discovered a number of illustrated novels published between 1905 and 1910 by J.P. Lippincott of Philadelphia. These books feature embossed covers (with glued-on full-color illustrations), illustrated end papers (in half the cases), line drawings (sometimes in color) on every page, lavishly decorated title pages, and the occasional full-color illustration on glossy paper just to tempt the eye a bit more. Most of these books are by someone named Ralph Henry Barbour, and I decided to dip into his book The Golden Heart. What I discovered was that his style of writing was just as rococo as the book design, all of which I found quite delightful (especially since I’d found someone who is a bit more outrageous than I am with his writing):

The harbor was blue—intensely, ridiculously, wastefully blue—as though all of the indigo in the world had been washed into it,—so blue that the big, wide, cloudless sky seemed faded in comparison,—so blue that Natalie’s eyes, which were quite the bluest things under that same sky, matched it absolutely, just as though she had stepped to the edge of the balcony here, opened those eyes very wide and said:

“I want a mile and a quarter of half-mile-wide harbor, please, to match these.”

•
I began reading Creeley’s collected poems (both volumes) on March 28th of this year, and that simple action of entertaining and educating myself led spontaneously to my writing a set of poems, each using stanzas of seven lines apiece. This book of poems now is certainly over 200 pages in length in single-spaced typescript, and it goes by the name Credence (for reasons both various and discombobulating). For 51 days I read those books, and for 51 days I wrote my poems. As I read these two volumes of Creeley’s, I also read a number of other books of poetry (most recently Curtis Faville’s metro) and I also wrote other poems (visual and otherwise) besides those of Credence, but with my completion of Creeley’s Collected I must also conclude the writing of Credence. In the end, this book of mine consists of 101 poems, which I’ll put aside for a couple of months before considering them again. At that point, I’ll try to rescue each of those 101 (a prime number) poems with stanzas of lines of seven (a prime number). Rescuing words is the role of any writer.

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Nancy and I are spending the night in Room Number 1. Upon realizing that our room had more than a name of a wine to distinguish it, I immediately searched for a Gideon Bible, but found none. This was quite a disappointment, slowing down my multi-year art project, The Hotel Bible of America. Whenever I stay in a hotel, I remove from the Bible stored in my room the sheet that includes the page number that coincides with the room number of my hotel room. I mark the sheet with information on my stay (hotel, room number, city, state, and date), and I amass each of these in anticipation of someday binding them into a thick, but incomplete, Bible. I admit that this project of mine does damage others’ private property, but I also must report that I’ve never found a Bible in a hotel room that has showed any signs that anyone has ever read it.

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pen|velope

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While moving through this room trying to find a sweet spot where the signal connecting me to the outside world, I dropped my laptop on my foot. I didn’t hurt the computer, but the top of my right foot aches. There must be something akin to irony that accounts for the fact that I’ve been hurt, even if slightly, by that machine that so supports my obsessions concerning writing.

•
To commemorate the completion of Credence, I present the last poem of the book. I wrote this tonight with the cold breath of midnight approaching my neck, and I present it with just one caveat: Never believe the authenticity of an I in my poems. There is always some of me in any I but also always some of something else. I didn’t, for example, eat any fennel pollen today (and may never have ingested any save on walks around the hills of San Francisco in the past), but the couscous was rather fine.

Resistance to Darkness

We exist
beside inside
a body of
water we reside
within water
modulating from
blue slate green
grey aquamarine

there is
no sun but
rain there
is no cloud
but sunlight
there is no
lake but mountain

from which
we see
and believe
the lake is
process and
being beyond
any depth

we do not
see the lake
itself only its
surface a
simulacrum of
lake a covering
like darkness

between
the water
now the color
of night
and us
there is
no connection

except
the darkness
which binds
us as one
which extends to
the surrounding
everything

a darkness
that behaves
like a liquid
flowing into
every corner
filling every
surface establishing

its dominion
over our bodies
our consciousness
the memories
we retain
against all hope
of necessity

the obscurity
of night exposes
the difference
between rain
and sunshine
the small petals
of our meal

the lemon-scented
grains of fat
Israeli couscous
the salmon dusted
with fennel pollen
the truffle-infused
oils how

the blueberry
of the wine
subjugates
its own
sweetness
allows flavor
to persist

the lake
before us
has translated
itself from
a deepening slate
to the color
of night

and we are
alone
but two
beside a body
of water
we are
two bodies

in motion
two tendencies
in conflict
with the night
resistance and
continuation
decision

and volition
intent and outside
ourselves these
bodies wandering
the body of
the earth
in search of

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With the writing of this poem, I now give up this style of writing, one that is too easy for me and probably too insubstantial because of it. I may return to writing a style of poem, which I began this year, that consists of nothing but lists with headings. The last one of those I wrote referred back to my experiences as a toddler in 1962 and 1963 living in Albany, California, and I spent four days working on it without making much progress at all. That’s the kind of challenge I prefer.

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I have taken a number of photographs around this inn, most of them only to serve as backgrounds for a set of 999 visual poems I am writing with extreme sluggishness. Tonight, I present a view of Keuka Lake’s northernmost point of its western branch and of a queer little lamp of a monkey atop an elephant. I wonder if this signifies some monkey on the back of the Republican party.

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Days seem dark merely because they are night. Wait for the morning. It always comes.

•

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ecr. l’inf.

Watching and Thinking

Every poem begins with a single word, the single word that starts it and engenders every other. It is unavoidable. Videosoundtextpoem, a brand-new blog by Mike Cannell, begins, with a single word as well, a pwoermd—

p’rosery
—which is a good start indeed.

Cannell’s second introduction quickly gives us a sense of where he’s going:

If a journey of a thousand miles can be said to start with a single step, then perhaps this poetry blog should start with the pwoermd you see in the previous post. A pwoermd (for those who don't know) is a poem consisting of one word and no title except for what the word provides.

And his project here revolves around the same concerns as mine:

I create visual poems, asemic writing, prose poems, sound poems (and text sound compositions) and hay (na) ku along with other various types. Not everyone will regard some of my work poetry, but I assure you it all is (including the most visual things that include little or no text).

I find his visual poems, so far, to be quite strong and effective, and I’m pleased to have another fellow traveler on this trip we’re taking. To keep his work in my mind, I’ve added him to my RSS feeder account and added him to my blogroll on the right. Let’s be sure to pay attention to Cannell. He’s going in the right direction.


ecr. l’inf.

manuscrypt

The Book of Now

My house is overrun with books right now. I keep buying books of all kinds (mostly poetry and books on words). People send me books. I order books. I buy books from stores. People give me books. The coffee table in our living room is covered with piles of books, as is a side table in the same room. Books (and laptop computers) are all over our "dining room" table. I've started to pile books on the kitchen counters. I've moved some books up to the third floor (my putative office, studio, and library). I've moved poetry books into my overflowing poetry section: a built-in bookshelf in my bedroom. Still, we are overwhelmed by books, especially new books.

But the book that interests me the most at the moment, that takes up much more of my attention than its slender body might suggest is Bob Grumman's April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now, a collected mathemaku of Bob Grumman. Currently, it is available for the pre-publication price just US$21.45, whcih is US$3.50 less than it will cost in a week of two when it is officially launched. I'd say more about the book, but since I wrote the blurb for the book, I figure that all I really should do is point you to the blurb (below) and the place where you can order a copy.

Collected in Bob Grumman's book April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now are almost two decades' worth of mathemaku, a personal genre of his that combines elements of visual poetry, mathematics, and haiku. Always the poet of the topical constraint, Grumman writes mathemaku that restrict themselves to a narrow range of subjects (spring, poetry, language, light) so he can divert all his effort into creating remarkable engines of poetic imagination where language, color, images, and mathematics conjoin to form stunning ineluctable gestalts. Drawing from his early pre-long-division mathemaku and his more recent forays into color and ever-increasing formal complexity, this book brings together a hearty sampling of the best of Grumman's mathemaku, including such masterworks as "Mathemaku for Ezra Pound" and "Seaside Mathemaku." A lifetime in the making, this book is not to be missed.

ecr. l'inf.

se(le)ction

thepoint

point

po|nt

po:nt

po nt

     .

ecr. l'inf.

When Sleep Defines

When sleep
defines
the ends
and opening
forgives the
closings of
our hearts
dream

ecr. l'inf.

