dbqp: visualizing poetics: January 2012

Une collagiste pour nôtre temps

Luc Fierens ended last year with a short but significant exhibition of his works entitled "Sulla Strada [On the Road]—Luc Fierens" at the U Man /Contemporary /Art /Space /Project in Marano d'Isera, Trento, Italy. This exhibition covered Luc's career as a visual poet and collagist from 1984 through last year, and the catalog of the exhibition presents these in chronological order, which allows us to see how Luc's style progress from a fairly rough-hewn one to a style almost as polished as the glossy advertisements that became the main source of fodder for his poems.

Luc is an artist for the world, so his works are "written" in English, French, Flemish, Italian, German, and even wordless. And certainly combinations of the above.

Jan

3 Movies, 1 Day

The most important literary theorist for my poetics isn't Derrida or Foucault, not even Barthes (though one might imagine that being so). Instead, the literary theorist who guides me most is the one no-one thinks of: St Augustine. Or Augustine of Hippo, if you prefer, the Christian philosopher who gave up his Christianity in his youth, to pursue a life of uninhibited pleasure, only to return to the Church and become one of its great theologians.

Jan

--e- Ee--e-e--

His name is all e's for vowels and r's in each half. No letter dares to jut below the imaginary line that holds the letters in line, so there is a straightness to it. The name. His name.

But not the art.

It is about twisting and bending, about creating shapes that will write something in shadow upon a plane, a surface flat and plain.

There is a disjunction, a discontinuity, between what we see, its two parts: between the chaotic twistings and the stylish longhand that rests upon the wall.

Jan

I Thought Poets Were People of the Word

Actually, it was Susana Gardner's comment that started this: her point that mIEKAL aND and I were "the wordmeisters," meaning, I think, not just the stringers of words together, but the makers, the inventors, of words.

Jan

The Small Time with Font Boy

I'm writing about reading. The reason is twofold: First, I generally write about only two things: writing and reading. Second, today Goodreads, a social media platform for people to document and communicate about the books they have read, sent me a note that I had to rescue two of the books I had written.

Jan

Bus Ride through a Drizzly Winter

A few days ago, while talking to James Belflower, he asked me what I was reading at that particular point in time, and I said, Nothing. I was, at that point, between books, so I said I was waiting to see what I would be reading, that what I choose has to feel right as I prepare to read it, that I never know what it will be until I look at my bookshelves (and I have many of them) and choose something to read.

Last night, I found myself about to take a short bus ride in the dark.

Jan

Since

Since there is evening.

Since there is morning too early to rise from.

Since there is language.

Since there is text.

Since text is physical, not ethereal like our tongued language.

Since text can be marred by physical acts and situations.

Since text can be environmental.

Since there is color.

Since text appears to us in the human landscape.

Since text carries meaning, even after we have forgotten how to find that meaning.

Since sleep is impossible.

Jan

A Certain Friday Night in Albany, New York

Coming into the middle of the first third of the reading, I am hit with a story, one slowly told and with no perceptible point. Things happen. The end. But things don't even happen. We are told they are. The narrator tells us people believe he is dangerous without demonstrating his danger.

I shift in my seat. I've been here only a few minutes.

The second reader was a musician for many years. Now, a poet, teacher, student.

Jan

The Regeneration of Rae Armantrout out of What Rae Armantrout Would Eventually Become

Gretel is not among us, never having made it out of the woods.

I am entranced by the words of women. Their voices may be so much different from each other, as is their eyesight (vision), yet those are the voices I yearn for, lean into, require.

Jan

Hiding the Facts

It has occurred to me that, this year, I have been intentionally hiding a number of the works I have made. Usually, I present quite a few of them, showing many of those that I like the most. But this year, I'm keeping them under wraps, showing just glimpses of them, to make the more erotic. Barthes notes, in The Pleasure of the Text, that it is more erotic to see a glimpse of skin through an unbuttoning in a shirt than to see a totally naked person.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience