dbqp: visualizing poetics: December 2006

Wabering

The process of Wabering is not well understood. There are complexities to it that researchers cannot yet fathom. Wabering does, however, exhibit a number of essential characteristics:

1. Art, especially poetry in some form, must be involved. There has never been, for instance, a documented case ice-cream-making Wabering, though that would theoretically be possible.

2. Collaboration between two or more parties is quintessential to Wabering. Some researchers have posited that the only defining characteristic of Wabering is synergy.

3. Wabering is best defined not as a single activity, but as a mass of activities seemingly impossible for one person to complete even with help. This indefatigability has been a key component identified in all Wabering studies.

4.

Dec

Quarante

piedra aslant

that bluing space

a touch

shiro bismuth

a fingering

algae

curve française

boteille de

mots

l’eau

agua mineral

l’air nahuatl

espacio cuir

peintre paint

y palabras

huit ears

rising

on

ecr. l’inf.

Dec

Life and Art in Synechdoche, New York

I tend to watch the hits to this blog come in. It’s not a mania—and I would know: I’m driven by manias of production all the time—but almost every day I review how people wend their way to this spot in cyberspace. In the past two days, something surprising has happened—a tiny thing, to be sure, but of some weird interest to me.

Dec

the myrrhmyrhh of the hyhnhmns from the leeves in the boock

On my son’s sixth birthday, I found myself in Miami Beach, Florida, at the home of Marvin and Ruth Sackner, the great collectors of visual poetry. At this point in my life, I had not yet begun my routine of near-constant travel (which was about to begin in less than a month) and I wasn’t yet accustomed to separation from my family.

Dec

The First Drift and Thoughts on Cut-ups Equal Merry Christmas

Jack Kimball, “Merry Xmas from Jack Kimball (thanks to Jim Andrews & Ron Padgett)” (Dec 2006)

Here at dbqp, our traditional celebration of Christmas includes a consideration of whatever digital Christmas poem Jack Kimball puts up at his blog, Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry

The writing of poems

and the living of life

seem to require

paying hard attention

to any and everything,

The cutup involves a media artist’s or painter’s sense of the writer’s ‘material’.

Dec

An HTML’ized Christmas

Ted Warnell is Web-footed by nature, a nature (however) he had to create over time, acclimating himself to a new environment. Given time, Ted might evolve to the point where he is no longer flesh and blood and thought, but just electron and pixel jostling into place, reorganizing into a new creature every few minutes.

One of the most remarkable features of Ted’s work is how he sculpts with HTML. He creates agglomerations that appear to be a unitary object on the screen.

Dec

On Festivus, It Began

Timothy Willette,

“chiral alley

for geof

huth” (2006)

Three years ago, I made the second posting to this blog, but I always recall December 23rd (sometimes referred to as Christmas Eve Eve or Christmas Adam in our household) as the date this blog began. My memory of even the past three years is filled with blind alleys.

I discovered the other day that today is celebrated by some as Festivus, an invented holiday that most people first became aware of on the television program, Seinfeld.

Dec

The Search for Meaning and the Near-Perfect Version

Geof Huth, One Final Copy of “starm8n” (19 Dec 2006)

For some people I work with today was the last workday of the year (and for others that day was yesterday). I went around to offices today dropping off holiday cards that are intentionally vague in their intentions. Not really Christmas cards (and “eXmaSscards” by name), they might celebrate the winter solstice or the coming new year or even, actually, Christmas.

Dec

gh

Márton Koppány, “Click Poem” (2006)

I don’t usually write about the same artist soon after a blog posting, but three days ago, my friend Márton Koppány sent me another small conceptual poem of his, this one maybe too hard for my dulled critical acumen to crack. Thinking about it, I decided there were a couple of hints to the poem’s meaning within Márton’s sending of it.

Dec

)))h) (w(((

how ever in lonely midnight,

struck of hour, heavy of

eyelid, the hand

did write

how every one

in only twilight,

snuck a nap, heaved a

sound toward

some thing white

how even, once

enthroned, slight

of frame, l’idée

fixé, the frozen

form thunk, not quite

however, only thriced,

mano a mano, thrown

together, thought,

seen, heard, it

some how touched

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience