dbqp: visualizing poetics: February 2009

If Tom Beckett Asked Me

"What do you think you’ve learned from poetry that you couldn’t have learned anywhere else?" which he did, how would I respond? Probably as I have:

Of course, poetry has no purpose. It is simply an empty shell we pour our less linear ideas into. Yet there is a freedom in that, an opportunity to allow a mind to wander. With poetry, we can slowly remove the shackles that keep us in place for too long. So maybe that’s the answer.

Michael Burkard, a poet I haven’t read in a very long time, wrote a poem once called “A Formal Child,” and I always thought of it as a poem about me. I was raised to be formal, though my family dispensed with formality over the years. We ate with two forks, dessert spoons, crystal glasses of wine on the table.

Feb

Words as Libraries

Everything is obvious after it already exists, but it’s coming to the point of imagining something that doesn’t exist that makes the difference.

Feb

Visual Poetry Posters of All Nations

The folks at Paper Kite Press, who are always imagining new things, have come up with a remarkable idea, one that understands visual poetry and how it works. They have begun a series of visual poetry posters, and they are selling the first batch of six for the remarkable price of US$23 postpaid (at least in the US).

Even a glance at the Ted Warnell masterpiece above proves that work like this needs to be big, deserves to live on a wall and be ingrained in your consciousness.

Feb

Foods to Eat with Diarrhea (Superillustrated)

I spent much of the last week learning about gastroenteritis, which caused me to write a poem about foods to eat with diarrhea. (I’ll spare you the specific sources of inspiration for that poem.) I had planned nothing to do with this three-part poem, but when I discovered four photos by Troy Lloyd documenting a fecal literature project of his, I saw a kinship of forms that I decided to highlight tonight.

Feb

The Next Move

Mark Young, "Envelope Artifact" (2008)

There is an ancient (though not particularly deep) history of chesspoems, pattern poems written in the grid of an imagined chessboard, but I love none as much as I love Mark Young's, all of which have a rigid but vibrant poetry to them. They also always have white and black squares, thereby heightening the illusion of the board--and the occasionally image within a square.

Feb

The Parts of Speech of Poetry

At the beginning of this month, Chris Piuma posted a micro-survey about parts of speech. After chewing over the idea for a while, I began to write back to Chris, but I soon realized that I was writing much more than Chris would ever need, so my response has morphed into an essay on parts of speech in my writing, particularly my poetry. Although the focus is on the writing I do myself, many of are general ones about this language of ours.

1.

Feb

Conception, Content, Construction

Maybe it is that I am actually too choosy, too demanding, in some ways, but I find Bob Grumman’s recent anthology Visio-Textual Selectricity to be both engaging in terms of conception and content and lacking in terms of construction. With all those cons in place, let me point out that Bob himself announced this publication in this manner:

My major error regarding it was not announcing from the outset that it would not be snazzy, that it would just be something more or less thrown-together.

Feb

Studies in Passions and Emotions

Given the length of time humans have crawled across the face of this planet, we are unlikely to discover anything we are doing that is precisely new. Most of our thinking is brushed off, dusted, polished a little. Most of our ideas are old ideas, thought out and around long ago. But, still, there is the surprise in learning this again, as we learn from this little extract from Puck magazine in 1881 (which mIEKAL aND discovered online).

Feb

STEP 1

Sheraton New York, Room 554, New York, New York

Some messages appear incomplete.

Feb

Winter in Florida

Sheraton New York, Room 554, Manhattan, New York

My father-in-law, Budmond Frye (one of only four Budmonds I can find in the world), decided that he wanted a copy of my visual poetry holiday card that was suitable for framing, so I created a two-tiered version of the poem that placed the panels in the proper order, and he took this sheet down to Florida with him.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience