dbqp: visualizing poetics: July 2007

fhurther thoughts

A small technical problem has kept me unusefully busy this weekend. For some reason, I have not been able to take a PageMaker file and (after a couple of steps) produce a 1200dpi tiff. With the settings all supposedly correct, only a 200dpi image results. So, as my usual computer crunches away at another possible solution, I return to the fh ligature--not because I have much of anything else to say, but because I have something else to show.

Maybe it was working with PageMaker today that made me recall that Emigre's Mrs Eaves typeface has a rich subset of ligatures. When I last owned a working Macintosh (trying to ignore for the moment that I'm working on my son's Mac), I used to own only the ligatures of Mrs Eaves.

Jul

The fh Ligature

Sometimes, in the course of creating fidgetglyphs, I employ one of the rarest and least necessary of ligatures: the fh ligature. I like how those two letters, the f and the h, fit together precisely and create tiny lagoons of white space between them. It may also be that I'm drawn to this pair because the opening half of it ends my first name and the closing half begins my last. One of the few places where an fh ligature could be put to the best use is in my common userid: geofhuth.

Jul

One Coast, Two Exhibits, September 9th

Marilyn Rosenberg, "Alphabet Stew"

(17 small books in a round canister, 8" diameter x 4.25" h, miscellaneous media)

By some weird stroke of coincidence, on September 9th this year,* the East Coast will hold two different receptions for two separate exhibitions of the work of two radically different visual poets. Marilyn Rosenberg is usually the visual poet of three dimensions, creating bookworks of increasingly complexity. And David Daniels is the neo-pattern poet of the PDF.

Jul

The Invention of the Movie Book

Maybe the spine caught my attention first, because it gazed outward, unfocused, one-eyed. Or because you can judge some books quite adequately from their respective covers. No book with an illustrated cover—we know this—comes at us without a message.

Jul

withough

Jul

The Asterisk in the Garden

The Asterisk in the Garden (22 July 2007)

When Andrew Russ, better known as endwar, visited our home three days ago (Sunday, July 22nd), he soon enough proved his status as a minimalist and visual poet. Almost immediately upon sitting at our table in the backyard, he pronounced our little kinetic sculpture the asterisk of the garden. And without another word he set off a little river of thoughts just as a good minimalist poem should do.

Jul

Something Like Nothing

The Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel, Room 720, Poughkeepsie, New York

Unless I'm on the road, I rarely write my posts inside the blog posting window, as it is too risky a procedure, something I've relearned today after losing everything I'd slipped into tonight's window. Since I've already spent much of the night creating an overly complex mailart mailing (in an edition of ten), I don't feel like recreating what I've lost here or even creating something anew.

Jul

weherever

Hampton Inn, Room 307, Elmsford, New York

Jul

Clipping the Fifth Film

Today, the mnmlst poet endwar (sometimes known as Andrew Russ) came to visit. His timing was perfect, as I returned home from a three-day trip yesterday and am leaving home on another three-day trip tomorrow. We spent tonight working on the fifth issue of my long-dormant mailartzine, Film Clips, an issue focused on his work, so I won't write about the meeting tonight.

Jul

nthst

[Cardinal numbers in English have quaint little endings to mark their differences in number ( st, nd, rd, th), but there are only four of these. After the fourth appears, all subsequent numbers simply repeat these four endings, because cardinal numbers are based on the number four, for whatever reason, just like the cardinal points on a compass. So this pwoermd above ends this series of pwoermds, written over a number of weeks. It takes me a while to write sixteen characters of poetry.

ecr.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience