dbqp: visualizing poetics

New York, New York, Southgate Tower, Room 2510

Today, I read the complete works of Craig Thompson.

Without knowing who Thompson is, a reader might wonder if he is an unproductive artist or if I am a speed reader. I can guarantee that the latter is false. I read slowly trying to take in every word. I subvocalize all the time. If I like a particular turn of phrase or an unfamiliar word, I read it aloud: “with skin as soft and pale as moonlight, the bones beneath her skin tangling and rearranging, Rising [sic] along the iliac crest, and dipping into the clavicles.” I read thousands upon thousands of words a day, but I read them slowly and deliberately.

And I don’t know how productive Thompson has been.

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Conceptual poems are usually so small that we could read a few dozen of them in a minute or two. But we must take much more time if we want to comprehend the poems, if we want to appreciate them.

Take this pwoermd—which I cannot print within quotation marks for fear of confusing the meaning of the poem—from a chapbook by annie one:

’i’m’

The pwoermd takes so little time to read that we hardly even notice it. Only if we take time, only if we pause a second, can we force sense into it.

I’m wandering through drowsiness right now, heavy-headed and slow-fingered. For the first day in months, there is no snow on the ground. As big changes come my way, my brain spins with sleep.

In this three-quarters-conscious state, I return to a typographical error from yesterday. I don’t have the context of the error anymore, but I don’t need it. What I need is a way to think through the visual cotext.

øyeyø=oΛəΛo

yøyøy ΛoΛoΛ

øyoyø=əΛøΛə

yeyey ΛəΛəΛ

eyøye=əΛoΛə

Some visual poetry transcends the bounds of language, depending for its effects on the arrangement of individual letters outside the confines of words. Such is the case with Monica Aasprong’s charming Soldatmarkedet (Soldier’s Market), a recent handful of neo-typewriter poems released by the Norwegian press Gasspedal as part of its Biblioteket Gasspedal chapbook series.

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l-°

A week from today I head down to New York City for an unprecedented full week of work. My job takes me to the city for quite a few days and nights over the course of a year. I always have plenty to do while there, and I spend almost all of my evenings with my daughter who attends college in the city. But if anyone reading this blog between now and Sunday, March 28th, has any ideas of places I should visit that week, drop me a line.

We often have difficulty believing this, but language is irrational. We assume, deep within our bones, that language is a logical system of meaningmaking, but it truly is a collaborative and ever-evolving mosaic to which all of us—the bright, the stupid, the careful, the sloppy—contribute a few tesserae. Because of this unavoidable fact, language changes in ways we might not choose, in ways that might not make sense.

One of the central texts of my life is Tillie Olsen’s Silences, which examines the causes of silence in writers by quoting from and commenting on people who had ceased or been kept from writing. I think of her book whenever I consider my longest silence, which began in 1995.

The onset of this silence was quite abrupt. From the end of 1987 until the middle of 1995, I ran a vibrant little micropress (dbqp).