dbqp: visualizing poetics: May 2009

Alphabet Begins with A. Why Doesn’t it End with Z?

After a while, we no longer want to hear the sound of our own voices, which are too familiar, which rasp against our teeth like breath being exhaled, something used up, no matter how essential the getting of it there was. We need to hear some other voice, some other sound, be reminded of a world beyond the confines of our skin, that inescapable prison. Or the prison of a language, the trap of English how it is made by us of this tongue. Wondering of the wonders of another tongue, how its gentle flapping against the back of the teeth take us to another sound because there are other ways of thinking out through language, those our language cannot do, but can only emulate.

Let English pretend, for instance, to be Danish, and it might produce.

May

Outloud

This week, I received different levels of information about upcoming readings I’ll be involved in, so the time for announcements is here:

June 27, 2009

7 – 9 pm

Tom Beckett and Geof Huth

Karpeles Manuscript Library

453 Porter Avenue

Buffalo, New York 14201

This reading will be something of an experiment for Tom and me. We are quite different readers, so this will give us a chance to see how our divergent styles of reading can come together.

May

The Book of Simple Being

Since I never write only to myself, I note something like progress on a project I may abandon, one I don't understand, something designed to take me years, something I call The Book of Simple Being, something that is poetry and prose and drawing and fidgetglyph, but which is only poetry, visual and otherwise.

I required space for this project, so I bought two 192-page sketchbooks with 9.5 by 12 inches in size.

May

Poetry, Technology, Humanity

People often make a distinction between the technological and the human. The belief here is that there is something beautiful in the human that is absent in the technological, and I understand that notion. The only problem I have with it is that the technological is always human. It is the imagination of humans that has created the computer, the Internet, the automobile, even the pencil, the paper, and the pen.

May

brthdy wshs frm Mike Cannell

Mike Cannell, "brthdy poem for Geof Huth" (25 May 2009)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Since I have a habit of recognizing the gifts of poems, visual and otherwise, that people give me, and since I might not have enough time tonight to write a proper blog entry, find above the visual poem that Mike Cannell sent me today on the occasion of my birthday. This little poem is a tiny dance of text occluding itself, leaving it as almost a secret message and not a secret at all.

May

The Still Point of Simple Beings

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Today is Magic Day, the only day of the year when Nancy and I are the same age, and Nancy shares her birthday on this day every year with her sister, who was born exactly two years after her. Nancy's birthday is the confluence of a number of annual events, a set of coincidences, and I don't even count among these the fact that she is exactly twenty years younger than Bob Dylan. This day is special for many reasons.

May

Summer Begins with Zombies

Each year, the summer begins for my family in the woods, we come together in the Adirondack woods, together by a small dark lens of a small dark lake that faces up into the stars, we eat our meals, we talk our conversations out, we watch movies, and we note how the seasons change, how what once was spring is now something like summer, even if it is still something like spring as well.

An Excess of Zombies

X.

Every

life is

a movie about

zombies, and we

are the

zombies.

May

The Weight of Words

Tonight, I took an electronic copy of the first draft of the interview Tom and I spent the last year creating and had a paper copy made of its 677 pages, all of which fit into a slightly overstuffed box. At home, I discovered that the paper weighed eight pounds and three and a half ounces, or about 3.72 kilograms, quite a hefty manuscript and an average of about four pounds two ounces per interviewer/interviewee for the year.

May

The Red Hookers and (Finally) How They Sounded

On the eleventh of April of this year, the Red Hook Collective gathered together to make improvisational music, sometimes accompanied by poetry. The members in attendance were Anne Gorrick, Peter Genovese, Teresa Genovese, Lynn Behrendt, Vince Murray, Nancy and I. Only tonight have I uploaded out selections, our evening’s album of songs, which you can listen to above and learn about below.

I am behind in many of my responsibilities at the moment, but at least that list has been reduced by one.

May

Vispo Rumination 44

If a secretary in our offices has a glossy magazine face up on her desk, showing the slender curves of a young woman, her dress opening here and there to reveal her delicate skin, and we remark upon a particular lower-case i on that page, how it swoops at its ends, its long sinuous curve, how its tittle almost dances away from it, suspended over the letter, then we know why it is that we are visual poets.

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience