dbqp: visualizing poetics: November 2009

Daydreamers and Nightsleepers

Last Saturday, November 21, 2009, Nancy and I drove from Schenectady to Kingston, the first capital of New York, for a Cadmium Text Poetry Reading. This is a frequent activity of ours, but (for some reason) we arrived there more than a half an hour early this time, which allowed us even more time than usual to talk to our friends.

A train maybe a mile long was passing within feet of R&F Handmade Paints, where the Cadmium Text Series, curated by Anne Gorrick, manifests itself. As we watched car after car stream by, I began to watch the graffiti on the sides of them and photographed as many as I could.

Nov

The Textual Imagination in Philadelphia

Text is everywhere. Though not quite everything, it represents everything.

A Partial X in Sol LeWitt's "On a Blue Ceiling, Eight Geometric Figures: Circle, Trapezoid, Parallelogram, Rectangle, Square, Triangle, Right Triangle, X (Wall Drawing No. 351)" (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 11 October 2009)

(photo by NF Huth)

There is the perfection of the X, matched only by the perfection of an incomplete X.

Nov

The Collected Uncollected Pwoermds

I have spent the night trying to organize my collected pwoermds in some logical and reasonably consistent manner. Now, at the end of the night, I've got them in reasonable order and am looking at 100 pages of pwoermds, and about 669 pwoermds total. (Counting them all is made difficult by the fact that I've intentionally left in duplicates of some pwoermds, for esthetic reasons.

The title of the collection keeps bothering me. It is a bit too cute.

Nov

Preview of the Most Recent Yesterday

First capital of New York.

Meal: sheep fetus cooked in amniotic sac.

Whistled poetry, words of Morse code.

The best smelling art exhibit ever.

Beechip cookies, not brownies.

Better (or even different) to document or experience?

Anne Sexton and reading contests.

Armenian-American singer-songwriter-poet.

Albanian dog at a reading.

Reading series has a birthday.

Maybe she has known me for too long.

Timing the poet.

Then blenndly.

Ifs.

Editing the day of the poem.

Nov

oddright

wrongeven

ecr. l'inf.

Nov

The Post-Garde (or Absence) (A Fifty-Fourth Letter to a Young Imaginary Visual Poet)

I am a creator (writer, poet, drawer, thinker) of at least bifurcated influences and traditions. Not moored to one dock. Not moored, but floating. Not waving, but there seems another way about this. So that's where I come from, which may be nowhere, or nothing, or the substitute we make for nothing when nothing isn't handy.

Nov

Comic over Cosmic, Ocular over Oracular

Roy Arenella, "ORACULAR" (14 November 2009)

Since I do not regularly post mailart I send or receive anymore (the requirements of time not allowing me to tend to all my desires), I sometimes allow striking pieces of work to pass under my eyes without remark, but I cannot do this today for this tiny visual essay I received today from Roy Arenella.

Nov

for instance, the gr ligature

Detail of Logo of Gryphon Teashop, Savannah, Georgia (4 November 2009)

tho we will have to hope for a better design for this ligature before it becomes widely used:

ecr. l'inf.

Nov

poems so small they fall between the floorboards and are lost

As I sat here wondering how to begin this little attempt at writing, I started to draw glyphs with my fingernails into the microfiber nap of the couch. The fiber performs much like a magic tablet. If I smooth the nap in one direction, I can erase everything I’ve created and start anew with a blank slate.

But today I wasn’t working with a blank slate. I was trying to find the multitudinous slates I’d filled with information and stored willy-nilly in my house and on the Internet.

Nov

fr, for instance

The limited number of ligatures common in type design doesn't necessarily mean there is a limited need for other ligatures. (Every week, I wonder why a certain ligature doesn't exist even in limited use.) The cause seems primarily a hewing to convention. Ligatures are invisible to most people anyway, so why not create hundreds more just to see how they might be used?

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience