dbqp: visualizing poetics: March 2009

The BBC in the ALB

Jason Middlebrook’s “Cardboard Stack” and the Performance Space for the Be Blank Consort, with K.S. Ernst, University at Albany Art Gallery, Albany, New York, 27 March 2009

(photo by Geof Huth)

The Be Blank Consort was created during a literary residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in 2001. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t at the Second Wave conference and exhibition in Columbus the next year, since at the time I was still living outside of the world of poetry, visual and otherwise. So I’m not a central player in the Be Blank Consort, though I’ve performed as part of it at least three times, in three different states.

Mar

Poetry (Visual), Vitrines (Four), and Kotik (Petr)

(photo by Nancy F. Huth)

I probably would have slept through half the day today except that John M. and C. Mehrl Bennett were staying with us and the dogs were barking for release from their crate, so I arose and entered my day. We never know what a day holds for us. I imagined a day that included a walk with the Bennetts in our Central Park and maybe a walking tour of the Stockade, the oldest part of the city, with plenty of homes from the 1700s.

Mar

Petr Kotik in Albany

The Be Blank Consort gave a performance at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, today, but I don't have the stamina to upload all the photos and video I'd need to for that event so that I could write about it cogently, so I'll say a few words about Peter Kotik's version of John Cage's "Empty Words" instead.

Mar

A Poetry Ponzi Scheme

The Be Blank Consort has arrived.

Under the aegis of Michael Peters, the Be Blank Consort has been corralled to give a sound poetry concert tomorrow as part of a three-day Peter Kotik residency at the University at Albany. By 7:15 tonight, the Be Blankers had all arrived. John M. and C. Mehrl Bennett were at my house having dinner, Kathy Ernst was in Albany awaiting tomorrow's festivities, and Scott Helmes was arriving at the Albany-Rensselaer train station.

Mar

Let's Make that Джeф Хьутхь

Given my schedule this week, I have time only for little postings. Most of this week will be taken up with a three-day staff meeting and concentration on a bill in the legislature that is critical to my organization. And Friday will be taken up with the Petr Kotik residency at the University at Albany, which will feature a performance by the Be Blank Consort, of which I might be a member.

Mar

They Call Me Джоф Хат

Today, Andrey Nadein sent me a pdf copy of the interview he did with me on visual poetry. This interview, along with a surrounding story and a set of illustrations that seem to focus on visual poetry and the textual imagination, will be published in the second issue of 2009 of the Russian magazine Advertising Ideas (or Рекламные Идеи). Not knowing Russian, I can’t say much about this, but I like the denseness of the imagery in these pages and the general layout.

Mar

Flarf in Annandale(-on-Hudson)

I have never been to Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, during the daylight, only at night. And only twice at that.

Sometime the week before K. Silem Mohammad’s reading with Paul Stephens at Bard College, I found out about it on Facebook (which seems to me to be the most valuable part of Facebook—to tell me about poetry events to attend).

Mar

Gingerbread Released

On this day, my father’s 72 birthday, Mark Lamoureux’s Cy Gist Press released my long poem Gingerbread as a chapbook, with cover design by me. I wrote the first draft of the poem in 1984, the year my daughter and first child was born, and I finished editing it last year. Sure, I took some time off working on it over those intervening 24 years.

ecr. l’inf.

Mar

Irony, Poetry, and Shirts

In my continuing co-interview with Tom Beckett, I gave this answer to his question, "What are your feelings about irony? Charles Olson famously couldn’t find the iron in the concept."

Irony is all there is.

Think of it this way: Everything that clearly appears one way to us is clearly some other way. Even the obviousness of physical reality is undermined by the conclusions of quantum physics, which, if true, should force us to reconsider our lives in deep and permanent ways.

Mar

Slight Delays in the Fabric of the Universe

Hmm, in the past seven, I've made it to two poetry readings (not counting the one that occurred just a day farther out), and I still have yet to record anything about these events. A little slowed in postings here over all. Tomorrow, I expect to get to at least one of these readings, either Kasey Mohammad's at Bard College or a reading of three Shearsman Press poets in Kingston. Just looking for time.

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience