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?
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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. . . .
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