dbqp: visualizing poetics: July 2011

A Reading This Saturday within Readings This Weekend

Somehow, I had almost forgotten that I am giving a brief reading this weekend: eight minutes in among 88 sets of eight minutes over a period of three days beginning this Friday, July 29th. This is, of course, for the great Boston Poetry Marathon and BBQ (the latter, unexplained, part being potentially the most revealing).

Details on my reading:

Geof Huth

Saturday

30 July 2011

4:28 pm

Outpost 186

186½ Hampshire Street

Inman Square

Cambridge, Massachusetts

(If you make it to 186 Hampshire Street, you'll probably be close enough to find it.)

I'll show a visual poem or two, perform a poem or two, and sing or speak in tongues. The usual stuff, and always poems I haven't read before.

Jul

Never Bucking the Word

Some things are inescapable, and what is most inescapable for each of us is our own self, the body of our being, the inner intellect that directs us. Both may degrade, and all do over time, but we can leave those two things that essentially define us as who and what we are.

Given this, we are always trapped by ourselves, always experiencing things as ourselves. The only receptors we have out into the world are those built into our body.

Jul

Is the ’Net Working?

I have been without Internet access for almost a week now, and that will continue for almost another week. (I do have access to the Internet via my phone, but even my skilled thumb typing doesn't make that a good method for writing brief essays.) What this disconnection from the Internet has shown me is that much of my intellectual and artistic life is now web-based.

Jul

the shape of't

I dreamt I held a poem in the shape of crystal

I believed that I spoke a poem in the shape of crystal

I decided that I thought my poems out of me in the shape of crystal

I ate out of a poem in the shape of crystal

I drank from a poem in the shape of crystal and held in my crystalline hands

I thought that I had made a poem in the shape of crystal

I resisted the desire to make myself in the shape of crystal

I desisted

ecr. l'inf.

Jul

Two

Sometimes, if the day offers us one gift, that is enough for a living.

A few days ago, Stephen Vincent sent me a numeral 2 that fills entirely the space of its creation. The two is a magical number. A sense of one in it without being one. The sense of two ones in one. A number important enough that some languages have dual forms of nouns (along with singular and plural). It is the color blue, which was my favorite color as a child.

Jul

Asemic Writing for Moria

To be a poet is to grow tired of words and to understand how words come so often to nothing and make so little better. To be a poet is to understand that the word works through many ways, even suggestion. To be a poet is to yearn to make your sense with a wordless but vocal performance with a wordless but textual manifestation. So it is that we come to the point that Bill Allegrezza decides to arrange for an asemic issue of his online journal, Moria.

Jul

At the End We Have Collage because Collage is All There Is

Harlem, New York, New York

Starting in January, Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick, the proprietors of Peep/Show, the online journal of textual and visual seriality, began to present to the world an issue on international visual poetry that I curated, and now, in July, all ten of those series of works are available online.

The final installation to this online exhibit is the collage work of Keiichi Nakamura, and I think it's some of the best work he has ever done.

Jul

Celebrating Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Harlem, New York, New York

An announcement from Temple University:

Please save October 21st for a full-day conference on the life work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

“A Celebration of the poetry and criticism of Rachel Blau DuPlessis” will bring together critics and poets to explore the wide range of contributions Rachel Blau DuPlessis has made to the field. In addition to lectures by poet-critics including Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Libbie Rifkin, and Eric Keeneghan.

Jul

Waking and Walking

i.

They walk

slowly, they

walk slowly

into your

memory of

their walking

maybe towards

you, maybe

ever away.

ii.

You cannot

remember the

dead except

the fact

that they

are dead.

They walk

slowly back

into life

or something

like it,

they walk

slowly into

your life

that has

accepted them

as dead,

dirt thrown

over them,

yet they

come back.

iii.

They know

they are

dead, so

they speak

slowly and

only about

the past

you remember

of them.

iv.

Jul

Poetry and What It Might Be

Poetry and What It Might Be by Geof Huth

Maybe I am a podcaster. Here is a 13-minute essay spoken on the back porch of my house tonight. It's about poetry, its need for variety, the varieties I recognize, and it ends with a short poemsong that uses no words but is made from the sounds of the voice.

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience