A Break from the Pattern

Holiday Inn City Centre, Room 923, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

It is nearing midnight, and I've had a tiny bit over five hours of sleep (and dropping) over the past twenty-four hours, so this might be a brief report. I'm in Milwaukee to give a presentation about preserving electronic records to a group of archivists. During my short time here, I've already accomplished three goals: spoken to the poet Karl Young over the phone, met David Baptiste Chirot in person (much more about that at a later time), and visited Woodland Pattern Book Center on 720 East Locust Street, Milwaukee. I'll focus on the last of these tonight.

Woodland Pattern (founded by Karl Gartung, Anne Kingsbury, and the aforementioned Karl Young in the 1970s) is a legendary bookstore, but now I know it is no legend at all, but a reality. There is a wide enough selection of books in this unassuming building, but what stood out for me was the poetry. And that means poetry of all types: textual and visual; mainstream and experimental; small press and micropress; books and broadsides and zines and ephemera. What a collection. I could hardly scratch the surface of the store's poetry section after an hour's searching, and I'm an expert searcher of books.

Certainly, I couldn't find everything I was looking for (but my tastes tend to be both eclectic and obscure). I did, however, acquire a great selection of books and pamphlets and a couple of fine broadsides (including a signed Ronald Johnson broadside from The ARK), and I did have to leave behind a number of orphans I just could not adopt right now.

Some of my other treasures include

Adriano Spatola's Zeroglyphics, one of the earlier attempts to de-signify written language

Bob Cobbing's kob bok, which includes a number of breathtaking examples of copy art and forces me to reexamine the definitions I have for "visual poetry"

Charles Stein's Transcripts (from the now-[unfortunately]-renamed Xerox Sutra Editions), and which pulls taut the concept of text-sound text

LeRoy Gorman's "Whose Smile the Ripple Warps," a tiny collection of eyeku

Marton Koppany's The Other Side, another piece of conceptual genius from this Hungarian visual poet

Ron Silliman's Woundwood (which I would've called Woundword, once again proving my inability to avoid puns), and which was an overly expensive purchase but is a simply dazzlingly quiet piece of writing

Robert Grenier's Transpiration, What I Believe, Minnesota, which opens up new vistas to Grenier's calligraphic work

While I was there, I engaged in conversation with one of the employees, and something I said led him to ask me this surprising question:

"Who are you?"

"Geof Huth."

"Oh, you do the visual stuff!"

"Yes."

Who knew that anyone in Milwaukee, save for those few people I know, would ever have heard of me. The man in question was Chuck Stebelton, who graciously allowed me to look through the remarkably spare and effective Moschatel Press publications that will soon be on exhibit at the Woodland Pattern Book Center. These small bits of ephemera force us to think and see and read, proving once again the beauty in the small. Best of all--for those of you who will be around Milwaukee on Sunday, October 9th, at 7pm--Thomas A. Clark will be giving a reading at Woodland Pattern that certainly will include samples of those brief whispers of his we feel compelled to call poems. And the next day he will be giving a lecture at the Golda Meir Library, and the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

My thanks also to Chuck for sending me away with the third of my signed broadsides of the day. This last one is a beautiful study in grey, "The Nineties," with some blind stamping and a quiet little poem perfect in its place.

A good day with words and paper, which makes this the best kind of day of all.

ecr. l'inf.