dbqp: visualizing poetics

Holiday Inn Express, Room 321, Poughkeepsie, New York

I’m back in a hotel I last visited in December (in a room whose number is an anagram of the number of that other night’s room). Tomorrow, I’m off to Long Island, specifically to Garden City (a place that has grown out of its name) and to another hotel I’ve visited in the past. My life has a way of repeating itself.

Today, I spent much of my day in our Poughkeepsie office, finishing up a presentation on Adobe’s portable document format. Part of this presentation will focus on the development of PDF/A, a standardized and restricted version of PDF intended to be a stable format for the storage of records of long-term value.

Is it unacceptable that so many visual poems are either about eyes or poetry?

ecr. l'inf.

Some days, we are all children of Noah, trapped in the ark. The sky rages a watery insistence down upon us, one that does not end. The hard surface of the world wavers between solid and liquid until the water claims dominion and begins to rise, nudging even houses loose of their moorings so they float away on a dark, roiling sea.

Suddenly and on schedule, spring has arrived in my neighborhood. The snow is melting quickly, and the last snowfall barely lasted on the ground for a day. The sun wasn’t quite out today, but the warmth was. The temperatures rose into the fifties, and piles of snow and ice weeped water all around us. I didn’t check to see if the solitary crocus at the far end of the yard decided to emerge from the ground already, but I did check my Eve poem to see what it is doing. It is emerging from the snow.

No.

The manifesto is a conceit.

The only manifesto left is the artistic manifesto. The political manifesto is dead in our country. The opposition causes a slight arrhythmia in the heart of the giant going. The majority lets that opposition go on, separate from the rest, lets its practitioners live in their own communities where they are free to eat tofu and foreign grains and pretend to know about socialism and anarchy.

This week, I used a reference book about poetry to put visual poetry into perspective for me. The book is the clumsily titled Facts On File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, edited by Burt Kimmelman. The book itself briefly describes each of the major US poets of the last century, along with the movements they formed and a few of the most well known poems they created during that century.

Centre for Cultural Poetics,

University of Southampton

Re-visualising Writing: Page, Canvas, Screen

One Day Conference: June 10th, 2005

This conference will address the relationship between writing and visual culture. It is particularly interested in exploring how technology continues to shape our understanding of the visual, spatial, experimental, and iconic properties of writing.

Of course, I am the wrong person to ask about how to manage time and make space for creating visual poetry. My personal solution is to sleep less, and I don’t recommend it for everyone.

But, more importantly, I see something honorable about squeezing one’s creative life into the small cracks within one’s regular life. That situation forces us to be part of the world and yet allows us an outlet, another way, another mode of living. We can be our true Manichaean selves.

Geof Huth, "HEFT" (version 3, 12 Mar 2005)

On Saturday, March 19th, 2005, I received the last issue ever of the venerable neodadazine, Lost and Found Times (or “LAFT” to cognoscenti)—a beautiful and deranged two-volume collection of visual poetry, textual poetry, visual arts, and all manner of undefinable extras. For almost three decades, LAFT provided a forum for writers and artists working at the far reaches of creative expression, artists interested in finding new and often disturbing ways to create art. When I heard that John M.