dbqp: visualizing poetics

Trenton Marriott Lafayette Yard, Room 532, Trenton, New Jersey

Bob Grumman resurrected a poem of mine the other day, and the rediscovery of this poem (a poem of mine someone enjoyed enough to remember) caused me something akin to delight. Since we write poems not for friends or critics or posterity—but for ourselves, for our own ear and heart and spleen—it should not have surprised me so much that this series of intentionally crippled words recalling up out of the collective memory of beach living a few happenstances of the seasand coast would seem not altogether wrong.

Wyndham Chicago, Business Center, Chicago, Illinois

For those of us who read, whatever is there that is not a text to us?

Wyndham Chicago, Room 1021, Chicago, Illinois

In one of the rarest of events in my traveling life, I took a direct, non-stop flight to my destination today, but it was O’Hare Airport, so my plane waited on the tarmac for twenty minutes or so. I took advantage of that time to start reading Ronald Johnson’s Ark, the beginning sections of which focus on the act, art, and senses of perception.

embership

Geof Huth, "Wreed" (15 April 2004)

Sometime last year, I learned to create sandglyphs, small doodle-like visual poems carved into the sand. A few days after my first creations, I decided to try to photograph these small creations before the sea erased them. On this page, I present a couple of these. Considering that I wrew these poems between the pulses of wave up the beach, these are reasonably interesting, but the problem with this form is it does not allow much time for reflection.

Months ago, mailartist Qpidoremix (in a comment to a blog post) suggested that there could exist a type of poetry he called "view point poetry, a poem defined by the viewing angle. geoglyphic, a poem defined by the viewer[']s position." I immediately responded that I'd like to see some of this geoglyphic poetry, and tonight (months later) someone entirely different suggested that he might have some poetry matching this description--in which case I want to see some!

ecr. l'inf.

A couple of days ago, I posted a few brief thoughts about this blog and the value of its often petite entries. I want to assure everyone that I'm not considering the abandonment of this blog, and I don't even think that my short entries are necessarily bad. I am a minimalist, after all. But if my goal here is exigesis of and advocacy for visual poetry, then I am compelled to consider what that goal requires of me.

Gzof Huth, "NZXT" (2003)

Who knows what's nzxt? Thz night gzts latz, and I fzzl a nzzd to post somzthing, but the zxigzncizs of my lifz right now do not allow mz thz chancz to writz much. (And I do havz plans.) So for thz timz bzing, I will post a simplz and tiny visual pozm that I wrotz a couplz of yzars ago. It is from forked tung stem, a book of small lzttzr-baszd visual pozms, a book I had originally plannzd to finish for my forty-third birthday.

zcr. l'inf.

A blog is a virtual space into which words (or images or links, etc.) pile atop one another until the bottom layer falls away into darkness, rarely to be seen again. A blog is essentially about today, maybe about next week—but it is rarely about a year ago. We bloggers type our thoughts into a space we cannot quite comprehend (one that appears on any computer that looks for us), and others read those thoughts and maybe make something of them.

Tim Gaze, "times new elfebet" (2001)

The concern of visual poetry is textuality; visual poetry is about text, and text is its ultimate subject—just as the ultimate subject of poetry itself is the word, the true word, the word made by the tongue and the lip and the mouth and released into the air.