dbqp: visualizing poetics

Guy r. Beining has been making visual poems for more years than great majority of visual poets. He’s decades into his art now, and he’s in a groove. He creates, with weird verve, an art brut style of visual poetry full of fragments: pieces of syntax, indications of images, which together form vague gestures that we must decode.

And somehow he continues to create huge quantities of visual poetry from his perch in western Massachusetts without the use of electronic means of creation or transmission. I point this out because it is so uncommon nowadays. Whenever I talk to Guy, he always notes that he doesn’t always hear about everything that’s going on in the world of visual poetry because he has no email.

I must admit that I never have any idea what thoughts of mine will engender sets of boxed comments, but yesterday’s posting was one of them. The comment that interested me the most was the one by endwar about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Endwar encourages me to check out the Wayback Machine, but I already knew plenty about it. As a matter of fact, the limitations of this “archive” actually make me worry about the preservation of web content in general.

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

Tonight, I’m taking a break and posting an essay I wrote for Audiatur, a Norwegian festival of new poetry, and for the huge exhibit “catalog” of the same name. Since the beautiful catalog won’t be widely available—though it should be—I’m distributing this essay here in its original English.

In the United States, you can walk into a general purpose bookstore and find no poetry at all.

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

In maybe the most real way possible, Washington, DC, is my true home. I wasn’t born there, and I lived in the District for only a few months in 1970, but my family was tied to that city for most of my childhood and adolescence, and DC was the place we returned to after living outside of the country.

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

The TAZO logo

Billy Mavreas—comics artist, asemic writer, and visual poet—recently explained his entrance into the world of visual poetry:

I got into concrete/visual poetry via band logos, psychedelic lettering, calligraphy, fantasy scripts in LOTR, books on talismans in the school library and actually finding an old collection (Once Again, Jean-Francois Bory) or two second hand and being amazed.

The first item on this list (“band logos”) struck me the most.

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

The other day, out of the blue, Markus Sulzberger sent me a link to Luxarium's "Haiku und Wordicht Forum." "Wordicht," he explained to me, was the (supposedly new) German word for "pwoermd," which he elucidated in this manner:

word = wort

poem = gedicht

pwoermds = wordicht

I was pleased to see a new group of people writing pwoermds, even if I couldn't understand these one-word poems myself.

I’ve been having a peripatetic email conversation over the past couple of days that bordered on the topic of the shortcomings of repeated ideas—specifically how visual and minimalist poets can repeat ideas indefinitely and, thereby, dilute the effectiveness of their work. I have to agree that that result is a possibility, but there is another way. Some poets examine one corner of the world of visual poetry so extensively that they find new depth and new surprises there.

My thanks to Chris Piuma for posting my series of microscopic visual poems, thelfbet, over at flim for the last few months—even in the face of some technical problems that delayed the middle of August for about two months. These neobetisms remain a bit rough in executive, but the idea behind them seems to still be clear to me.

Sometimes I worry that the beauty of a book as an object blinds me to the quality of its contents. Which such trepidation in mind, I entered Christian Bök’s books Crytallography and Eunoia.

Both are simple perfectbound paperbacks, almost unremarkable at first glance. But a few seconds with either disabused me of that idea. Both books, though essentially books of poetry, are books whose subject is book design, or, more broadly, information design.

Somehow, I forgot that my son decided to be a visual poet for one night three years ago. He even announced the fact at the time. Starting with a found text (a completed game of Scrabble), he rearranged the text, moving all the letters downward until he had filled all the empty spaces. What remains is a text we can read but can't quite read completely, yet we know that if we spent some time with it that we could figure it out.

Tim Huth, "UNNEEDE IFTMOAN" (2 Oct 2002)

ecr. l'inf.