dbqp: visualizing poetics

Dateline: Schenectady

As I flew to Tucson and back this week, I spent part of my time reading Willard Bohn’s Modern Visual Poetry. I bought the book a year and a half ago, right after I had discovered the book. I have another book by Bohn and he has written widely about visual poetry—especially French visual poetry, and more especially Apollinaire—so I knew he was a respectable critic who had an abiding interest in the art form. This new book of his held even greater interest to me, since it promised me modern visual poetry.

When I received the book, I realized I had forgotten about the Modernists. Because of this art movement, “modern” has a secondary frozen meaning to people discussing art, one that refers to a point in time that is now in the past.

Tucson, Arizona, Radisson City Center, Room 1002

When in 1983 I moved to Syracuse, New York, the snowiest major city in the state, all my poems became about snow. I wrote textual poems about snow, I made visual poems about snow, snow was the major focus of my thoughts.

I bring up this point, because I’m still in Tucson tonight, and this city has a much different feel than my half-ancient industrial home city of Schenectady.

Tucson, Arizona, Radisson City Center, Room 1002

I’m beginning this entry on a plane flight, just as my computer has informed me that it’s running out of power.

During my long time spent in the air today (and a seemingly longer time spent on the tarmac in Chicago waiting for a berth for our plane), I realized that I’ve already imagined the layout of my room in Tucson.

I'magination

In the past, I have written about the requirement that visual poets understand their tools, which are the many pieces of visible text: letters, numerals and numbers, grammalogues, punctuation, diacritics, typefaces, and even words.

Words we might forget about because much modern visual poetry is asemic. Words don’t reside within the poems, and the letters or shapes within them don’t necessarily even suggest words.

a

,e

awake: between sleep and sleeping

bellow: the opposite of abbove

breakfast: a brief sojourn before a newspaper

citation: an error on the road to definition

concrete poetry: something hard yet resolute

dachshund3: an annoyance

deadline: the future

definition: the meaning of communication

dinner: a mistake

edit: to rearrange cognition

eyeglasses: a new day of seeing

font: a matter of some debate

gate: the cat about you

headword: quickly and foolishly

i: the better half of sight

jocu

I am an anime character; I am a manga man.

The optometrist dribbled drops of a solution into my e.yes, and my pupils dilated into shiny black plates rimmed by a tiny green ring floating in a bloodshot sea of white.

Now I cannot quite see quite right. Looking makes queasy; watching nauseates me.

I type through the e.yestrain and the e.yeaches (which look like peaches but feel like peach pits pressed against my e.yes).

Born of woman, Nancy responded, "No."

She continued knitting, with one needle always resting in her navel for leverage. She always knits as if each needle is preparing to escape from her hands. Her style of knitting differs greatly from the freehand style common in my family, but she knits. In the winter, she knits.

As she knit, tonight, a sweater, I recalled my only knitted visual poem, which I designed 16 years ago (almost to the day) in Johnstown, New York.

Do not , imagine! / reading is easy.

Sometime / readers will note that / we have already discussed the punctuation poem as one devised of punctuation marks . only / there are older poems that point to the visual nature of the poem in the time of text . / each of these poems presents a single text with a double meaning.

Below is a fairly well known extract / from a late medieval punctuation poem .