dbqp: visualizing poetics

This time of year—stuck between Christmas and the new year—is always a busy one for me (family abound, and my attention must move to my guests), so my apologies for the expected brevity of this note. I did feel compelled, however, to respond to you quickly, and this compulsion came from my seeing exactly what you mentioned in your letter.

I do think that visual poets sometimes exhibit tendencies found in all manner of artists: a propensity to over-value their work. This is certainly not true of every artist, but I do run into evidence of this in visual poets from time to time. With visual poets, who often see themselves as avant-gardists blazing new trails (whether or not it is true), the general outline of their argument is that their work is something marvelously new.

Geof Huth, "When the f is a Question"

(28 Dec 2004)

In the world of marginal arts (like visual poetry), untraditional methods of distribution are sometimes employed—methods like

the zine (any small magazine printed cheaply and distributed in small editions)

the website (which can sometimes be free and still be available to anyone)

the flyer (rarely seen now, but a small folded publication dropped off in public spaces)

the letter (whether paper or electronic, correspondence can carry art to another)

and the assembling (a magazine created out

Geof Huth, "feeling" (2004)

This month, the fifth edition of Zunái, la revista de poesia & debates, appeared online. This Brazilian review includes a good selection of textual poetry in Portuguese and Spanish and a small but revealing selection of visual poetry, mostly American.

Marcelo Sahea, "Tape" (2004?)

Brazilian Marcello Saheas’s contribution includes three visual poems and one object-poem that even stretches my ability to use the term to the breaking point.

I’ve been a poet for a number of decades by this point in my life. Not necessarily a good poet or a productive poet, but still a poet, still someone who slips strips of words into patterns of sense.

As I sit here typing, visual poetry is moving further away from textual poetry. When visual poetries began to appear two thousand years ago, the resulting poems were textual poems whose words a poet assembled into mimetic shapes (an altar, a pan pipe, an egg, etc.). Nowadays, a visual poem may be a primarily visual object that includes but a few words and that might include only isolated letters.

Geof Huth, "a pebble drops" (31 Jan 1987 & 10 Nov 2002)

Click on image for better view.

[This poem has two dates of creation: the first date is the date I wrote the text, and the poem was nothing more than those words for years; the second is the date I created a visual aquarium for the text and made myself a haiga.]

ecr. l'inf.

The first hint that something was wrong was the sound of a waterfall in my kitchen. My kids were deaf to its sound for a couple of seconds, but I rushed out of my seat in the middle of writing a note to someone.

By following the water up the stairs, we discovered that a pipe within an interior wall on the third floor had burst sending untold gallons of water down to the second-floor bathroom, then the first-floor kitchen, and finally into the basement.