dbqp: visualizing poetics: April 2015

5 Continuences

1

I sit and sing the song until it doesn't end.

2

I believe there is a way out of this without moving.

3

I create a thought that continues unabated.

4

I extend my arm until my hand disappears around the corner.

5

I wait.

ecr. l'inf.

Apr

Techriture

This simple tiny chapbook reproduces linear doodles of Raymond Queneau that appear to precede much of the 20th century work in asemic writing. The doodles are extracted from a small notebook of Queneau's and they demonstrate a form of expression that seems balanced between drawing and writing.

The first of these actually resembles, to a great degree, the work of the French Lettrists, who had not yet begun to write.

Apr

AverbalAsemicAsemantic

The poet, the pure poet, the one minding only the abstraction of words, is enchanted by the word. But the visual poet is enchanted by the suggestion of the word, the hint that a word may be in existence within a visual field, the fragrance left behind by a word now gone. The visual poet is interested in the recreation of the life of text, which can exist in many forms: needled into the skin, ablaze in lights, scrawled in pencil deep into the pulp of corrugated cardboard.

Apr

Bob, Where Are You?

I've known Bob Grumman, mostly through the mail, but also in person, for almost thirty years. In the early years, we handwrote and typed long letters back and forth to each other. We mostly argued, and Bob loved to argue. We just didn't agree on much, yet we had a great interest in the possibility of poetry. That included any kind of poetry, but especially visual poetry.

We are both intellects, thinkers, figurers, but we came from different intellectual points of view.

Apr

An Essay of Ordinary Thoughts

Teresa Brinati allowed me to have this book. She presented it among others for me and others to take, and she allowed my taking.

It is a small book, published in 1989 and mailed to the Society of American Archivists in Chicago in 1990. The reason the author, Vichien Poonvoralak, sent the book is unknown. Why he sent it to a national association of archivists is unknown. Poonvoralak's process is (or was) to make his books and distribute them to people he didn't know.

Apr

its only elf

A word of Rae Armantrout's, more than most words, more than mine, whether a usual word or suspiciously camouflaged as intellect, has a power to it, the effect of attention making, an unrandomness.

There is a fulcrum to it. These so few words so many'd by the use of them. Their effortless struggle, their surprise. See here:

I take these

white streaks of truck glimpsed between branches

to be blossoms.

Some people see these words and think Emily Dickinson.

dbqp: visualizing poetics

visual poetry, the textual imagination, and personal experience