dbqp: visualizing poetics: April 2008

Prefaces

Tonight, I have to finish reading a 1600-page grant application, so much of my writing will continue to be restricted to writing comments about that application. This leaves little time for a real posting, so I will cheat once more. [But prefaces first.]

I received Mark Lamoureux’s chapbook “Poem Stripped of Artifice” in the mail today, and this evening I read it to Nancy. I have taken to reading poetry aloud to her (and sometimes only to myself) over the past month. I’ve been reading Jean Vengua’s book Prau to her slowly, but I decided to read Mark’s entire chapbook to her all at once. The first sections of the chapbook are shockingly good: Filled with dreamlike sequences, marvelous repetends, and a dreamcatcher’s eye for searching for sense in the world.

Apr

Internetworkings

I spent the afternoon and evening in Saratoga Springs at the annual meeting of the New York State Town Clerks Association. The theme for the mixer was pajama party, so I wore slacks, a blue blazer, and a tie. Inside the large room for the mixer were a couple of hundred town clerks (about 97% of whom were women), most dressed in pajamas. Many asked me why I wasn't wearing pajamas, and I had to explain that my version of pajamas would not work in mixed company—or unmixed company.

Apr

Ways of Reasoning on Paper

Saul Steinberg, “February-March” (1968), Ink, crayon, graphite, and watercolor, 21½ x 14½ inches, The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York, © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

As we watch people march out of the dungeon February and into March, it is important to recall that Philip Booth always taught his creative writing students to be guided by Saul Steinberg, the Romanian-born and New-Yorker-nourished cartoonist with a difference who imbued all of his drawings wit

Apr

Wan April

Somehow, a huge bout of traveling, teaching a workshop on my feet for eight hours on Wednesday, little sleep, and struggling with a suitcase too heavy for me to move with me arms (in my condition) and too ridiculous to keep moving with my legs, all together, have left me tired. I’ve fallen asleep at least three times since returning home from work this afternoon, so I am accepting the fate of an early bedtime tonight.

Apr

lighthouselightfingernaillight

The spot color is red.

Red is the color of the ink that affixes the typographical ornament, the only typographical flourish of this book, to the cover. Red is the color of the thread that ties this tiny palmbook together.

There are two books here, as there always are: the book as physical object and the book as a memorial of thought. The first book is beautiful with a stiff laid paper cover and small square pages of white adorned with tiny bodies of rounded Bembo.

Apr

I Dreamed

Fairfield Inn, Room 220, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I dreamed I had created the most resonant of praecisio poems, a poem that said everything that could be said about nothingness and was simultaneously unsettling and revitalizing, incandescent.

Apr

Fear and Loathing in Baton Rouge

Fairfield Inn, Room 220, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

President George W. Bush came to Baton Rouge today, following me here, and tying up traffic on the Interstate. Since I received all my news via taxi drivers, all I know is that he was here raising money for the Republican Party, at a cost of $2000 per guest, $5000 if you wanted a picture of yourself with the president. I have since learned from the New York Times that “Bush stopped in Baton Rouge to raise money for the U.S.

Apr

The Failure of Poetry

Food Court, Between Gates A7 and A8, Detroit Airport, Detroit, Michigan

(started 20 April 2008)

When I imagine the failures of poetry, I don’t imagine quite what Auden did when he said that poetry didn’t do anything. His focus was on the utility of poetry in the general world, the world of eating, sleeping, working, and living. My focus is on poems that fail as poems, on their own terms, in their own world, the realm of poetry.

Apr

Vispo Rumination 36

If a visual poem need not be a poem but sometimes is, can it sometimes not be visual even if it usually is?

Apr

A Few Fidgetglyphs on the Middle Sand of the Middle Beach

North Easter Island Circle, Englewood, Florida

Geof Huth, Blind Pass Park, Manasota Key, Englewood, Florida (18 April 2008)

On three different days during our stay in Florida, I made it to the beach, and each time I was there I created sandglyphs, short poems, usually visual, carved into the middle sand, which is the sand between to wet sloppy sand right at the shoreline and the dry sand farther up the beach. Only the middle sand can hold a letter in its belly.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience