dbqp: visualizing poetics: October 2009

Something Resembling Silence

It appears that I have not been writing much here recently. That is because I have not been writing much here recently. That is because I have been writing elsewhere. Though where I am writing is at the same keyboard, the effect, the distribution of something written "here," is different. What I am writing elsewhere is something like a book of poetry, and I must finish the poems that make up the book by the tenth of November. (And I have other writing projects that must be done within that time as well.) So I have not run out of things to say about visual poetry. I still need to write here. Need, which is something like desire. And I will be back, maybe erratically at first, but eventually fulltime.

ecr. l'inf.

Oct

Interpreting Art

Film director David Lynch has stated that no-one has ever come close to describing his interpretation of the film Eraserhead. What Lynch demonstrates with this statement is his realization that meaning is never the purview of the creator, who is actually in charge of surface and who works on meaning at great personal peril. Interpretation is always the role of the viewer, who can discard that responsibility at will.

ecr. l'inf.

Oct

Crescent Street, Astoria, New York

Today while working in the Bronx, an emigre records manager I was speaking to, a man whose daughter is a poet, he told me that, if we could somehow download and preserve all of our memories and ideas, the intellectual contents of our brains, that we could be immortal.

Oct

ed.:

The Gershwin, Room 542, Manhattan, New York

You see, for a poet believing is the same thing as knowing.

Wanting is the same as having.

There is no difference between thinking and action.

To us, nonsense is the greatest truth.

We are engaged by connections even through the process of disconnection.

We are happy with our words.

We are happy with our words even I'd they engender thinking.

We think in words, of words, through words.

ecr. l'inf.

Oct

Era Figuratum

Hampton Inn Syracuse/Clay, Room 314, Liverpool, New York

The figured age. And what the figure is, what it might be. A number, particular in size. The outline of a human form. Thus, both number and body. An image, an image of any kind, a plate in a book, and whatever it could symbolize. A character, which is an image, which represents a shape in nature, a body of letter, the boundaries of meaning, still a number, yet so.

Oct

Visual Poetry Reviewed

Oh, we poor visual poets. We got reviewed recently by a man not from our fold, a man of more conservatives tastes and manners than us, and we were pleased.

The review is by a man named Paul Schultz and it takes place in The Trades, and it's not exactly a bad review. It's just a review of Anthology Spidertangle by a man not quite sure what he's looking at, or not prepared to understand that being not quite sure might be exactly what he's supposed to be experiencing.

Oct

bindithoughts 17

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BINDI, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10 October 2009)

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I find it strange that a place entitled Bindi would not use a single tittle on either of its i’s. The bindi, after all, is something of a human tittle.

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If you ever allow yourself to believe that poetry has no effect on the world, consider this: Today, I read Ron Silliman’s “Ketjak” (as part of The Age of Huts (compleat), which includes as one of its repeating sentences one about split-pea soup.

Oct

Documentation and Intuition

Today, Nancy and I made one of our many treks to Kingston, New York, to hear poetry. We do this a number of times a year because we enjoy poetry and we enjoy the people we meet at the Cadmium Text Series. We even enjoy the friends of ours we see there.

Sometime tomorrow, I’ll recount this day of poetry, and our fun with our friends, but for now let me think, just for a second, about the idea of documentation, specifically why I do it.

Oct

Feather-Bird-Flight (Part Byrd)

Don Byrd Reading His Poetry, Cadmium Text Series, Kingston, New York (19 September 2009)

You see, as Piuma is Italian for Feather and Byrd is Surname for Bird, the joining together of Chris Piuma and Don Byrd for an afternoon of poetry reading seems to require the event be a flight. And it was. An exceptional afternoon.

Oct

The Question of the Bee

I know almost nothing about the leafcutter bee, and it is a bee that cuts into leaves to build itself a nest, but what it leaves behind can be incredible.

The outdoors poet Mike Busam (not a poet of the outdoors, but one who writes outdoors) sent me the find above. Mike's eye is attuned to the circulating beauty of nature, the grace of its myriad imperfections colliding somehow into one perfection.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience