dbqp: visualizing poetics: March 2008

bindithoughts 7

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When I am home during the day, I wear my Homer Simpson slippers all the time. These actually belong to my son Tim, but he left them here as he went off to college. I have to slip my feet into Homer’s mouth to put these slippers on, and sometimes that causes them to vomit socks.

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While looking through the second volume of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems, I noticed that he had a book entitled Visual Poetics. As a visual poet, I thought it would be interesting to procure I copy of that book.

Mar

These Stones, These Poems

As any archeologist knows, stratigraphy is everything.

By examining the strata of an archeological site, you can understand the evolution of the site, how it changed over time, because the lowest stratum is always the oldest and the top is always the latest. Archeologists have to pay attention to the strata to make sense of the past world, and we have to pay attention to the strata to tease out the meaning of the visual poems of Spencer Selby.

Mar

After the Fact: Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art and the Book

From January 22 through March 15, 2008, the Beinecke Library at Yale University ran an exhibit entitled "Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book." The goal of the exhibit included "a broad display of books exploring the ways in which poets, publishers, artists, and printers have navigated the intersection of poetry and art in printed formats."

Harriet Bart before Arion Press' Pattern Poems

Additionally, the exhibition considered "the ways poetry and book arts interact and connect, the

Mar

Call: Visual Poetry for Poetry

Feel free to forward this very serious sounding announcement anywhere. I see this as a good opportunity to bring some notice to visual poetry, even if the selection of visual poems will be quite small.

A future issue of Poetry magazine will include a small section on contemporary visual poetry edited by Geof Huth. This section, which will include full-color visual poems, will also be released as a separate offprint.

Mar

Kimono Man

In some future time, the greatest superhero will be someone named Kimono Man, but for now all we have is the image of me within the framework of one of Cathy Bennett's kimonos (which she stores on her flickr page). Cathy has taken the picture of me as "wounded, the illustrated man" and superimposed both the trappings of a kimono and the final paragraph of an essay of mine upon it, creating a beautiful and eerie little verbo-visual whole. My thanks to Cathy for her beautiful work.

Mar

If Not Peace and Love, At Least Understanding

Although I have lost the language entirely, German was the second language I learned to read and write (coming, as I often note, just before I learned English), so I find it pleasant to read a book of visual poetry that mixes English and German. Klaus Peter Dencker’s Vers T Ehen is a book of fairly classic, yet remarkably refined, European poesia visiva.

Mar

The Ends of Literature

For many years, since its very inception in 1990, I have received the zine ZYX*, edited by Arnold Skemer. The latest issue is number 46 and includes what has, over the years, become the regular features of Arnold’s zine:

1. A sticky note with a small message to me:

Dear Geof: ¶I am encrusted with the primitive. I obstinately persist in technological backwardness. There is a bit of the Luddite in me. What is to be done?2. An opening essay by Arnold.

Mar

m(Ark

the blind

night come

my ark takes

to darkness

rolling

with the waves

I sleep

through storms

cannot steer

sans stars

sans sight

under cover

I listen

to the dark

rain down

over me

the ark

tumbles

over waves

my quill

spills ink

black as rain

the floorboards

are stained

black the ceiling

is black my

shoes black

even my fingertips

yet there floats

serenely

suspended

between ceiling

and floor

between twisting

and torquing

between rolling

and rocking

a single sheet

Mar

Poem as Memorandum

Tonight, I'm typesetting a book of my poems, those 366 that make up the ineptly titled Longfellow Memoranda. I like typesetting, even though there is tedium associated with it; to my mind, typesetting is a part of the writing: the setting of the words down as they must appear, to concretize their meaning, even if they never appear in that manner again.

Mar

Confessions of a Lexiphanes, Fitt the Third

Another olla-podrida, this set of “Confessions of a Lexiphanes” includes announcements that go back at least until November. These I’ve arranged stratigraphically, with the oldest ones on the bottom.

Ample Forewarning

Plan on being in Columbus for the Avant Writing Symposium in August 19 - 21, 2010.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience