The Writing of Language
The Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel, Poughkeepsie, New York, Room 617
It is important to keep one point in mind: Writing is not language; it is merely a representation of language. Sometimes, I have difficulty forcing that bare fact into my skull, yet I know language is of the tongue and the ear, not the eye.
By our ancient reckoning, poetry is a streaming of syllables, sounds sweeping into us. Visual poetry is a sight, a seeing, a site, a place. Syllables slip through our ears and away, never caught. A visual poem we can hold in our hands; it can stay with us over time, continuously there. The poem for the ear we must resuscitate out of our memory or off the page whenever we want to experience it again.
Maybe that is why I am a visual poet. The seen world seems so real to me, eminently palpable. The heard world slips into the air and away. I can easily see the solid world and understand it, but sounds are evanescent, momentary. (If I could not write down a poem and see it, I doubt I would ever be a poet at all. Although sound entrances me and serves as a field for my play, I would believe I had made nothing if all I made was uncaught sounds.)
My interest in the visual sometimes encourages me to write nothing but letters that barely suggest sense or sound. One of these is the awkwardly yclept “flYslt;J.” (where the final period is part of its name). This poem comes to us from one of my uncompleted collections, Bowhowse, which includes barely verbal or totally averbal poems that examine the knuckle end of the printer’s fist and depend on only one typeface for their creation.
Geof Huth, “fIYslt;J.” (Dec 2002)
ecr. l’inf.
6 comments:
You are a visual person and there is nothing wrong with that. You should explore your talent (as I am sure you do)
But if you want more sound inspiration, while you write try looking to your left and to your right.
My guess is you look up; most visual people do. Sound people tend to look left and right while kinestetic people tend to look down.
Ofcourse there can be any combination there of....
Still, I think you are on to something with your visual poetry. It reminds me of hyroglyphs.
Stayed in your hotel in the summer of 1954..my first hotel ever. Whenever I see a pre 60's movie I'm reminded of my first hotel experience..big, roomy space, attached bath, hallways elevators and the like.
The next day we visited FDR's home before heading on to NYC.
Geof,
I think that the attraction of minimalist-oriented vispo like this piece has very primal roots. They're just a step up from cave scrawlings. This is compounded by the fact that aesthetics is so entirely removed from most of Western written language that a poem that beautifies its bare bones has an alien aura about it.
To cut to the chase, I like it.
Late last night I was flipping through the pages of "Wolfgang Weingart: My Way to Typography," which if you have seen, you'll smile at the synchronicity. If you haven't seen it, I think you would enjoy it greatly.
"I would believe I had made nothing if all I made was uncaught sounds"
this immediately made me think (especially in light of you day job)
why sound poets and performance artists are so manic about documenting
but your concern, idea, thought is also the freedom and beauty that a sound-poet, performance artist and (even the 'lowly') actor embrace--the beauty of a movement that once done can never exactly be repeated (even via recording or documentation)
kevin
You write (not say) "It is important to keep one point in mind: Writing is not language; it is merely a representation of language. Sometimes, I have difficulty forcing that bare fact into my skull, yet I know language is of the tongue and the ear, not the eye."
I disagree with this. If writing is a representation of langauge, then so is speech. Consider: what is the language of the deaf? Not one of sound.
There is a tendency to say that because writing (at least in the West) was originally conceived as a way of notating speech, that language somehow reduces to speech. But how does written Chinese derive from spoken Chinese? Or ever try to read a mathematical or scientific text out loud? Equations are embedded in sentences so that they are part of the narrative, but they are impossible to state aloud in an intelligible form -- this is why scientists and mathematicians are so reliant on chalkboards, transparencies, and now slide shows when presenting their research. Written language may have started as a way of representing spoken language, but it has evolved beyond that now.
Yes, when i read something, at least at my normal slow rate of speed, i am hearing the words in my mind, but i think the sounds (and letters) merely convey words, rather than are words. It's the difference between numeral and number.
endwar
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