dbqp: visualizing poetics: November 2012

From Darkness, We Can See the Dimmest Light

I sit often now in the darkness, which is the place from which I read, into which I write, in which I watch, through which I listen.

It is not that I prefer the darkness, nor that I am repelled by it. Darkness is both comforting and frightful. It is simultaneously the venue for sleeping and for living through nightmares. Since most of my dreams are nightmares, I might fear the dark, but I rarely have as an adult. I know that the darkness might hide dangers, but I can also hide within it.

And I don't retire to the darkness because of truly practical considerations. I'm not trying to save utility costs by keeping lights off.

Instead, I have lost my need to be bathed in light to do what I want to do. I am working more and more with screens, even though I work so much with my hands.

Nov

A Surprise Publication

Although most of my publications are poetic or artistic in inclination, occasionally I have something published related, even if indirectly, to my work as an archivist, and my latest publication this year, if not certainly my last, is in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Local History.

My entries, however, are confined to issues verbal, specifically to slang and regionalisms (though not in that order).

Nov

Announcing iPoetry and iPo

Against my better judgment (hey, I have no time for yet another job or hobby or diversion from the simple process of making and getting), I have accepted the responsibility of being the poetry and visual poetry editor of iARTistas, an e-zine focused on all forms of artistic electronic expression (even audio and video). This will move that journal towards new ways of making and imagining poetry.

Nov

As the Color Seeps into the Page, Our Color Seeps out of Our Faces

For about a year, I'm guessing, I have followed the work of Alice Leach via her eponymous blog. Her

work attracted me because of its organic wholeness, its vital connection to the body through the hand of the artist, and its intentional yet beautiful obscurity.

There is something gorgeous, and definitely alluring, in what we cannot quite read, especially when we can read enough of it to desire to read more. Her work is manuscriptive but with an artist's flow to it.

Nov

Will Vispo Last? Will Vispo Be?

After more than a week of somnolesence, my computer has been revived. I've spent, in one way or another, thirty hours bringing it back to life. So I will celebrate this occasion by writing about books made of paper, or not about books made of paper but the visual poems within them, or not of those visual poems but of visual poetry as an alcove of artmaking, of how visual poetry fits into an esthetic continuum.

For it is a continuum, not a point in space.

Nov

Where Next I Perform as if Myself a Form of Poetry

I'll be giving a poetry performance in a couple of weeks. And Sparrow, the poet, will be there as well. Together, we will make a day of it.

Cadmium Text Series

R&F Handmade Paints

84 Ten Broeck Ave., Kingston, New York 12401

Saturday, November 17, 2012

2:00 pm

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience