Writing Just Past the Edge of Sense
As if in response to a request, I received from Scott Helmes a selection of his recent visual poems. These new pieces allow me a bit of empirical data to use to consider the fluid boundary between visual poetry and the purely visual arts. Let’s begin with the idea that a visual poem is an artistic construction that contains both visual and textual elements, each of which is essential to the poem.
Most of the pieces Helmes sent me were from a series of visual haiku he has been creating methodically over the past year or so. We know they are haiku because he identifies them as such in their titles. They follow a common technique of visual haiku by showing us a textual landscape that we cannot interpret linguistically but which captures a single “scene” for our edification. Each of these poems also consists of exactly three lines of text, thus replicating the Westernized form of haiku.
Scott Helmes, "haiku #28" (31 Dec 2004)
In “haiku # 28,” Helmes introduces his technique. He tears text out of pages and rearranges them so that they almost appear to form complete words. This particular poem plays with the idea of positive and negative space; the poem alternates between black text on white and white text on black. No letter (let alone word) appears whole in the poem, and in some spots the partial letters begin to form abstract shapes, suggesting something beyond text. How is this a visual poem? Because visual poems exist as images, and this is a stylish visual whole. Because visual poems are textual (not necessarily linguistic), and this contains text—though significantly obscured text. What is the importance of the text? It sends a message we cannot read, yet one we can still receive.
Scott Helmes, "haiku #32" (10 March 2005)
Helmes’ “haiku # 32” uses the same techniques as in “#28,” but with differences. This poem uses color and allows partial and even entire words to reveal themselves. It seems to me, though, that the strongest parts of the poems are those least revealing. The middle line of the poem allows a few names to appear, so we can imagine people inhabiting this poem. In the top line, shades of orange move around and into the letters of the text, transforming orange from a color of positive to one of negative space. But the last line captures my imagination best. Beginning with a scrap of text that ends with an S and a classic (yet partial) apostrophe, this line implies ownership, yet whatever it is that is owned is uninterpretable.
Scott Helmes, "haiku #34" (6 May 2005)
The last haiku, “#34,” is an experiment in Qage. Helmes pulls us through dramatic scraps of text filled with striking examples of letterforms in various shapes and sizes. And nestled in the middle of this text is a simple word, presented in a swooping, faux-cursive typeface: “test.”
In many ways, I find it easy to accept these decidedly unliterary pieces as exemplars of visual poetry—a form that, after all, is a hybrid of visual and literary arts, one whose individual pieces modulate between two poles. But Helmes’ last piece is more problematic. I don’t know if Helmes considers it a visual poem, but its mere existence in the same envelope as these other pieces forces me to consider how it might be a visual poem.
Scott Helmes, Untitled Collage (28 March 2005)
Here is the issue: This simple collage includes only one entire word (“ever” apparently attached to “for”), but this text appears in a photograph and may have no particular significant in the piece at all. Or the main point of the poem is to focus on “forever” and the various forms that the human form and human experience take over time. (Almost all of the almost-square pieces of this collage include the representation of a human being.) But there is another way to interpret this piece. Note that the squares are arranged in a grid pattern, three wide by five deep—a pattern that suggests typogrammatical works of visual poetry. And the simple squares fall in patterns as if to imply that each square is a letter and each sequence (of one to three squares) a word. What I am saying is that the images might represent letters.
Of course, if my interpretations even make sense, this still leaves this piece at the edge or just beyond the pale of visual poetry. This may be the point beyond which we cannot go, the point at which the visual takes over entirely.
ecr. l’inf.
12 comments:
Scott's visual haiku is just another example of the attempt to twist the word haiku into something that it was clearly never meant to be by the Japanese. I would rather call these works "usoku" from the Japanese "false" and ku--and suggest that Scott use that tag, because it's much more accurate. Why are Westerners so concerned with distorting the cultural products of the East?
What can I say? The extension of meaning of the word "haiku" here seems central to the point of the pieces. That act makes a cultural point without disturbing the Japanese definition at all--which itself has varied over the years. One word can always mean many different things.
And I think the interest here has nothing in particular with "distorting the cultural products of the East." Instead, it is about extending the meaning and utility of all cultural products. As a matter of fact, Scott's pieces in particular here are about extending the concept of "visual poetry" as well.
Geof
Nice to have someone more rigorous about definitions than I commenting. I'd never call Scott's (absolutely stunning) pieces "false haiku"--because they are clearly true to what I consider the essence of haiku. But they aren't haiku, they're pictures of haiku. For me, the question is whether they are what I call textagraphs or pure illumages--i.e., visual art using textemes or visual art not even using textemes.
"Graphiku?" With the understanding that they aren't necessarily haiku but have to do with haiku in significant ways, as my own mathemaku are not necessarily haiku (I consider a few to be haiku but many to definitely not be haiku) but have to do with haiku in significant ways.
--Bob Grumman
Oh, I'd call "Haiku #32" definitely a haiku and poem (and visual poem). Didn't look at it closely the first time through.
--Bob G.
The taxonomy of new media art is becoming increasingly complex. In the visual arts we have general terms like perspective, realism, expression, abstraction, process and intervention, media specific terms like drawing, etching, painting, sculpture, video, computer, performance and installation, and the complex philosophical terminology of the socio-political culture wars (empiricism, relativism, reductionism, deconstructionism, etc.).
Language based art (particularly new media art), because it admits to the constant (even real-time) transformation and transmutation (any-to-any relationships) of all forms of art regardless of form, content or philosophy may require a different approach. Let the artists do the art, describe the art, critique the art, but with the understanding that the art is in as great a period of transition as any art at any time in history and that this is occuring not only in America and western Europe, but in China, India, eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. Cross-cultural influences are fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. To me, that is a very good thing.
Geoff--No, the definition of haiku hasn't changed over the years in Japan, though there are variations within the definition. Haiku is a cultural treasure in Japan--and defining visual art or mathematics, or anything else as haiku is engaging in slap-dash American "I can do what the heck I want to do to the products of any other culture and define it as I darned well please, and screw you if you complain" thinking. Why is it that we think we own the world and everything in it? If you would come to Japan and meet real haijin (as I have and do), and see what they do and how they work to do what they do you would not be so cavalier with definitions. Why not stick to the West and call these things visual sonnets, or visual epigrams--because there's nothing at all of the haiku about them-- and leave haiku alone? Haiga is visual poetry from Japan, as defined within the culture, but even calling what Scott's doing haiga would fall short by a million miles. You see, I spent years living in the countryside here and it was really obvious when an American was around, because they were always condescending, patronizing, pushing themselves forward, feeding themselves first, showing temper and bad manners--and so there's a feeling here about what Americans do, and the first and major part of that "understanding" among the Japanese is that they respect and take care of themselves first and no one else. What does this have to do with "visual haiku" and mathematiku and all the other cute ku business? If you came and lived here and saw it all in this context, you would stop this haiku stuff, because you would be embarrassed by it, as I grew to be embarrassed by the ignorance of most Americans about things Japanese. Please think about that over there in New York State and Minneapolis and Florida--there's a real culture here with people who seriously follow art forms that are hundreds of years old. Definitions are important to them. My good friend Rokuya Akashisan has been writing haiku for over 40 years and has won awards and been published many times in the yearly seasonal almanac. That's a big deal here in Japan where the real haiku are written. To talk to him is to meet a serious craftsperson, and one who has actually created haiku that may indeed become part of the culture. I wish you all could actually talk to this man, and the other men and women like him here, and I wish that you could read haiku the way it should be read--in Japanese--then maybe you would understand the difference and stop trying to foist this same, sticky "anything I say goes" defining that happens in so-called visual poetry onto something that really matters to a nation of people.
And what in God's name, Bob, is a picture of a haiku? Why don't we talk about an x-ray of a villanelle--it would make about as much sense.
No, no, I'm not attacking Scott here. I think his pieces are stunning and I'm sure he respects Japan and the Japanese as much as anyone else does, but it's this relativistic axiom that all of you seem to take for a given--that's what disturbs me and I think it's a part of American culture that somehow escapes your ability to question. Since we are Americans, and we are the greatest nation in the world, we can then appropriate, use, misunderstand...and still somehow be the good guys doing something that will be of great help in "extending the definition" or doing some burstnorm bruhaha that absolutely needs to be done, because we say it does.
Jesse,
There could easily be an argument from a hard-core Dadaist that your work as a publisher for Ahadada has corrupted the name Dada and that intellectualizing and commercializing Dada is extremely distasteful to the spirit of Dada. There may also be some artists of Swiss descent that feel that Swiss heritage has also been compromised. I personally don’t know that this true but I have had friends in the past that would probably take a similar stance.
Best of luck,
Kaz
"Dada is a tomato. Dada is a spook. Dada is a chameleon of rapid, interested change. Dada is never right. Dada is soft boiled happiness. Dada is idiotic. Dada is life. Dada is that which changes. Dada means nothing. Everything is dada.
Dada manifesto
Tristan Tzara
I've read with interest what's been written here and quite enjoyed Helmes' pieces. And in posting this comment, I'll be asking a lot of questions and providing few answers.
But, I believe it is self evident that the West does not have a ‘Haiku Tradition’. What it has is a rather short history of literary appropriation from a completely different language-culture. I think Helmes' pieces above are extremely mindful of this fact.
What Jesse seems to be driving toward is the cultural bond between writer and reader that has evolved in Japan over centuries. Such a writer/reader bond will always escape the west as language is at issue, there are too many different forces at play--the torsion of cultures and the many differences that constantly shear away this bond. In Helmes' pieces above, "haiku #32", I believe he is extremely cogniscent of this, appropriating the form of haiku and seeking to supplant the cultural bonds that tie readers and writers of Japanese haiku with a metaphor emblematic of the west: pages torn from a glossy magazine and reassembled. This, in my mind is an attempt to create a true Western equivalent of the haiku.
I guess the real question here is whether or not American poetics has been and may be trying to subsume the influence of its Japanese counterpart. And as Michael mentioned, is this a good or bad thing? Does haiku and other eastern forms make the holders and arbiters of American cultural power worried about the future viability of the western manner of practicing and writing poetry? Probably not.
Is the issue at hand context? Japanese culture provides a way out from the Western pop monoculture with which we are deluged every day. Japanese influences, even in an American poetics, undermine this limiting mindset by promoting an alternate version of what the poetry and reality may look like. I lived for a number of years in Korea and often wondered what prompted my fascination with eastern literature, religion and pop culture; I'm still asking the same questions.
And as a very brief aside concerning the name "Ahadada", although a few people see a deep significance in it. It actually was what Jesse's son used to call him when he was just beginning to talk. Jesse thought it was cute and used it as his Internet name.
As Jesse has mentioned before, there's no real connection with urinals or Hugo Ball or hobby horses, though I chose Duchamp's urinal as our logo.
Haiku is to the Japanese as Dadaism is to the Swiss is an analogy that simply doesn't work, Kaz, even if you strain to make it so. Just two of the many points where this analogy fails apart: haiku is a form of written art, while Dada encompassed just about everything--and could best be described as a life style; haiku is a central part of Japanese culture while Dada is one of many by-products of 20th c. European culture and is not centered soley in Switzerland, etc. etc. etc. So much for that. Jess
"One word can always mean many different things."--Geof says this in relation to haiku, and once again, I find this to be typically American. Anything is what I say it is, right? Japan on the other hand has traditions--for better or worse--and those traditions stretch back in the case of haiku to the 1600's. Workers in traditional arts here respect their art. People apprentice themselves for years and years to a master carpenter or a potter or an actor in order to learn the craft. I think there's something good about this "cultural drag" on the new. In America innovation in the arts leads to people defining rather than doing. Let them go back and learn how actually to create what it is they say they are creating--let that process be a long one--and then maybe... Unfortunately, haiku came to America during the same time that we were flooded with Japanese kitsche in those heady WW II days when wind-up toys and "made in Japan" made it all seem so easy, so cheap. Even children could write "good haiku" in a moment of "inspiration." It's the same deal as Zen--which I would call fast-food enlightenment--no muss, no fuss--perfect for Americans.
The first inkling that I had that something was wrong with my conception of haiku was when I first came to Nagasaki and began to talk to Japanese about their culture. Everyone told me how hard haiku was to write, while I, on the other hand, thought haiku was one of the easiest forms of writing. I think the cultural business I mentioned above is one of the reasons why Americans think they can "own" haiku and do with it what they want. In addition, there's a linguistic reason for the feeling of the ease of haiku composition. Writing "haiku" in English is quite a different process from writing haiku in Japanese. It involves an entirely different kind of thinking that, if you do not study Japanese, you will never understand. Translation can only "point" but it cannot deliver the real thing to English readers--or indeed to anyone who speaks and thinks in the Romance languages. And it does take work--and lots of it--for the Japanese to write real haiku. Why then do we think we have the right to "extend" the definition of haiku when we really don't know what it is to begin with? What arrogance!
I should have said "post-WWII" days...
So my suggestion is that you drop all the business about ku this and ku that and use my handy dandy USOKU, because, as I said above, it's the most accurate description of what Scott and John are up to.
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