dbqp: visualizing poetics

Today, I focused my activities on paper. I threw huge quantities of India ink on smooth sheets of 100-pound paper, trying to create a few visual poems big enough (and interesting enough) for an upcoming visual poetry exhibition. I can't capture clean images of these 14-by-17-inch pieces, but here is one of them.

Geof Huth, "The Roots of Yggdrasil within the River Styx"

(29 Jan 2005)

Maybe tomorrow I'll write a little bit about visual poetry and the affordances of paper.

ecr. l'inf.

If a visual poem were a person, would his parents recognize him on the street?

Below the BarToday, William James Austin released the 2005 Winter Collissions of his online gallery, blackbox, which includes my two most recent snowglyphs: "UNTOUCH'D" and "WROCK'D."

ecr. l'inf.

Thanks for your email, which came as a bit of a surprise. It is always slightly unsettling when a correspondent of mine first corresponds with me in a new mode. I've understood you as a paper correspondent until now, and that fact has somehow defined you in my mind. You have now forced a new definition of yourself into the lexicon. I do, of course, understand the reason for this change of mode: you wanted to get a question to me quickly.

Imagine a mania: that you cannot stop collecting little scraps of letter-encrusted detritus off the street; that you accumulate these cards and papers and coins and labels at home; and—and here is where the story changes—that you create a collage every day out of these little discoveries of yours and you rubberstamp the date of creation right atop of or into the structure of that collage.

Without surprises, monotony would be our only friend. Fortunately, we cannot avoid surprises.

Plenty of surprises are bad ones—or at least quizzical. At work today, I had a few of those. A job candidate (who could not make it to an interview yesterday because of snow emergency parking coupled with the arrival of Hillary Clinton to our capital city) had to cancel her interview today because of a debilitating stomach virus.

zerone

Reed Altemus tonight is working away at the copy machine. The oscillating wand of the photocopier’s light is flashing back and forth across his face. The machine is fusing toner to a page. And, there, into the tray, is slipping out a new piece of art: a piece of white paper decorated with toner.

And it is beautiful.

Altemus is a copy artist; his creative tool is the photocopier. To some, it might seem inconceivable that an artist would use the tool of bureaucrats and businesses to make art.

Nancy woke up this morning with a scrap of a dream in which she was trying to remember to buy yarn and buttons.

Not much action in that little piece of dreamworld. Her dream was merely her sleeping mind trying to remind her to buy a couple of items today in advance of the snowstorm that arrived this afternoon.

Geof Huth, "Q/C" (9 Apr 1987)

Original size: 12" X 20"ecr. l'inf.

Écrasons L’Infâme