dbqp: visualizing poetics: March 2012

Four Hours before the Day before 75

I should be asleep by now. As I begin this, I have less than four hours to sleep before I begin my travel to Nashville, Tennessee, for my father's seventy-fifth birthday, which is Friday. But I won't get to sleep right away, because I have this small note to finish.

Whenever I am about to travel, I always stay up late. I always find more to work on. I always clean up. I even neatened my excessively need office today before I left. Tonight, I watched a movie, a packed my bags carefully, I made sure I had no bills to pay, and I bought copies, for friends and family, of a couple of books I recently appeared in.

Mar

When There Was Mail

At one point in time, it was the 1980s, I was still a young man in his twenties, between children (well, between the births of my two children), and I lived my life through the mails. Being a visual poet at that time meant that I was living distant from the company of other visual poets, there being only a few places on the continent where two visual poets might run into each other: Seattle, Toronto, and that may be the entire list, now that I think it through.

Mar

One, 1, None (Sixth Draft)

See a seen.

A shape inviolate

of wonder often has possi

bilities unthought.

Numbers expressed are

an orb extended. Rays

recall an orches

tral set. The musician

can do whatnot, exploring

music.

Mar

Sunlight and Sunwarmth

I find myself lost in an early spring, a near-summer, and the puns are blossoming.

Certainly, I spent most of the days indoors, and most of that in a room with no windows pointing outside, though the room was not at all windowless, so when I exited my large building into warmth and sunshine, I realized that it is simply warmth and sunshine that I yearn for. I want the sun to see and its heat to keep me warm. We are creatures, and our only comforts are those of creatures.

Mar

Films Watched February 2012

I watched a small number of movies last month, many fewer than I usually do, only sixteen, but they expended enough of my time, they led me to different modes of thinking, sometimes to thoughts of despair at the possibilities for art, sometimes towards acceptance that art can have some valuable effect on a life, and always to conclusions about how these pieces of sequential art have an effect on the art that I make.

Mar

Undelete

—for John Bloomberg-Rissman

Beyond a simple few words

the first never responded

too starkly down

I now represent

a failure of the representation

of self

the reason

was merely to

know this is true

Morality, thus, is death-affirming in practice.

dispensing old clichés

we get what we make

the worry in the worrier's mind

Getting from making, and all that.

At least, tenuously so.

Mar

Seeing and Saying

Part 1: Aporia

My desire is limitless but not my fill.

I am filled with a need to create, to make a mark (not on the world, but the page, the screen, the mind), and this desire pushes me to write more and more. Why? Just to get the words, the ideas, the shapes and colors and images out of me. Bingeless, I purge. But I cannot always do everything I want. Some days, some nights, I am too heavy with other focuses (or, occasionally, weariness) to do much making. Some creating, sure, but not much.

Mar

My Puppet, My Magician, My Me

Today, I received a copy of H.L. Hix's book, Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can't Buy. It includes pictures of individuals' most precious possessions along with their explanation of why each is so important to them. For my contribution, I wrote a little essay, which I've recorded tonight. Tomorrow, I will think about the whole book.

ecr. l'inf.

Mar

My Medicine

The mind has to work to keep itself entertained, my mind particularly so. Given this I am apt to allow my mind to wander into ideas that are new to me so that I might avoid the boredom of my imagination.

My inspirations are small but continuous, so I don't use them up all at once. I store them for the future.

Mar

There is No Art

There is no art in seeing. There is no art in being. There is no art.

Found, in the seam of glass, a seeming, there is a seeing now. What comes together comes apart.

Whatever comes apart is whole.

There is no art in wanting. There is no art in haunting. There is no art.

It mostly comes from presence. An essence of the self as symbol.

The crash together is the music.

There is no art is feeling. There is no art in peeling (in pealing). There is no art.

Motion forms as blood that's moving.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience