dbqp: visualizing poetics: November 2011

The Poetry Survives, the Books at Least

I cannot buy any more books of poetry.

That is what I tell myself, but I ordered a few titles from Jeffrey Maser of Berkeley just the other day. The problem is that the bookshelf that I've set aside for poetry (one that my father-in-law built into a wall for me) is absolutely full. I might be able to squeeze another book into it, but it will be difficult. This bookshelf includes only books of poetry by individual poets or sets of collaborators. There are no anthologies here, no books about poetry, no books by poets that I don't categorize as poetry (all of these are on a different, much smaller bookshelf).

This set of shelves holds my entire alphabet of poets: Aasprong to Zukofsky. But the truth is that not all my books of poetry by individual poets are here.

Nov

The Re-invention of Hugo Cabret

One day shy of four years and four months ago, when I was still an innocent child, I wrote a review of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" in this very space. My review was positive, though I certainly characterized the writing in this illustrated book as just a little better than dull. But it is not only words that make a book work, sometimes it is also images, or how the images work with the words.

Nov

da levy died today

A dream is not a portal to the soul; it is, instead, the soul itself. A dream does not so much tell us something about the dreamer as it is the dreamer. Sometimes, we realize that we are merely ourselves, that the features that distinguish us from others are inseparable from ourselves, that we are just an accumulation, rather than a whole.

Nov

rT

The ligature is an obsession of mine.

A ligature is a sewing-together of two separate letters of the alphabet. Its goal is to make more eye-appealing those pairs (and sometimes triplets) of letters. The ligature brings two letters closer to another, makes them a single character, so that they might sit more comfortably in a line of text.

For instance, the common ligatures, the fi and fl, fuse the opening eff to they eye (removing the tittle in the process) and the l.

Nov

Words, words, words; Books, books, books

I have to stop for the night, but I can't make myself stop, and it's almost 2:00 am as I begin this.

For years now, I've been simplifying my life, removing stuff from around me. Eighty cubic feet of my papers, all that documentation of my life, at least one item for each year (and usually hundreds). Here and there, I'm throwing away toys, furniture, whatever, that I don't need anymore. Now, I'm pulling a bit more than 1,000 of my books to give to the same library that holds my papers.

Nov

Suddenly: Exhibition

Not through any of my normal sources of information, but through a former colleague from the New York State Archives, I learned tonight that I, and what appears to be hundreds of others, are included in a large visual poetry exhibition, Language to Cover a Wall, at the University at Buffalo. The exhibition runs from November 17th (which I'll note is today) until February 18, 2012. Some of the events below are already in the past, but I'll note them anyway.

Nov

A Bridge of Words over the Water

Nov

Bridge to Terra Firma

The connections are slender and brittle, but I can bridge them.

We believe we can.

A text is a visual presence. The particulars of its making set the particulars of its form and telegraph important messages to us. If an ancient manual typewriter is used, the text will show certain irregularities. These qualities may, these days, be seen as endearing, even tending toward the handcrafted.

Even these poems may seem so, though I created them on my iPhone.

Nov

who i am is sleep

There is no clear structure to thinking. Everything is held together in our minds by a web of webs, and there is no knowing where one strand may hold onto another, just right, to allow a thought to pass, an idea to come.

That is why Jack Spicer knew the Martians came and left the ideas in his skull. He could not imagine what he could imagine. He could only imagine it into being.

Nov

W

Maybe sometime I will complete my search and find every letter of the alphabet in its native non-paper environment, and this means letters meant as letters, not shapes resembling letters. This W rests in a little world of vinca (cf. PERIWINKLE).

ecr. l'inf.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience