How I Work
any hotel, any room, anywhere, anytime
Over the past seven days, I’ve traipsed around New York State, finding myself in a number of wildly different parts of the state, yet as I moved through the state I kept creating tiny visual poems that now litter my house. Over time, this has become my way of creating: finding paper surfaces of various kinds, I wraw the smallest, most insubstantial of poems onto them and move on. I wonder, sometimes, if mine is a numbers game, if all I’m interested in is creating the highest number of individual pieces in the smallest time, if I believe that the person with the most visual poems at the end wins the contest.
Last Friday, I believed my hand was working. I was at the camp on East Caroga Lake to help shut it down for the year, and I created ten little mailart cards almost effortlessly. At the time, I thought I had wrawn almost each of the little fidgetglyphs that graced those cards perfectly. Looking at the results tonight, I see that my hand gave out a little, allowing unwanted wiggles in the lines, yet still this is a well formed glyph. I created the original of this glyph a few weeks ago, and this serves as the second in a series of three fidgetglyphs (the first is “mt,” with the m in the upper left corner and the t in the lower right). I created these on the backs of cards I bought while in New York City on Monday, the 24th of September. As I wander, I collect the materials I’ll need to make what I will eventually make, even though I usually have no idea what I might make.
The next day while still at the lake, I created two calliglyphs, and they were nearly spontaneous creations. After a few strokes of the pens, I had corralled little puddles of India ink into expressive shapes I decided were good enough to keep (for now). I then used a few discarded pieces of cardboard from work to create 113 different copies of these cards. I laid them out on tables, watching the black ink slowly sink into the felty fibers of the cards and dry to a dull sheen. As I created these, my methodology became almost trancelike. My hand soon learned the process and repeated the movements required of it to make very similar copies of the original poem. As I worked, my mother-in-law (looking at the regimented array of these cards from the opposite end of the table from me) carried on a repeated conversation with me:
“Why are you making all these Ys?”
“To send to a guy.”
“What’s he going to do with them.”
“Put them in a bag with other things and sell them.”
“Is he going to pay you for them?”
“No, but he’ll give me a copy of what he makes.”
She saw a Y. I saw maybe an R, maybe a K, maybe a man marching into battle with a dramatic pennant fluttering in the wind.
After creating all the copies of “Vexing and Vexillological” (the upside-down of which, my mother-in-law’s view, I’m calling “Vexillological and Vexing”—as if it’s a totally different poem), I still had a little swirl of India ink left at the bottom of my glass, so I collected ten creased cards—the creases being important to the meaning of the poem—and I wrew a simple set of z shapes that I decided had something to do with waking jaggedly out of a dream. Afterward finishing these cards, I packed up my supplies, loaded the car with food and dogs, and Nancy and I left for home. This was Saturday, September 29th.
Three days later, I found myself in Hauppauge, in the middle of Long Island, and I finished the series of m-cards I had begun in New York City the week before. Using cards I bought while visiting Fisher’s Island in August, I created another ten cards, which went to the same ten people as the other two sets. This fidgetglyph ends the story of creation, which begins with a void, proceeds to a plan of action (a map), and then leads to genesis (a making). All told, the three poems consist of nine letters. When shapes matter as much as letters or words, you don’t necessarily need as many of the latter as you might otherwise. I created these cards in my hotel room at night, because that is what I do almost every night I’m away from home: I create a set of cards that I mail out to people the next morning as I prepare to leave for someplace else.
The morning after creating these cards, however, I found myself in Wheatley Heights creating quite a few little fidgetglyphs, each of which I wrew onto a small square of lavender paper. This first glyph of the day (“div:vis۰ion,” where each i is without tittle) took me a while to figure out. I make three small attempts on this single square of paper until a “solution” to my compositional problem occurred to me. Visual and verbal puns are all that keep this little beast from being stillborn.
Rarely does rhyme enter into any of my visual poems—visual poems being primarily treats for the eye—but “yf note,” which opens with an omega (with a conclusion) uses rhyme as it recounts for me nothing less than that day’s process of creating visual poems.
Sometimes, I have a verbo-visual idea I’m working out that doesn’t work at all in the first context I put it into, so I fiddle and fiddle, I fidget and fidget, until I find a place for it. With “River,” my goal was to find some kind of esthetically valuable way to use an R that was trapped in some kind of container. This is one of the weaker of the day’s poems even though it still holds some interest for me.
As I created each of these poems, with a purple ink I’d filled the belly of my fountain pen with, I was co-presenting an all-day workshop on electronic records for school districts. I opened the day, striding in front of the audience like a preacher at a tent revival, exhorting them to care about the day’s topic, trying to fill them with the passion of purpose as they considered an issue that could very much cripple their districts if not handled correctly. Passion is my way. I work in a field that people think is boring and without any means of touching the human heart, and I talk about it with passion because the management of records is filled with intellectual challenges, legal pitfalls, and the usual need to chase excellence that should propel all of us through our days. While my co-presenter was speaking, a small issue arose in the audience, so I wrote a tiny email to Nancy (who is a teacher) and she responded:
“We’re in the middle of a controversial discussion of the retention of teacher’s records.”
“Oooooo! Let me know what happens!”
At that point, I decided I needed to quell the audience by putting the situation in perspective but by doing it in a dramatic way. I arose from my chair, took over for my colleague for a second, and urged the audience back a step to consider the problem anew. I modulated my voice dramatically, I gesticulated, I sat on the table and spoke quietly, and I moved towards each audience member who spoke. I did whatever I needed to do to make myself a physical presence to the audience, to keep myself from being a voice trapped behind the podium. After a couple of minutes, I gave the floor back to my colleague, sat down, and wrote Nancy another note:
“I think I just put it in perspective for them. But we needed the power of my passion.”
“Believe me, I know the power of your passion . . . they are very lucky!”
I usually create my glyphs while surrounded by people—sometimes these people are members of my family, but usually they are people I work with. So I create these in spaces where people are speaking, and I use the words they say to inspire whatever I’m working on. As I listened to the presentation going on around me on Tuesday and the voices of the audience asking questions, I thought of the word “voices” and of how a mix of voices can overwhelm a soundscape and moved from message to mess, from music to static to nothing we can understand at all. That small thought guided this intentionally messy little glyph.
I ended the day with a slight visual panegyric to the alphabet and its allographic variety. I had to scribble the metadata about this poem (its date and place of creation) on the bottom of the card as I prepared to leave Wheatley Heights for Saratoga Springs, because my partner and I had to leave quickly to attend a dinner celebration of Archives Month (yes, October is American Archives Month). Moving a little more quickly over the roadways than allowed by the law, we made the almost four-hour trip in just a little over three hours, thus ending my travel for the week.
But my week continued. I found myself in a ninety-minute meeting in Albany the very next day, and some of the notes I took during the meeting morphed into fidgetglyphs. This one (the ineptly titled “we ews them”) is a poem still struggling to find its perfect version, but its shape and meaning became a little better defined with each additional attempt I made to find its true shape.
And today I close the circle by writing about much (though not all) of my week’s vispoetic creations. These are all tiny attempts, because that is almost all that I do now. My life is filled with small actions designed to build up to something bigger. I travel too often to do much else.* I work within fragmented temporal and physical spaces. There are no wholes in my life, only pieces, shards, orts. I collect material, ideas, my thoughts and create whatever I may because it is that act of creation, no matter how small its engine is at any particular point in time, that propels me. I live by obsessions, pushing myself to see what else I can do, seeing the possibility in never giving up. And even if those obsessions are tiny, they give me a reason to suck in a breath of air every couple of seconds as I await the next possibility.
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* I suppose this is a good chance to point whatever audience reads this far into this posting to FragLit, a new online magazine of fragmentary writing that contains a small essay by me about the fragmented experience of traveling. Olivia Dresher, the editor, has done a beautiful job of presenting a couple of handfuls of writings about travel that highlight the fragmentary and intertwingled way that humans think and live.
ecr. l’inf.
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