dbqp: visualizing poetics: January 2007

Leaving the Light

losing the light:

last light (like

first light), a

burning down to

a blackness, dark-

ness, nextness, something

so cold it

sharpens and cuts,

it brightens like

ice catching sun,

it blazes out,

a homefire burnt

past embers, no

flickering of breath

awakens to flame,

catches with hissing

a broom’s straw,

Sunday’s paper read

right through, or

a love letter

lost of love,

yet we wake

from darkness every

morning (even if

to darkness again

we wake), sometimes

to find that

the great dark

sky that quenched

the sun left

behind a dusting

of snow to

recall the light

that lives and

dies each day.

ecr. l’inf.

Jan

Anew, Beginning

Today, without warning, Blogger finally allowed me to switch over to “New Blogger.” Whenever I had opened Blogger in the last month or so, the thing told me to switch to New Blogger, but the size of my blogs had blocked me from doing this each time. This time, however, the switch took place, and all my blogs transferred over to the new format without trouble. At the other end of the process, I had blogs that looked just like the originals.

But that’s not quite what I had wanted.

Jan

whisp

Jan

D: The Door

The D is a door (daleth) swinging on a hinge, the flap of a tent, half a saloon door pivoting away and back and forth. The sound of tongue against teeth, it is dental, toothy, dentate. It chews up other letters, spitting out death, destruction, despair, destitution, derision. It rides some dark sound to the pit of our imagination, yet it is delta: the fat mud settling down, at the end of the river, into fertility and increase.

Jan

The Biggest Bridge

Volume 3, number 4, of the e-journal Big Bridge is so large that I’ve only dipped into little parts of it, but there’s plenty here to take advantage of, including a big and wandering review of the Blends and Bridges visual poetry show and the continuation of Some Volumes of Poetry: A Retrospective of Publication Work by Karl Young. The announcement of the issue gives you some sense of its size.

BIG BRIDGE is pleased to announce its 2007 Issue.

Jan

Something Like Opinion (A Twenty-Fifth Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)

Crescent Street, Astoria, New York

I don't know why it is that I almost always respond to you when I'm away from home, though even as I do so again tonight I'm doing it with my family with me, so I have brought my home along.

Don't think for a second that I'm going to disagree with your opinion--and not because I think you're right, merely (instead) because I think opinions can extend into a crepusc where light is night and day is dark.

Jan

A e o

ecr. l'inf.

Jan

An Appraisal Completed: Geaf Ruth and Q~mmW fu=BMve’fililil~OOlr*

Today was a big day in many ways. I finished the second of my big extra-professional projects (this one a script for a webinar on the portable document format). I learned one of my three sisters “will be serving the Navy in Manama, Bahrain, for the next two months as an intel analyst working for COMUSNAVCENT” (luckily, a fairly safe deployment). And the financial appraisal of my papers arrived in the mail, along with a bill.

Jan

Punctuatio en Libertà

Dan Waber, first adventures of col and sem (2007)

(Click to Enlarge)

There is a dance upon its cover—or, simply, a dead stare and a wink; actually, a colon and a semi-colon, bits of punctuation set free to mean, to make, to be.

Jan

Passion Orbits the Peripheries of Symbols (or, iLove U.)

The books of poetry I want to read require me to think and see and hear, and Sharon Harris’ AVATAR does pretty well in most of these regards. Growing out of an imaginative tradition that includes Darren Wershler-Henry’s Nicholodeon: A Book of Lowerglyphs (1998) and Christian Bök’s Crystallography, Harris’ Avatar mixes poetry (of an interestingly twisted variety), visual poetry, visuals, and various codes and tricks into a book of subtle delights.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience