dbqp: visualizing poetics

Extra: Visual Poetry in the Finnish Media

2009-07-18T05:56:00.002-04:00

Index Reference to Article about Visual Poetry, Turun Sanomat, Turku, Finland (18 July 2009)
The interview I gave to Anni Teppo appeared in the form of an article today in the Turun Sanomat, the major paper in Turku, Finland. This reference (blurry, I admit) above points newspaper readers to the article.

Article about Visual Poetry, Turun Sanomat, Turku, Finland (18 July 2009)
The article itself includes a picture of my pudgy face as I explain a card I’m mailing off to my son Tim, who is staying with my daughter Erin right now. Karri says he likes that I’m only partly displayed in the photograph. (I agree!)

Here’s a very rough translation of part of the article, which is my transcription of what Karri read to me.

Geof Huth is a noted American visual poet making figures that look like letters but are not quite. It makes you stare at them and look for meaning. Visual poetry is meant to be stared at. He patiently explained what visual poetry is because he’s done it a few times before. In visual poetry the words might just resemble words, and the letters might just resemble letters. In the poem it doesn’t have to have semantic meaning but there is some kind of meaning anyhow. You don’t need paper or pen or a computer. You can do it in the sand, snow, on a windowpane. It’s like drawing with words.

His book a book / of poems / so small / I cannot / taste them was published in Finland. He began as a visual poet when he was about three years old and was entranced by the look of the newspaper page

Karri Kokko says that it’s easy to communicate at the visual poetry workshop at the Saari Residence because in this genre the visual aspect of the piece transcends the verbal.

The article also mentions mentions that participants at the visual poetry workshop include Christina Bök, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Marko Niemi, Henriikka Tavi, JP Sipilä, and Teemu Manninen, and that we will be giving a reading in Turku tonight.

We’re hoping for a crowd of at least twenty, on this beautiful summer day, when most people in Finland are relaxing in the cabins in the countryside.

ecr. l’inf.

When Reading Poetry to Dolphins, Will We Have to Swim?

2009-07-17T23:59:00.008-04:00

(A day late in being posted, but posted on the day the events occurred.)

After deciding on what works I would perform on Saturday, I worked late last night and into this morning on creating a booklet for the reading, a design that was a little strange but appropriate for the poems and which worked well with an A4 sheet of paper folded to A5. I couldn’t get the program I used to design and the one I use to output the final layout of the booklet to work properly. Somehow, I had forgotten probably one critical step of the final output, so I worked until probably 2 am on the design and until 3:30 on the output. But I never finished. When I went to bed, the sky was already brightening and the birds were greeting today with their tentative but vibrant song. Even with the singing and the light falling into the room, I fell asleep immediately.

I set my alarm for 8:30, and began working on the book immediately, working out various solutions to my layout problem. At some point in the morning, Karri Kokko and Satu Kaikkonen came to see Nancy and me, and I explained what I was doing. We chatted as I kept trying new solutions to my problem, eventually deciding on a strange solution: I would print the poems down the face of full A4 sheets, which is a fairly large and ungainly sheet of paper, made more so by the fact that I decided not to use cover stock on the booklet. The sheets do, though, display some of my poems (visual and otherwise) quite well.

I finished the booklet with Karri and Satu in the room, and Karri called a copy shop in Turku, where he was told the cost of printing would be €238 (about $330 dollars) for 55 copies. I said that was far too expensive, and Karri told the shop so, which then asked if I really needed it in color (which we’d never asked for). After figuring for black and white, the price dropped to less than a third of the original cost, and we mailed off a file for printing.

Those People at the Visual Poetry Workshop Today: Christian Bök, Karri Kokko, Marko Niemi, Kristian Blomberg, Nancy Huth, Satu Kaikkonen, Henriikka Tavi, Mikael Brygger, Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
Next up was Satu’s presentation, but before we began, Perri Naukkarinen, one of the people who works for the Saari Foundation, needed to take a picture of us, so we gathered outside on the stairs. Perri took a few photos of us with her camera, but worried about the sun (its glare and the squinting that caused in us). Before we broke up, though, I took this picture of the group.

Satu Kaikkonen Giving Her Presentation, Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
Satu’s presentation was called “My Way to Visual Poetry,” and it was an account, filled with examples, of her development as a visual poet—over the last eighteen months, for, you see, Satu has produced a large body of work in visual poetry, but she’s been a visual poet for only a year and a half. Satu is aligned in many ways with a small band of younger visual poets (including Troy Lloyd and Mike Cannell) who are manically productive but whose esthetics require that they work in a wide variety of forms and styles of visual poetry (and related forms) at once.

