dbqp: visualizing poetics: March 2007

The Summit at Alki Beach

Silver Cloud Inn—University Village, Room 229, Seattle, Washington

After giving an all-day workshop on electronic records and wearing out my throat, I took a drive out to Alki Beach with my friends Jeff and Barbara Benson. I had to meet up with Nico Vassilakis, the poet laureate of Seattle,* and Crag Hill, the one-time proprietor of Spore and its predecessors and someone I haven’t seen in ten years. The five of us ended up talking in a small coffee shop across the street from the beach, and we made plans to videotape tomorrow’s performance. After the Bensons left for home, Nico, Crag, and I continued our conversation over dinner and discussed, in a desultory way, the order of parts of tomorrow’s performance.

Mar

an/swer

Mar

emember

Mar

Poets. Painter. Composers. Sculptors.

Silver Cloud Inn--University Village, Room 229, Seattle, Washington

Somehow, things work out, and that's what I got out of today. My first flight left an hour late, so I should have missed my connecting flight, but the airline held my flight just long enough for me to connect (a first). As I exited my first flight, the second was boarding. By the time I made it to the gate, every other passenger was seated in the plane.

Mar

A Reminder: Seattle

I’m almost ready to finish packing for my flight early tomorrow morning, so all I’m going to do is remind those near Seattle to come to a small and varied set of performances (alone and together) that Jim Andrews, Crag Hill, Nico Vassilakis, and I are giving this Friday. It’ll be great to be in Seattle, especially since I’ve been a Seattle poet for decades without ever being part of that community.

Mar

Buckingham's Palace of Words

usually an 8-fingered typist, i am particularly handicapped right now, having burned two fingertips of my left hand. i am typing one-fingered (right, middle) and eschewing capitals as an unnecessary extravagance. no big deal any of this, just an explanation.

i know nothing about david buckingham except what i have found on this page, pointed out to me through robin reagler's blog.

Mar

The Page between the Margins

Reed Altemus puts out (looseleaf, in folders) a wide-ranging set of visual poetic and copyart productions under the title Live Matter, which term he defines as “the usable area of the page between the margins.” Within this space—and, truth be told, even into the margins themselves—the artists that Reed brings together exhibit amazing bits of imagination.

Carla Bertola’s Inter-Positions is one of the more recent of these print folders, and the shortest I’ve seen so far.

Mar

Sans Teeth, Sans Eyes, Sans Taste, Sans Everything

The opening of The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson suggests a number of readings. The circle could be an “O,” that small round awe-filled word that announces a formal address, maybe to an audience arranged in a circle around a fire, an audience so large that it surrounds the small fire in two concentric circles—so that, from above, the scene appears to be an open eye (pupil, iris, and sclera clearly defined) or a wheel about to roll into a story.

Mar

Guidebook to an Imaginary City

Every day, I think about visual poetry (though hardly exclusively) and I try to determine how to promote visual poetry and visual poets.

Mar

This is Your Body, This is Your Blood

The title is simple to understand, even with my childhood Portuguese almost totally lost. carne viva::live meat or live flesh. The title, appropriately enough, appears over an illustration of a woman holding open the flaps of skin that should cover her mid-section, thus allowing us to see the darkness inside her body. The title, also appropriately, floats within a red band that crosses the cover of the book.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience