June 28: An attempt at recapping and clarifying my thinking on gush and truth today. That means . . . terminology! Verosopher (vehr AH suh fuhr), Gushosopher (guhsh AH suh fuhr), Philogusher (fihl AH guh shuhr) and Holiscient (hah LIH see' ehnt). One who seeks significant material knowledge; one who mistakes subjective feelings for significant knowledge; one with an emotional understanding of the elements of the universe; one who understands both what the verosopher knows and the philogusher feels.
Stray related observations: both a verosopher and a gushosopher begin with premises (nouns plus verbs)); but only the former reasons from his premises to greater knowledge; the latter just adds adjectives to his premises. A primary premise of verosophers is that the ability to perceive matter is all we have to work with; gushosophers believe in undefinable other abilities sensitive to other elements of the universe besides matter, also undefinable. Objectivity and communicability versus subjectivity and hermeticism.
More in due course, I hope. I still feel very sleepy. So far today (10 A.M.) I've felt a bit better than yesterday. Starting at around six this morning, I walked three miles in fifty minutes or so--something I did yesterday, too--and didn't feel exhausted, so physically I'm doing okay for an elderly patient. I feel semi-eager to start seriously writing, but got no motor.
June 29: Karl Kempton recently posted his thoughts on the Poetry visio-textual art gallery at Spidertangle:
what i found remarkable about the nov 2008 poetry mag issue
before i get to the "what i found remarkable", i think, feel and see
a need for context. context is a necessary addition within this
discussion by visual poets on the spidertange list because there has
been none. the november 2008 issue of poetry mag is not merely
another mag with some visual poems as a feature. it is not just
another emag issue among many with visual poetry. like it or not, it
is the only poetry magazine found throughout our country's library
systems and probably the most widely read poetry mag by poets and non
poets in this country.
i had to be reminded of this and so i pass on the reminding. another
context is that one of the main characters in the founding and early
years in harriet monroe's poetry mag's rise to fame was ezra pound.
for easy digestion, she tempered down his writings in the mag. it is
their efforts upon which poetry mag remains a force to this day.
pound was a player in the early visual poetry and its rise in the
last century; he had a hand on BLAST for one, encouraged and
supported visual poets in the 20's and onward. his interest in
ideograms also influenced visual poetry. he interacted with many
japanese visual poets during this period. this included an extensive
correspondence with kitasono, the founder of the japanese visual
poetry group, VOU, and attempted in the 50's to bring him together
with the concrete movement in brasil — the brasilian concrete
movement named itself "noigandres" after a few lines in pound's canto
XX. this was no casual triangulated correspondence and relationship.
so, the mag poetry in its past had a strong link with visual poetry.
then, there is the fact that this issue of poetry graciously gave
visual poetry its first large scale stage and exposure in over 40
years, the concrete anthologies being the last large public exposure.
(it seems the mag lost contact with its past; this feature seems a
bit over due.) one would hope, then, the selected visual poems for
this issue would make an earthquake of epic proportions at least with
the readers of poetry mag first and foremost and among the composers
of visual poetry.
the last context is a question. if this presentation of visual poetry
was your first introduction, would you be interested enough to pursue
more?
with this and more in mind body and spirit, i suggest a look at this
event within this frame. for me, this is not an unimportant and
isolated moment in visual poetry.
alas, the issue caused much grumbling among visual poets. besides a
few emails to the web at poetry foundation, a loud roar of silence
followed its arrival. by few, i mean number of individuals. the
grumbling among the visual poets has not been very public. many who
submitted work and were rejected felt, and i guess still feel, they
cannot come forward with their criticism without the ladle full of
sour grapes poured over them. to be open here, i submitted work. huth
passed one on and it was rejected. my head is tilted back waiting the
sour grape call and pour.
this is not about sour grapes; matters not to me that i was rejected,
but it matters to me that those i consider top notch visual poets
were rejected. other high quality visual poets, because of the
process and or editor, refused to participate. i was an optimist
disregarding their pessimistic forecast of the end results.
upon reading the first sentence in the intro by huth ("The child of
both poetry and the visual arts, visual poetry has a double set of
interests and its forms are myriad."), i was deeply concerned. huth
may be a child of art and lit, but visual poetry in its long global
history with its many antecedent streams and rivers is a grand old
ancient. soon thereafter he continues the misinformation and ideology
that the sole ancestor of contemporary visual poetry is the pattern
poem from greece onward. this was hoisted upon us by higgins and the
concreters to frame their specific and narrow genre within the vaster
and wider spectrum.
nor i am the only one noting this reductionism that disappears rock
art symbology dependent upon narrative, ceramic symbology that
continued from rock art eventually finding its way into writing
systems or as accompanying illumination on small and large scale
presentation, calligraphies, illuminated books and codices of all
sorts from a variety of cultures, etc. he also jumps from mimeo to
xexox limited editions to the web forgetting to mention the bursting
forth from the mid 70's through the 90's of offset magazines and
journals publishing a great blooming of american and international
visual poetry. he also disappears the global mail art exhibition
phenomena with its catalogs of the same period, a vast percentage of
which were visual poems. lastly, he forgoes mentioning the great
creative global urban movement of huge multi colored spray can
painted panels and walls of language based graffiti equal to and
often surpassing the majority of visual poetry and concrete works of
the 80's and 90's. whether or not anyone agrees with me here about
this and the entire shallow intro, huth had the opportunity at least
to have provided a wealth of web links for folks to followup should
they be curious enough to do so and to prop up global visual poetry.
if you take a moment either now or after completing my little piece,
go to kaldron () and
scroll down to the surveys. you will note ernst, helmes and lipman
count among those surveyed. also, among individuals published, work
by basinski can been seen; work by huth is found in "The Institute of
Broken and Reduced Languages." so, five of the players' works i have
had a hand in publishing directly or indirectly on-line. in the
printed issues of my mag, helmes was featured a number of times.
helmes, ernst, lipman, gallo and grumman (see below) i exhibited in
one or more of the many international exhibitions i curated or
published in issues of kaldron.
so, what i find remarkable in this goal to show case visual poems in
a wide public arena is that there is nothing remarkable. these could
have appeared in any emag and be among the counted but not
necessarily the standing tall. i would not have selected any of them
for a kaldron issue. i would have requested more to select from.
there is no next step evolution of work by any of the selected, nor
nothing made new. further, these works do not meet the level of
previous works. again, look at the kaldron surveys for a compare and
contrast. the poetry mag issue is, as huth implies in his intro, a
glimpse, a peek-a-boo. it is not a knock you over announcement that
THIS is visual poetry!
how many readers of poetry mag unfamiliar with visual poetry wrote in
to express interest in it? hundreds? many tens? a handful? five?
huth has complained his palette was too small. i would have written
back and requested more work if i did not have enough to select from.
i would have demanded more quality. if the submission rate was
telling in insufficient numbers, i would have constantly reminded the
world wide community of visual poets to send, send, send. to me, that
is one of the roles of an editor, work hard to get the best. this did
not happen.
perhaps i think this issue is more important than it is. perhaps it
is just another special feature and then the audience moves on and
forgets.
the issue does what the concrete anthologies did, create a huge yawn
among most lexical poets and a bit of snarking and sniping by others
replied to by some visual poets. this issue maintains the status quo;
visual poets remain delegated to the caboose of the poetry train.
as i understand the process, whether it is fair or unfair, huth
signed up for it. he did so with full awareness that he did not have
final say. thus, he handed over the first major public viewing of
visual poems to individuals with no deep, wide or tall knowledge or
participation in visual poetry. so, this is what we get, a small
ripple, if that, in the huge lake of visual poetry. but we do get a
large back wash the waves of which set visual poetry backwards —
again — in the public eye.
now, as far as grumman's review of this poetry mag issue in the may/
june 2009 small press review issue, i point to his public email in
spidertangle where he said he held back on his full truth. i know he
did. we had many exchanges about this. he has yet to answer whether
or not he held back 50 or 25 per cent.
this is further negative fallout from this issue. holding back actual
response out of fear. fear of what? has american visual poetry
reached the tipping point of fearing to state one's heartfelt truth
or vision? this is even more remarkable.
karl kempton
summer solstice eve 2009
oceano ca
|
My reply was brief: "So nice to be mentioned by Karl. I will only say that in my review everything I said was honest. But it wasn't a full picture of where I stood. Because of lack of space, for one thing. But also because I wanted to emphasize the positives. Also, I was bending over backwards to be polite and fair to Poetry, a magazine I have voiced disdain or worse for on more than one occasion. My gravest bit of "dishonesty" was in deleting a two-paragraph
introduction in which I said some rather negative things about the magazine. Oh, which reminds me of another reason a writer may intentionally avoid presenting a full picture: focus, simplification, accessibility.
"I agree with more of what Karl says than I disagree with it but consider the whole matter dead. I think few who saw the vispo issue of Poetry could have been converted to a vispo fan regardless of what works were in the gallery or what kind of intro Geof wrote. Even links to rock art wouldn't have helped. Heck, even my SPR review won't help!"
June 30: Here's another Spidertangle post, this one by Crag Hill, followed by my response:
Been reading Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public Space by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand. Two provocative quotes from Heriberto Yepez (known for slogany signage on the Tijuana/San Diego border) keep bubbling away in my head: 1) "...visual poetry exclusively done for a museum, a book, or the net is like a rainbow in black and white," and 2) "Visual poetry means to make poetry visible for others. So, visuality is a technique to expand the audience and viewers of poetry in general--not a way to do a special kind of poetry confined to small circles of readers." The book argues for a poetry that thumbs its nose at an "inadvertent audience," an audience that enters a reading not anticipating poetry in any sense, chipping away at the complacency of public space/s (or worse, the passivity of consumer spaces, e.g. malls). Spidertangle has been oft-interested in expanding its audience. Any projects outside the norm/ative in progress and/or imagined?
|
Said I: "I long ago thought of one that's probably unfeasible: a series of videos in the PBS mode on visual poetry aimed for PBS (and or school systems, which live off of documentaries). Ideally, a narrator and technicians would travel the US and Canada in a van or bus and interview visual poets, AND estabniks--as well as people-in-the-street--making sure to include its worst enemies.
"It would not, in my view, be pandering to the Philistines. That's because the work would have been done simply for the joy of doing it, and for the hope that SOMEone SOMEwhere would like it, who cares who. A model (the only available model?) would be the Sackner Archive film. Which makes me wonder why that hasn't been shown on PBS."
Hey, I played three sets of doubles this morning and feel pretty good. Still not unlethargic, though. . . .
July 1: in something I just posted to Spidertangle, I said, "I think, as I often say, that a visual poet as a poet should just try to make the best art he can. Unfortunately, he has to consider marketing his work--by which I mean, get an audience for it--unless he's satisfied to be a solipsist (for which he needs an independent income). So it is not foolish or aesthetically immoral to try to work up a brand name of some sort. It certainly helped the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets make it (so many of them being fast-lane academics was more important, though). It's how these (mostly) dopey flarf "poets" are making it.
"That's different from what the responsible literary taxonomist does--which is define as objectively and detailedly as possible the varieties of poetries and show how they relate to each other in order to facilitate discussion. I continue to believe that getting our poetry discussed is as important as getting it seen."
I was hoping today to discuss the reaction to my PBS-type video documentary on visual poetry idea, but there hasn't been any. Is it really that uninteresting a suggestion?
July 2: Three or four people have now commented on my documentary idea, and Camille Bacos forwarded as our video-maker. What follows is my latest post to Spidertangle on the subject: "Camille would solve what seems to me our biggest problem. Further thoughts, the first from Nico b/c: use the 2010 thing at Ohio State as the scene of the first, main video. Lots of people should show up and the officialness should help our grants-gaining efforts.
Shouldn't need much of a script. But here's a rough outline that I think would work:
"Title simply 'North American Visual Poetry, a Survey.'
A voice might state it, too.
"A few credits.
"Meanwhile, from before the title and continuing for five minutes at least, a succession of visio-textual works. At some point that seems right, voice-over says, "When dealing with visual poetry, a question quickly arises because of the wide variety of works involved." After five or six works pass to illustrate the point: "Some are emphatically both verbal and visual." four or five examples. "Some not so verbal" Examples. "Some considered "asemic.'" Examples. "Are all of these examples of visual poetry?" Wide variety of examples (and the main point of this introduction is to give an excuse for showing a lot of works, and how different from one another they are). "The point has been and continues to be vigorously argued by many involved with the art." More samples while quotations of vispo definitions from various references are read. "No definition has gained universal adherence. As a step toward possibly agreeing on one, this conference staged a panel on the question. Cut to panel. Standard documentary of those involved, then
cut-aways to people not on the panel.
"Then, "however people define it, few here would disagree that visual poetry in North America is a wonderfully valuable for of art . . . seriously under-valued by most of those in the poetry establishment. Take, for instance, the work of K.S. Ernst, which is mostly at the verbal end of the vispo spectrum." Show some specimens, then standard interview of Kathy (or whoever goes first--I picked her because she's one of the more accessible visual poets around--I do think the documentary should work up to the asemic people, not start with them)--background, high points in career, influences . . . Then simple transitions like, "Joe Blow's works are in a similar vein--or extremely different though as verbal," or whatever. I would hope most of the works in the beginning section are returned to and commented on.
"Later (or interspersed) interviews of non-visual poets including people with little knowledge of it. Make sure to get the Sackners (who have a lot of knowledge of it!).
"End with another series of visio-textual works. Voice-over of some kind of summary.
"This is a rough draft to work from, get things going. I don't care much what the script finally is--but think it essential that we say something about what visual poetry is.
July 3: I've got a review to write. The deadline is a little over two weeks away. My energy level is so low, I haven't been able to start it. So I have vowed to do so today, with at least a hundred words, and do another hunder every day thereafter until finished. Two weeks, maximum. I'm assuming the revision I'll surely need to do will be easy. I can almost always revise. A hundred words sound easy, but . . . I'll let you know how I do in tomorrow's entry.
LATEST ENTRY
July 4: I woke up last night at around 11:30 and stayed awake until midnight because I had to take some medicine then. To have something to occupy me, I did an Internet search on my name. I'm always curious to see where I am in the world, at least so far as the Internet can tell me, but hadn't check for several months. Anyway, I came across
this, a variation on my "Mathemaku No. 10" by the late David Daniels. He'd honored me with another piece I knew of, but never knew of this one. Needless to say, this one delighted me. (As had the other.) I think I will be influenced in my art by it. The text of the human figure, by the way, is from an autobiographical piece of mine. Aside from its being about me, and a response to a poem of mine, I loved the sophisticated folk-artishness of it, the wonderful colors, its sequentiality. Gotta do something with its kind of sequentiality myself--a poem calling another, moving, poem to it, and the two becoming a larger poem.
A huge regret: David's not being around to thank.
Report on my review: I typed 103 words of it yesterday, most of them quoted from the author of the poem under review, Vernon Frazer. Close to pathetic, but something.
|
