dbqp: visualizing poetics: May 2008

Poetry and Peregrinations (A Forty-Fourth Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)

Comfort Suites, Room 211, Canton, New York

Sure, frequent travel takes its toll on a body, a mind, even on the poetry of that mind, yet it also allows for opportunities I might not otherwise have. I am forced into spaces alone, totally alone, for long periods of time. This provides me the opportunity for contemplation that I otherwise might not have, and it provides time for writing, for creating.

I imagine that the fruits of my poetry making might be more abundant and richer if I were always in the same spot, never traveling, and afforded time absolutely alone, but I'm not sure of it. Travel allows us to see things we might not otherwise see.

May

Vispo Rumination 37

Comfort Suites, Room 211, Canton, New York

The word has power, but so has the text, even the wordless text, shimmering.

ecr. l'inf.

May

When and When Not

When I have written too much in one way, forced myself long enough to live in one straitjacket, played the game of a certain constraint for enough times, I give up that tic, dispense it into the winds, and try something else. I’ve rested a bit from writing a daily poem—and have no plans to start up again—so I try now something else. Instead of lines almost too short to be seen, I write a poem with lines averaging about twenty syllables.

May

Berthdeigh Whishes

Mike Cannell, "Visual Poem for Geof Huth" (2008)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Mike Cannell, whose recently birthed blog of all manner of poetries visoundtextpoem is a little engine of interesting works, sent me a dense and engaging visual poem for my birthday (which was yesterday for those keeping count).

The particular processes of this poem's creation remain opaque to me, but the poem both accumulates and obscures text, producing a poem that cannot (at least not easily) be read.

May

slighly

May

Cross-Stitched Pwoermds

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Today, for my birthday, I received many great gifts: a couple of $50 bills, a leather messenger bag, plenty of tea (including a great dragon pearl jasmine), a CD of music by the Swedish artist Jens Lekman, and a framed cross-stitch of three of my pwoermds (chosen and cross-stitched by my daughter Erin). The last in that list hit me the hardest and gave me the greatest joy. But joy is relative.

Here are those pwoermds re-envisioned in cross-stitch.

ecr.

May

agrainst

May

threee

May

A Small Point in a Floating World

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Every year, usually over Memorial Day Weekend, our family returns to this camp* by a small lake. We return to the dark cold water. We return to the place I’ve come to for almost a quarter of a century, to the place Nancy has come to for almost forty years, to that spot in the world that is the closest to a constant in our peripatetic lives.

May

W(o/a)nderings

There is something in visual poetry (or, maybe, in the visual poet) that nurtures mania and causes rash bouts of productivity that might last for years. We see this, clearly, in people like John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich, Andrew Topel, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and many others. And we also see this in the work of Kenneth Patchen, who produced all manner of writing: poetry, novels, visual fiction, visual poetry.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience