fhole's positives

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Over the past few months, I have fallen behind on writing a few words here and there that take notice of the various publications that have appeared in my house either by my design or through the work of the Fates. So I’m returning, hopefully with a vengeance, to such reviews, and I’ve decided to start with fhole, because it is a fairly short zine that is easy and entertaining to review and because I’m two issues behind.

By design or happenstance, these two issues of fhole (and maybe all others—I haven’t noticed) consist of thirteen sheets of paper, side-stapled thrice on the left-hand side of the page. Being numerologically sensitive, I like to think that this number is intentional. Thirteen is one of those rare numbers in western culture that has begotten its own phobia (triskadekophobia), so choosing this number is an outward sign of spurning superstition. What I know of fhole’s editor Daniel f. Bradley (who doesn’t even drop his own name onto the pages of fhole) makes me believe it possible that the thirteen sheets of this zine represent a deliberate no-nonsense response to convention. But there’s one other numerological datum that adheres to these two issues: thirteen sheets works out to twenty-six pages. There are as many pages (counting the putative covers) of this zine as there are in the standard alphabet used in the English-speaking world. And letters are essential components in the creation of writing, both visual and otherwise. Letters infest the page with meaning, so it seems fitting that the pages of this zine return the favor by suggesting the alphabet of possibility by their number alone.

Of course, the fun of such numerological exagmination is that there might be no intention to it at all, no meaning save the meaning we build upon its randomly generated foundation.


fhole number 7

This issue of fhole presents what has come to be the standard product of this zine: a stripped-down, inexpensive, do-it-yourself production that combines short textual poetry with a simple, and sometimes stark, visual poetry. This issue contains many averbal or minimally verbal visual poems, which are a hallmark of fhole productions. But scattered in the issue are a few other forms of creation, including a couple of photographs by John W. MacDonald.

John W. MacDonald, Photo of jwcurry (2006) & Reed Altemus, “Homage to Bob Cobbing Series # 3” (2006)
(I’ve decided, for esthetic and practical reasons, to present pages from this issue sitting open upon a table. This allows me to capture more precisely the gestalt of this zine.)

MacDonald is a great photographer, and the reproduction of his photos in a photocopied zine will never provide an accurate representation of the original. Yet, even in the washed-out greys of this photograph, we can see the depth of shading captured in this photograph. Although the zine is silent on this matter, this is a photograph of jwcurry, the Canadian poet and publisher. Looking at just curry, we are presented with a contradiction: a man with wild hair and beard, his posture a subtle s-curve, dressed in black slacks, a grey pin-striped vest, and a white dress shirt, he prepares to eat a large bowl of Alphabits. All the shades of the photograph exist in his figure alone. As a matter of fact, he alone represents the entire range of shading in the photograph, causing his striking figure to be even more obvious, his contradictions to be even more absolute.

Facing this photograph is Reed Altemus’ “Homage to Bob Cobbing Series # 3,” another of Reed’s stylish series of copier art visual poems. Unlike the MacDonald photograph, this poem is meant to work only with absolutes (blacks and whites). Although it contains letters and suggests words, the source text of the poem has been crumpled and then captured as a series of overlays, shards of text, leaving the reader without enough purchase to determine a meaning to the words. Yet they captivate by their shape and their insistence, which is exacerbated by the ! that ends the poem.


John M. Bennett and Serge Segay, “+’H” (2006)

John M. Bennett and Serge Segay collaborate on another minimally verbal visual poem. This one is dominated by word-balloon-like quotation marks, suggesting speech, but a speech that has been twisted out of shape. The funnel within the piece might suggest a megaphone, but the sound coming out of it (maybe “WawAa”) is maybe meaningless, or the sound of crying, or some other undeciphered message. We are left with a message we cannot interpret, but that is often the case in the world of floating sounds. We make do with what words we have, with whatever sounds we can decipher into sense.


Frances Kruk, “Back to the Garden” (2006)

Simultaneously more and less verbal is Frances Kruk’s “Back to the Garden.” Besides the title the only readable text recirculates our thoughts back to the title itself:

and we’ve
got to
get our
selves

…

Back to the Garden

Coming between these two sets of words is a black and white smudge that we accept on faith is a text processed past the point of unreadability. A few shapes within that mass suggest letters, but we cannot guess which particular ones. The inescapable interpretation here is Judeo-Christian. The garden has to be the Garden of Eden, that sedate pastoral paradise given up via the human urge for knowledge (even forbidden knowledge). And the smearing of text across the page suggests both the chaos of modern life (the negatives of knowledge) and a particular story that appears slightly later in the Bible: the story of the Tower of Babel. Here the clash of words and the swirling of sounds are so great that no sense can be made out of them. We might be sitting still, but sounds and words are spinning around us out of control.


Scott Helmes, Haiku Collage Text (2006) & Andrew Topel, Child with Block (2006)
In the middle of the issue, Scott Helmes is brought face to face with Andrew Topel. Scott’s poem is from his series of “haiku” poems, which are verbo-visual collages with three lines of text. Scott’s works are beautifully architectural, creating space with the voids he tears out of bits of found text and with the graceful curves of the letters he chooses to present to us. We can almost read the source words left in this poem, but not quite. This opens up the poem to interpretation, allowing us to treat it as an object of deep contemplation. Sitting here, I can imagine the words “text,” “fist,” “but,” “The,” “missing,” and “infinity,” but none of these readings is absolute. Instead, they are suggested by the text and my imagination. Other people will read other sense into these scraps, just as a brief, yet open, text like a haiku leaves itself open to multiple interpretations.

Andrew Topel is one of the most productive and imaginative visual poets around, and this poem is one from no series of his I recognize. Visually, this poem doesn’t quite work for me, being a tad awkward in execution (quite unlike Topel), but it is conceptually intriguing. A child is playing with a toy that resembles a block, or maybe it’s a Rubik’s cube of possibilities. But each of the possibilities upon the block, each of the bits of text, seems to be nothing more than brand names. This child is looking at its future. The crystal ball the child uses is cubical, but it tells the future nonetheless. Its future is one of innumerable connections, but connections between corporations. The text is made up of words and lines, nothing more, no life, no vibrancy, no connections between people. Yet, for some reason, the child looks forward to this life, there being no other.

There are plenty of other interesting visual and other poems in issue seven, plenty to justify the small cost of the zine.


fhole number 8

The eighth issue of fhole opens with a visual poem by Andrew Topel on the cover. A Neanderthal appears to exhale a web of letters that twist in the air above his head, trying to rotate themselves in such a way that they form words.


Karl Bakker, [OH one] (2006) & Elizabeth Bachinsky, "cu(n)t on the bias" (2006)
Karl Bakker creates a complex series of textual manifestations upon the page. At the base of this poem is a text that has been processed so heavily that that letters are beginning to run into one another. Atop this foundation he places sets of snipped texts: individual letters, words sliced in half horizontally, and tiny but whole words. These various bits of text don’t cohere into a single straight thought, but they make us think. The texts appear to have something to do with the dictionary. The “symbol [R],” for instance is interpreted for us in the center of this piece, forcing us to think of existence, mere being. Supporting this broad interpretation are other words slipped into place within this mise en page: “at the,” “people,” “voice andV,” and “can do.”

Elizabeth Bachinsky’s “cu(n)t on the bias” is a rarity in modern visual poetry. She has created a simple tabular concrete poem, one that goes by the name of permutational poem. The concretists of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were enamored of this form, but it is actually centuries old, having been developed during the centuries-long pattern poetry era. This poem consists of two words, “COLD” and “HOLE,” set on a line-by-line letter-by-letter shift that causes other meanings to arise: old hole, hold, l’ecole, ole cold, e coli, and others. The meaning here is clear. The cold hole of the poem is the vagina viewed as a sexual trap that woman (not man) cannot escape. It is old, cold, infected, an oubliette. The genes from which we are created, after all, help determine our future.


Judith Copithorne, Untitled collage [“fy“] (2006) & Scott Helmes and Jesse Freeman, Untitled Collage [“TU“] (2006)

What I find remarkable about the two collages by Judith Copithorne and the team of Scott Helmes and Jesse Freeman is how similar they are. We might imagine that these two examples of the power of the printer’s fist would actually be the work of a single person, instead of three. These poems ask nothing of us but for us to love the look of language. I wonder if the Helmes/Freeman collaboration exhibits enough of the power of synergy to justify its production. The fragments that I am sure are Helmes’ interest me the most, and I see the value of Freeman’s inked additions. I’m just not sure the bold strokes of Freeman integrate well with Helmes’ collaging. (Or, of course, I’ve guessed wrong about who has created which part of this collage.)


Karl Bakker, Untitled Typescrapt (2006)
After pages of interesting work of various kinds, fhole number eight ends with a gridbased typewriter poem by Karl Bakker. The page is splattered with typewritten characters. Usually, the same letter repeats many times in what resembles a straight line. I can make no words about of this. Instead the text reminds the reader of the method of its creation, and the reader hears the rat-a-tat of the typewriter keys, allowing us to read the splatters of text as bullets and blood. Something, maybe, like the pain that writing always causes us during the actual making of it.

_____

Copies of fhole are available from the editor for $3 Canadian at 8 Park Road, # 3302, Toronto, ON M4W 3S5 Canada, and you can find the zine’s twin blog at fhole.blogspot.com.

NB: In case the meaning of the pun that I used to title this review isn’t clear, its secondary reference is to the very real chance that my interpretations of the visual poems in these two issues of fhole are not necessarily “correct,” that my words do not necessarily represent the points of view of the creators of these poems.

ecr. l’inf.