dbqp: visualizing poetics: June 2011

grass-fed sunlight

grass-fed sunlight by Geof Huth

I don't usually succumb to the depths it takes for a blogger in the field of poetry to post nothing more than a poem, but today is a good exception. In less than an hour, it will be the halfth-birthday of my friend Eden Myers, veterinarian, raiser of lambs, maker of lamb sausages, who lives in the bluegrass land of Kentucky. I know better her husband, an electronic records archivist for the same commonwealth of Kentucky (though born on Key West).

Eden, whose name seems like a place of beginnings, was born on December 24th, which is Christmas Eve in Christendom and, thus, a poor time to try to gather some attention to oneself alone. For that reason, Eden's family has taken to celebrating her birthday on June 24th.

Jun

The Poetics of the Letter

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press out of the Newton-le-Willows in England puts out small and physically sturdy books that lean towards the experimental edge of writing and that sometimes lean towards the verbo-visual. With the book Poéticas by the great Portuguese visual poet Fernando Aguiar, KF&SP falls right into the trap of visual poetry.

Jun

Ikon and Ekko

The international visual poetry portfolio being loaded at the online magazine Peep/Show continues to grow, slowly, like flowstone, and it now includes a presentation of the work of Suzan Sarı, one of the many remarkable Turkish visual poets working today.

The pieces she has in Peep/Show are monumental black and white pieces, harsh almost, and not so much made out of letters as made out of images that appear symbolic or almost letteristic.

Jun

Cucamonga Isn't Better Than I Am?

Lullaby Doubled and Cut Short by Geof Huth

Sometimes words are so simple they do not seem to exist and meaning seems as clear as air, as crisp as a whistling moving through the air on a wide flat still plain.

Listen to the song as you read this.

A book may be made of pictures and the words may be handmaidens to those pictures, but the words still carry it along.

The words tell us where we are.

Jun

Palmword

I draw with my hands. I'm a wright of words, some not known. I am a wrighter, yet the creatures of my pen have fallen over and won't right themselves. A wordwright, I don't depend on words for meaning.

Jun

A Small Snapshot of a Design in Progress

I'm working slowly, too slowly, at designing Nancy's book of poetry, which goes by the title Radiator. Even though the poems in the book are generally narrow, the book itself will be square to accommodate the cover image I want to use, which is a photograph by Nancy. Esthetic decisions are guided by structures we develop for ourselves.

I even bought a typeface for the book because I needed something I really enjoyed, something new, and something that works with the poems themselves.

Jun

The Two Halves of One Almost Whole

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Tomorrow, I will begin designing a book called Radiator. It is not my book but Nancy's. It has seemed to me that poetry should be a cooperative venture, not poems necessarily, but poetry necessarily so. A beast so frail and unattended to requires some joint attention. And I toil at that job a bit, trying to bring attention to the small unlit corners of poetry where those who are my people and I inhabit.

Jun

Why Poets Hate Poetry

Mohonk Mountain House, Room 205, Lake Mohonk, New Paltz, New York

Only poets truly hate poetry because only poets understand the degree to which poetry fails to live up to its hype.

When was the last time a poem loved a poem? When was the last time a poet thought the turns of phrases in a single poem were so good that it would change lives forever? When did a poet ever believe that a poem alone could transform the world? Never.

Jun

New-Century Concrete

The Inn at Turning Stone, Room 453, Verona, New York

The international visual poetry issue of the online magazine Peep/Show continues to grow, and this newest installment features the work of Marcelo Sahea, a Brazilian visual poet who is one of the best exemplars of contemporary Brazilian visual poetry.

The Brazilian visual poets know who their ancestors are: the famed Noigandres group, certainly the most famous of all groups of visual poets ever.

Jun

mnmlst tpgraphy m(vi) pstrs

I like to exclaim that visual poetry is everywhere, and apparently I am right, having stumbled across a set of minimalist typography movie posters. The play in these virtual movie posters is similar to that of hardcore minimalist visual poetry. Something that I might do, or endwar, and different from the rigid constructions of mid-century concrete.

But the goal is different and so is the use of text.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience