Look at the Walls

Royal Sonesta Hotel, Room 772, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Tonight, the visual poets John M. Bennett, K.S. (Kathy) Ernst, Scott Helmes, and I are sleeping in the same hotel for the first time ever. We are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, huddled against the Charles River, and at least Scott and I have good views of the placid Charles. It is a good day.

Sure, I didn’t get to bed until 2:30, I ingested huge amounts of caffeine (especially for someone who almost never has any caffeine until noon), and I drove, jittery, three hours to the east to make it finally to the Nave Gallery in Somerset, Massachusetts. It was worth it to see the SoundVision/VisionSound III show curated by William Howe and Christopher Fritton. It was worth it to meet and share the same roof with three of my favorite visual poets. It was worth it to be able to say, for the first time, that I had given readings in two consecutive years.

The afternoon’s events began with William Howe running a discussion of how visual poetry can be performed, can be made oral. Chris Fritton made the point that visual poem texts are often so “estranged from language” that they beg to be performed. He used the example of his shoeprint poem from yesterday. Fritton had carved words into the soles of sneakers, walked in some ink, and inked impressions across a large piece of paper. He explained that a second impression of the same sneakerstamp could, because of the varying clarity of the print, engender a different reading. I suggested at one point that we should look at the walls around us (covered with visual poetry) to aid in our discussion.

Christopher Fritton, Shoeprint Poem (15 July 2005)
At one point in the discussion, Scott Helmes brought a little clarity into play by saying, simply, “I think we forget that people view this stuff.” That visual poetry is for the eye, works for the eye, and that we need a visual poetry people enjoy seeing.

As the discussion worked its way around the circle we sat in, we came to this question (asked by Lisa, whose last name I didn’t catch): “Why do we choose verbo-visual ways to express ourselves. Bennett said that he does whatever he does in order “to know something I wouldn’t know otherwise.” Ernst said that she began to create three-dimensional poetry so that it could not be caught in a book; she wanted something that couldn’t “be shut up and put away.”

We ended our talk with, though I cannot remember quite why, with these words of mine: “You want people to be a little uncomfortable, at least” (but not, I assume, too uncomfortable).

Unfortunately, few of my pictures of the show turned out. Most of the visual poems were behind plexiglass, so I turned off the flash to reduce the glare, but I couldn’t hold the camera still enough, so almost every photograph is blurry. What I can report is that there was lots of strong work by a large number of people, including a few I’d never heard of. Nico Vassilakis’ concrete movies were playing on the way throughout the show (taking up the space where my three color pieces were supposed to be, but I do not begrudge him his space. Howe told me, by the way, that a number of people purchased copies of Concrete Movies to use as background visuals in parties!).


K.S. Ernst, “Visual Poet’s Picnic” (2001)
Kathy Ernst had three large poems (maybe 5 by 5 feet in size), each printed onto a piece of cloth that she hung from a rod. These pieces would gently wiggle in the breeze of the fan, which ran throughout the show in a vain attempt to reduce the heat in the room. I complimented Kathy on her work and asked her how much the prints cost. Hundreds of dollars, but they seem worth it to me.


mARK oWEns, “Corn ER” (2005?)
mARK oWEns had a number of verbally ingenious conceptual visual poems, including “Corn ER,” which was hung high on the wall, with each half of the poem on a different side of the corner.


Amy Sara Carroll, “J” (2005?)
Amy Sara Carroll’s series of handwritten alphabet poems were quite alluring, sensuously textual, though in an innocent way.

After the discussion on visual poetry, we had the performances. First up was Matt Chambers, who gave a non-visual-poetry reading, but with a twist. He read the poems of others (Jack Spicer, Charles Bernstein, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, and William Carlos Williams)—and whenever he read a poem he wore a paper mask made out of a photocopied photograph of that poet.


John M. Bennett, Reading in His Poetry Barbecue Apron, The Nave Gallery, Somerville, New York
John M. Bennett put on his poetry barbecue apron and read from a number of his books. Again, he didn’t read any visual poetry—but it was instructive to see how he interpreted orally the sound of his texts. His reading had a greatness to it, a presence, a powerful weirdness. He read with an exaggerated modulation of his voices, something almost like a series of glottal stops restricting the flow of syllable at random. But there were no glottal stops at all. As usual, I couldn’t really catch the meanings and syntax in his poems; I went for the sound.

We ended the day with my reading, which was almost entirely a visual poetry reading. Since I needed the audience to be able to see the visual poems so that they could understand how I was inventing a way to read them, I created for them a chapbook entitled foureff, which included a selection of my readable visual poetry. I read selections from The Dreams of a Fishwife and a number of unpublished collections. I tried to show that poems with obscured texts could still be spoken and that collage poems could have an intentional meaning that we miss if we “read” only their pictures. And I showed how to read a poem consisting only of letters. I ended with a couple of sections from Lacunae, an unfinished set of textual and visual poems on my usual subject: meaning and sensemaking. The section ended, intentionally, with the word “Song,” and the audience started to clap. I held up my hand to tell them to stop, and said, “This is the hard part.”

Then I began my first ever public performance of one of my extemporaneous sound poemsongs (which I usually sing to myself in the car). With my eyes closed, I took a tiny scrap of a melody, layered a set of glossolalic sounds upon it, then created new sets of sounds and melodies to make a song. The room wasn’t that large, so I could get quite a bit of sound into it, and I conducted this performance in my usual dramatic way: pacing the floor, singing to the ceiling, falling onto my haunches and balancing on the balls of my feet, singing directly into the floor to change the sound. At the end of the song, I screamed until I couldn’t maintain any melody or music and then ended by almost whispering the last two lines. I thought I did pretty well, and Sylvia…Sometimes (one of the two people who came to hear me) said she thought my song was moving and primal. Nancy, however, thought it was too embarrassing, and she doesn’t want to be around for the next performance!

ecr. l’inf.