Graffiti Nation

Today, Nancy and I drove to Purchase College to pick Tim up at the end of his freshman year. We moved his possessions out of his dorm room, cleaned a little, and called it a year. Then we had a little Mother's Day celebration at one of Purchase's three restaurants, along with Erin and her boyfriend Jimmy. It was a long day, though productive enough. We have our son back in the house, and I found time at the college to collect a few photographs of graffiti and other verbo-visual expressions.

"You Cant" (11 May 2008)
The first to catch my eye was the simplest, just a bald statement that "You" (possibly the school's administration) cannot silence the thoughts of the free-spirited students of the campus. (Since this is primarily an art school, there is more smoking on this campus than any other campus I've ever visited.) I find something quaint about this sign. And not just that it's handwritten in chalk on brick, sans the necessary apostrophe in "cant." The idea that the students of this campus are being overregulated by an oppressive administration intent on domination is just too humorous for words. Something about the impetuousness and incomprehension of youth strikes me. However, I have to say that the half-wiped-away word "thoughts" is a nice piece of verbo-visual panache, whether intentional or not.

"Don't Piss On" (11 May 2008)
I spent, for reasons best not dwelled upon, quite a bit of time in the restroom in Tim's dorm. As I stood in that cramped and odorous space, I kept reading an essential instructive sign telling me how to urinate. Despite its tone, vocabulary, and dramatic style, its message was simply imperative, much like the directive to employees to wash their hands before returning to work.

"I" with Bandaid (11 May 2008)
Finally, I noticed (maybe on my third trip to the same stall--there were no urinals) that the I in "PISS" was almost dotted, though at the wrong end, with a little bit of a Bandaid. I saw this as a continuing homage to Vladimir Burda's original "ich," dotted with a fingerprint.

Of course, this is what I see, because I always see what I want to see.

ecr. l'inf.

i-self

imaginotion

Sentimentality and the Fascism of Personal Choice

As Ron Silliman blogs at the beginning of the day (certainly, an early riser), I blog at its end (myself, a person for whom the night is the time of greatest productivity). So I end the day responding to or reverberating off the posting that Ron began the day with. The posting runs itself like a poem, moving from idea to idea, while revolving along the same idea, allowing accretions to the original thought until it ends with a little shudder of surprise.

He begins by noting that plenty of websites are now quoting snippets of Creeley poems, and we begin to wonder where this thought might take us. Apparently, the presentation of quotations from poems is a sentimental activity in this context, which well it might be, but it’s hard to imagine why this presentation of poems must be sentimental, or why it constitutes some kind of affront to the memory of Creeley. Let’s consider a few questions:

Why I wonder does this have to be the same as the concept of memorizing and reciting poetry? If it is, why is memorizing poetry a bad thing? Are we to believe that postmodern poets do not memorize poetry, lest they be thought sentimental? Does that jibe with Creeley’s frequent enough quoting of famous lines from poems? (He even found it necessary to quote François Villon’s famous line (sans “Mais”), “ou sont les neiges d’antan?” twice, in two separate poems, in his book Echoes.*) And why are we expected to believe that Creeley’s sentimental nature (or, more properly, that of his poems) was created out of whole cloth at the end of his career?

The sentimental (and a leaning towards sentimentality) was clearly in evidence even in Creeley’s early poems. Ron considers Creeley’s poem “The Warning” to his “own comment upon sentimentality,” noting also that this poem gives the volume it appears in (For Love) its title, but failing to consider that the poem “For Love,” which ends the same volume and which is essentially a love poem to his wife of the time. But is “The Warning” truly a poem that comments on sentimentality>

The Warning

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

Interestingly, Creeley once gave a reading a little down the road from here in Herkimer County, and afterwards a woman said something about not enjoying his “violent” poem. Creeley noted his surprise at her reading of the opening of “The Warning.” He didn’t see it as a violent image at all, because (at least, it so seems) the image is not meant to be taken literally: not cracking open of heads is intended. It seems to me that the opening stanza is merely a joke, a shocking surprise, and a necessary element in retaining the love between two people. Without the shock of that image to wrestle interest out of the jaws of the quotidian, love would vanish, and that seems the warning of the poem to me.

Not that we can be sure. Creeley’s poems tend to be remarkably economical in their use of words and, therefore, a bit cryptic, and my reading of the poem—one that is definitely sentimental—might contradict many others. But given the frequent references to love in Creeley’s work, and to friends loved and sometimes lost, it seems impossible to call him a hard-edged post-modernist. His style of writing, particularly in For Love and Words, is quite dense and crabbed, with syntax spiraling into itself, but that technique of writing doesn’t negate or eradicate the intent of his poems. It seems to me that technique can be demanding on a reader even if a poem is sentimental.

More interesting to me than Ron’s take on Creeley and sentimentality. Is his about sentimentality and totalitarianism:

Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.

Sentimentality seems to me no more totalitarian than it is democratic. All political movements have as an option the appeals to the heart, which is usually easier than an appeal to reason. People are more pliant to the call of their hearts, and their heads are better convince via the heart itself. And I hardly see the quoting of poetry or presentation of it in popular forums (assuming NPR and the tiniest websites of cyberspace constitute part of popular culture) as “totalitarian framing.” One’s own grandmother might be a great sentimentalist, yet she is hardly likely to be a fascist because of it.

This type of argument is too simple, and it reminded me of a 1970s review in Time by John Ashbery of the paintings of Grant Wood in which Ashbery suggested that Wood’s paintings were somehow of lesser quality than we might imagine since they were a favorite of the Nazis. (A bit of rhetorical legerdemain I’ve found difficult to forgive Ashbery for after more than three decades.) Life, the world, emotion, art, and even the great existential gut that guides each of us are not as simple as that. We cannot reduce things to absolutes that easily and still keep a grip on the shimmering surface of reality.

When I think about it, which I do quite frequently as I continue to read Creeley from beginning to end, I see Creeley as a brave poet, a man interested enough in saying something powerful to say it in his own and sometimes difficult style, to say it in few enough words to confound the reader, and to expose himself as a man of emotion and doubts. In some ways—I’ve said this before—Creeley was a confessional poet. His heart is on his sleeve; his sentiments are always in evidence. He was a man in love and full of doubt, happy and sad—just like all of us, just like each of us—but he was willing to risk embarrassment to be a poet of both word and emotion. He took poetry for all it was: intellect and heart. So that probably makes him a good candidate for quoting on blogs, because in the briefest space of words he tried to hit our minds and our hearts.

Ron ends his posting by quoting from Creeley’s famous (and fairly atypical) “I Know a Man,” which is the story of a conversation that ends with a call to “look/out where yr going.” The poem, which crowds more intertwining syntax and story onto a dozen short lines than we could likely imagine on our own, is a simple one, a recounting of a story, a bit of writing fully in the demotic. It entertains and instructs and scarcely little else, but it hits us with its way of telling and the telling that it is.

And it leaves Ron with his final and important point: “But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.” Which is as it always is. Poetry is not about solutions. It’s about finding a way, exposing a thought, excavating the mind, the body, the heart. It is a fully intellectual exercise—and, often enough, a fully sentimental one—sentiment being just one version of our intellect.

_____

* Possibly so because Echo herself is mentioned in the Villon original.

ecr. l’inf.

I Am Riding

New York State Thruway, Heading North from Exit 21B, Coxsackie

I am riding in a car in the dark on the New York State Thruway with headlights pushing into the darkness but only so much, the reach of the lights never increasing even as the car courses through the night. I see pairs of receding red lights in the dark, but my primary view is of the punctuation of the highway.

On the right side, marking the edge of the darkness, stand simple short poles bearing little reflecting tittles every fortieth of a mile. Right beside the right hand side of the car is a long white line, an uninterrupted elongation of white that formally marks the border between the roadway proper and its shoulder.

Dividing the road lengthwise into two dark channels, two lanes, is a broken line, a line segmented into short blocky lines. In my sleepy imagination, each of these lines has a counterpart in the roadside tittles, and the nightime's roadway is repeating the same self-deprecating yet self-absorbed word at me: i i i i i i.

At the lefthand side of the road, a long white I continues forward into the forever, running its long curving way to the far edge of Pennsylvania, the point at which this existence of ours ends.

ecr. l'inf.

palpaple

Between Writing and Drawing, the Agreement Between (A Forty-Third Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)

Holiday Inn, Room 120, Morrisville, Pennsylvania

Geof Huth, “eRr” (8 May 2008)
I am tired and on the road and likely to write only a little to you tonight. Just so you know.

It is great to hear that your daughter is already the natural visual poet that she was destined to be. Vou is not alone. My daughter and son certainly were when they were younger. All children are, at some point in their lives. All of them struggle to distinguish between the drawing and the copying of letters they do, and they end up with some kind of hybrid. When my daughter Erin started creating these, I called them wrawings, written drawings, and I treasured every one of them, enjoying their twisted sense of textuality.

Only tonight did I realize what must be the truth: that the thousands of fidgetglyphs I’ve written over the past many years have actually been inspired by the wrawings of my children, especially those of my daughter. The daughter, it appears, is the father of the man. We are the creators (always, the co-creators) of our children, and we think of them as extensions of ourselves, but our children give much back to us. We learn much from them. We are extended and expanded by our contact with our own children.

Or so I came to believe tonight, in the dark, as I was walking down a dark dirt bikeway. This hotel is nestled among railroad tracks, Highway US 1, low-level industrial development, as a simmering sense of dread. But I found this bike path that runs parallel to both a small turgid canal and a light-rail track, which together help define a small strip of wildlife, a narrow bosque that extended into the night, past reason, past my own sight. Inside this narrow border of wildlife, I saw ducks (one mallard propelling itself briskly across the water in the dark), rabbits, heard an owl in a tree by the railroad track, and was overwhelmed by the high-pitched susurrus of crickets, their call the exact defining of night.

Out there in the night, I eventually realized that I could cut glyphs into the hard-packed dirt with the edge of the sole of my shoe, creating rough terraglyphs that resembled petroglyphic creations, at least to my eye. I might be able to extend the world of my glyphing to the earth at my feet and make my right foot a creator of the new form of creation, but ultimately my children (Erin and Tim) remain my inspiration. I create these small picture writings after their example.

I am no more the creator of them than the creator of language, and I am happy for that.

ecr. l’inf.

limbre

Texting

Geof Huth, "The Manifestation of Plenitude" (2008)
A question asked of me today in Syracuse (the birthplace of rhetoric) reminded me that this day marks the two-month anniversary of my heart surgery. My cicatrice is healing nicely; it is now a rosy dribble through the gathering hirsuteness of my chest.

I am a marked man—the text of my past, the harbinger of my future, written on my chest. The remaining sign is simple: but a line, but a stroke. It is the penultimate simplest sign in any symbology, after the point. It says, Here was the cut. Here was the opening, the short-lived efflorescence of tissue and bone. It bisects me: right and left, what I write and what I have left to write.

Since I have no tattoos, this simple text will be my silent tattoo, insistent ostinato. Yet I feel it now, like an itch, more than I see it. Numbness and itchiness inhabit the same body of skin.

Today, Bob Grumman even made positive comments about a couple of my fidgetglyphs, calling one "something of a tour de force on the evolution of sign-making, and melodic." Maybe he realizes that I am merely a textual creature.

I carry the most perfunctory text upon my torso, yet within me and slipping out of me whenever I move there are all these texts, all these markings upon the world, all these scratchings into the face of the past.

Geof Huth, "perish/persist" (2008)
ecr. l'inf.

strikethrought

mighg

Our Austere Simplicities

All complexities grow out of utter simplicity. All symbols begin with the point, the simplest symbol—spaceless, capaciousless in mathematics—which foretells the line, the square, the grid, the plane, the pyramid. All electronic data is reducible to ones and zeros—something or nothing, the ultimate in simplicity, on or off, no other choice. Yet those bits of data can accrue into one of millions of colors, a plan for a city, a thousand-page poem about a thousand-year war.

The simplicities of my works are masks, counterthoughts, mirrors among fog. Any simplicity belies an intellectual armor that protects the whole enterprise—which is the poem itself, complex in its simplicity—and the massive accumulation of pieces it represents one point of. Every poem, every movement, vocable, glyph, or sound is one of the multitudes that creates a unit. We create complexity out of numerousness.

Yesterday, I created one simple visual poem, yet who can make, I wonder, sense out of it? who can wander sense back into it? Its simplicity requires engagement and thought. Reduced to its descriptive title, it is “bracketed caret, bracketed deleted A, bracketed v, bracketed greater than.” Reduced to a typographic form—yet it exists only properly in calligraphic form—it is

[^][A][v][>]
Yet this form is not quite right. The caret it too high. The A isn’t deleted with a proofreader’s mark. The similarity of these bent shapes isn’t close enough. Yet we can see it. We can make out the outlines of its complexities even in this simplified form.

Naivete is beauty. Simplicity is beauty: wabi/sabi. Wabi for enjoying the beauty of the simple and austere. Sabi for enjoying the beauty of the wornout and rough.

I am constantly defending the central—in terms of chronology—visual poetry movement of the twentieth century. We must understand that classic concrete poetry, a poetry of rigid simplicity, used up much of its resources before it petered out in the 1970s. But it created new forms of visual poetry that still engender moreness. Concrete poetry was not an end, never an ends, but simply a beginning.

The world expands from a point, not a continent. Complexity begins with the simplest point and grows from there.

We work like oysters, creating (out of nothing more than inspiration and time) whatever simple complexities we can muster.

I am struggling, some of these days still, with a mild form of exhaustion. By the late afternoon, I am usually groggy and not quite lucid, yet I sit down and read pages of poetry, I take notes for poems—always individual words or phrases (rarely any in the poems I’m reading)—and I might even try to write a poem. My body is still a bit rundown from trying to heal itself. The process of surgery simplified my body—removed some veins, left voids where once there was tissue—and now my body is making itself, once again, complex. It is knitting my sternum back together (and sometimes I can feel it in progress). My body is discovering new pathways for its blood, and the blood goes through my body better now than it has been. I can tell when I expend energy, and my erection does not recede right after orgasm as it had earlier this year. The complex is here and growing.

We are amalgams of pieces, experiences, thoughts. Those alloyable properties are what allow for complexity. At the base of it all, everything is an element, perfect and simple. But we can combine those simplicities into complexities by the processes of amalgamation, accumulation, accretion, secretion, discretion, infection.

After accumulating time, we accumulate our creations. The simplest of beauties are often the most complex. And we love complexity for its simplicity.

My sentences I create out of individuals words and stock phrases (like “stock phrases”). I build them with the blocks of written language, taking simple pieces and expanding them into ungainly little complexities, until the beauty of the begun sentence is subsumed under its innumerable layers of simplicity made complex by their joining together as one.

Tonight’s little essay began as a concept. Simple. It was to be a sequence of words, relatively short, that I could write quickly, almost effortlessly. Yet I allowed it to grow in complexity, word by line, sentence by paragraph, until it became not so much an essay as a concatenation of thoughts, alterations to a theme, designed to guide a reader on the same trip, through the same ideas, over and again. This night’s midget attempt is merely evidence of its point, the point from which each creation must grow.

ecr. l’inf.

[ ]wind

wind[ ]w

What is Poetry But an Excuse to Play With Words?

Every book is the same book. Or every book is just a chapter in the one great book we read throughout our lives, ending our reading sometime before the book is done. We add chapters to this book however we want, in whatever order, at whatever speed, because the true book is the experienced book. The book read.

Tom Beckett’s most recent book isn’t even a book, evaluated from one point of view, since the three pieces of it do not even submit to a single title to bind them together. Instead, the work’s title is merely the works’ titles set out in a row separated by virgules: This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day.

Another recent title from Otolith’s is Márton Koppány’s Endgames. Putatively, this is a sequence of visual poems, yet they don’t quite form a sequence. Instead, the book presents a number of incomplete sequences. As with life, something is missing. There is “Bonsai No. 1” and “Bonsai No. 3,” but no “No. 2.” Many pieces from the series “Ellipsis” are missing, as are “Colon,” “Endgame,” and “Waves” No. 1.

Sequences are often arbitrary anyway. This is our one book. The author can make it as he wants as we can read it how we want.

Tom Beckett’s first poem is “This Poem.” Not the one before you, not these words skittering down your screen, but that poem. The poem thrives on self-referentiality, and the poem is obviously human:

This poem

Begins again.


This poem

Considers

Its losses.


This poem

Stares into

A mirror.


This poem

Plays

With itself.

The poem, “This Poem,” is a poem thinking itself out, thinking itself into being. It’s one trope, beyond this anthropomorphism, is anaphora. Each short stanza begins with the line “This poem.” This repeated phrase helps accentuate the meter of the poem, a simple kind of drumming into the head. We know that the poem is about all poems, how all poems are castles of artifice chasing their own dreams.

Márton Koppány, “Waves No. 2”

What Endgames is, besides a collection of some of the finest cryptographic and intellectual visual poems of all times, is the first collection of Márton Koppány’s color poems, which is a pleasure to behold. For the first time ever, we can hold copies of his poems in color in our hands. Color seems more like a physical presence when held in one’s hands, so that makes the physical reality of a book so important. Also, the fact that the pieces have been accumulated in one place is, by itself useful. Suddenly and immediately, this shows me how important the color blue is in his work.

Tom’s second poem is “What Speaks?” and it is the most ambitious, the most complicated of his poems. He created this poem in public at his blog Chiaroscuro Metropoli, where you can still view the final version of the poem, and the poem includes all of Tom’s usual interests: a philosophical discussion of language, the sexual reality of human beings, and metaphysics. His methodology is lapidary, placing patterns of text upon the page, allowing us to wander through a glittering tapestry that holds multitudes of thoughts together as if one.

I am

Not beautiful

The Ventriloquist

Whispers

Through me.



(S)he is

Getting sleepy,

Very sleepy.



The moment decays.



Voice overs

Ever after

More or less

Nothing's ever

Exactly the same.

We are pulled through a maze of words, different shards of mirror reflecting different realities at us. Nothing is whole, because all entireties are fragments. And we see the fragments. We understand how language and reality works by confusing us with tiny bits of information that add up to a life. This poem is your life in motion. Be careful with it or you might break it.

Márton Koppány, “Place”

Márton works with the smallest bits of meaningmaking: individual letters and punctuation marks and tiny visual representations of the world. His goal is to make sense out of almost nothing, sot that our attention is purified into a spotlight of concentration, so that we can glean everything from almost nothing. His techniques force us to interpret how a letter looks, where a punctuation mark is placed, how a color changes over space, how a seemingly normal object of our everyday life is presented just so to mean just that. His poems ask us to be great readers. He has utmost confidence in us, a rarity in a writer: he trusts the reader.

Tom’s last poem is “A Day,” which simply recounts his life, a day of, in some detail, though focused on those parts that might mean something like

Wanting to find

courage

to live at least

a little less filtered,

appearing naked

in mirror,

cock tucked

between legs,

pinching nipples.
The spare documentary nature of this poem is itself alluring. Here is a man not naked before us but almost so, working towards it, working out his sense of self and his idea of his place in the world, and doing it before us. This poem is the confessional redolent with the aura of old confessions. We are the priest. This poem is the prayer in lieu of Hail Marys. It ends with a line, two words, that are touching and exhilarating:

Close eyes.

Let go.

Márton Koppány, “Csend (Silence)” (for Geof Huth)

Everything is personal to me, including each of these poems in Marton’s book, a couple of which are literally for me. I am glad for these gifts, for gifts that see asterisks in seashells, for gifts that see signs everywhere. As I like to say, Márton Koppány is the greatest Hungarian poet writing in English today. And though that is true, I say it because it is a joke that deftly avoids the better truth: that there are few poets of any kind anywhere with his gifts. His mind creates the most surprising of meaningscapes. His language is simple beyond simplicity, pared down to letters, numerals, scraps of pictures, the dry language of memos and emails—yet his is the finest poetry. In the end, poetry is for the mind—through the eye, through the ear, through the heart, but for the mind—and Márton is the greatest poet for the mind. His poems engage us, entertain us, and challenge us all at once. They are not dead but cryptic. They are not beautiful but empty husks. They are the reason for living.

And let us thank Mark Young and his Otoliths press for yet another batch of interesting and fulfilling poetry—always doing what I would like to see a poetry press do. All I can do now is encourage you to purchase a copy of each of these books soon.
ecr. l’inf.

semse

ltttl

beign