dbqp: visualizing poetics

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

The indefatigable Jukka-Pekka Kervinen--a Finnish poet of such enormous capacity for writing, blogging, publishing, and text-manipulating that he seems superhuman, but who is simply a man who doesn't sleep much--has begun to release the fruits of his latest publishing endeavor: eIghT-pAGE pREss. Consisting almost entirely of works of visual literature, this press is much what you'd expect it to be: one that puts out saddle-stapled booklets that are eight pages in length.*

Straining my belief, Kervinen has released at least ten titles from this press already, and I'm sure more are in the works, so this tiny little press has become a hotbed of international visual poetry (although each of the authors so far, except for Kervinen himself, is American).

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

When I was young, I remember flipping through a book called The Visible Man. It consisted of some base image of the human form on top of which I could flip clear plastic pages that would lay down the bones, the veins, or the organs, so that I could slowly construct my own human. It is hard for me to look at "The Poetics of Life," the most stunning of Amanda Smith's visual poems and not recall the hours I spent in Barbados contemplating human anatomy.

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

If there's anyone else who does dirty better and dirtier than David-Baptiste Chirot, I don't know who it is.

Chirot walks through the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with paper and lumber crayon* in hand, making visual poems through the ancient and childlike process of frottage†. He finds a water meter or a manhole cover or any other number of sources of text and image and he rubs part of it onto a sheet of paper.

8228 Visual Poetry

NOUNS

1.

The visual poet Scott Helmes may have hit upon the problem with visual poetry when he wrote that bit of text that appears above as the title of today’s musings.

If the world is divided—as it very nearly is—between those who labor on behalf of the word and those who toil for the image, then who is there left to carry on the struggle for visual poetry? If left to visual poets, their numbers as so small as to almost ensure defeat.

In my household, only one day out of the year is designated Magic Day, and that day is today. What makes Magic Day magic is that it is the only day of the year when my wife and I are the same age. Today is my wife’s birthday.*

In our family, we have many traditions unique to us. These traditions are how we define ourselves as a group, so they are important to us. And the simple concept of Magic Day is one of them.

Geof Huth, "Ten Anuses" (3 Aug 1986)

Recently, the issue of clean versus dirty visual poetry is popping up in my life more often than I would expect. The proximate cause of these coincidental events is the existence of me and my visual poetry itself, which tends towards the clean ("clean" in this case being about equivalent to "neat") instead of the dirty (think "messy" in an artistic way).

The visual poet must understand the history of writing because that is from whence our inspiration flows. Visual poetry is, after all, that artform interested in the visible word as a source of esthetic delight.

With this in mind, let's take a peek into Carol Stetser's Copy-Book from 2003. A copybook is a book that includes examples of good penmanship.

Geof Huth, "The Letter Bagpipes" (21 May 2005)

Below the Bar

Today was Carrot Day in the Huthhold.

Sometimes, I make mistakes, and that’s what my whole family did tonight. The four of us went to the theater to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Since I claim that Episode I is the worst movie of all times, I didn’t expect much from this third episode, but I’d heard people say this movie was good, that George Lucas had suddenly learned how to make movies again, and we went to see it.