As Satu opened the session, she handed out a sheet of paper for us each to write a line upon, without reference to what everyone else wrote, and she told us to create this exquisite corpse in English. The reason she gave for this assignment was that it would keep our eyes off her as she gave the presentation, but of course we were done in a few minutes. Her interesting presentation went on much longer.

Satu explained that she has always been interested in the visual, noting that this was manifested when she was a young girl, had found a tube of red lipstick and used it to draw all over her sister’s white wall paper. Satu’s introduction to visual poetry, however, came with a cover article she had read in the Finnish journal Valo (which Karri noted means “light,” but he probably meant “lighght,” which we might translate into Finnish as “valllo,” but which changes the sound of the word, giving a plummy depth to the word and the referenced light).

Coincidentally—or maybe not, maybe this is how it always works—Satu’s career as a visual poet mirrors the development of visual poetry itself. Her earliest visual poems with heavily verbal pattern poems, in shapes like hourglasses and railroad track (the latter quite an ingenious visual idea), but she moved quickly into the use of color and into both more complex and simpler (minimalist) pieces. She began making object poems quite quickly, though she did not always preserve the object as the poem, deciding instead to save the photograph of the poem as the poem and to reuse the visual elements of the poem (feathers, needles, buttons, wood) in other poems. The poems weaved paper into shapes and forms, pierced she sheets with needles and feathers, created seemingly talismanic pieces that she then reduced to memories by dismantling them. One problem she noted, though, was that she had originally created her digital images of her poems as small files so she could upload them easily to the web without using up all of her storage space there. Now she takes large digital photographs of her poems to ensure she has good copies. This is why I always recommend that people take photographs at the finest settings they can, to ensure they had the entire range of image quality they might need.

Satu noted that she is now more interested in asemic visual poetry because she believes it allows for more possibilities, even if it can communicate only through a sense of emotion instead of via direct linguistic means. She also explained how she created her visual poems in series, allowing her to produce narratives, and this led her to creating abstract comics that are quite powerful. Her sense of adventure and ability to create new ideas out of old forms is quite huge and impressive, as is her visual control. She takes the comics conventions of panels and tiers and explodes that grid, atomizes it, distorts it, but leaving in place enough of a hint of the conventions to allow her to allude to previous forms of communication even as she creates new ones.

She ended with a discussion of when visual poems are not visual poems, which moved us deeper into a discussion of what visual poetry is. She noted that she makes pieces without letters or words, but she considers these visual poetry if they say something poetic—and there are more and more examples of these nowadays, in the work of Scott Helmes and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, for instance, pieces that refers in vague gestural ways to writing or to the conventions and structures of writing. Satu calls her pieces like this “color art,” and she says often makes these out of fragments from a visual poem of hers, creating multiple examples of color art out of the same pieces of a visual poem.

Beyond this work, Satu writes poems in English and Finnish, plays with machine translation of these poems, composes songs, creates letterpoems (which are minimalist visual poems that use only a handful of letters or punctuation marks to created a glyphlike poem). She writes pwoermds and small digital poems using the marquee functionality of HTML. She creates visual poems out of wine bottles stuff with writing and other bits of ephemera. And she produces a good percentage of strong and powerful work. She is truly a wonder of the visual poetry community.

Satu Kaikkonen, "m'emories" (an Abstract Comic)
At the end of her presentation, Karri asked me to categorize Satu’s work, and all I could say was that her work covered the entire gamut of visual poetry. Luckily, Satu created her presentation as a blog, so anyone can visit there to examine a sampling of her work.

At the end of the presentation, Christian Bök read us the results of the exquisite corpse, which included one line in Finnish, because Karri wasn’t there for the explanation that we were supposed to write in English for the benefit of a mere three non-Finnish speakers. Henriikka Tavu has the copy of that poem, so I’ll have to get a copy of that for posting later.

This afternoon, I found a real surprise waiting for me: a postcard from my old friend Dees Stribling, one of my most frequent hardcopy correspondents. The card said, “Got this in Mexico, so it’s only right I send it to Finland for you to carry back to the US. If you choose to. Don’t forget to look for arctic cloudberries.” So far, we have purchased a jar of lakkahillo (cloudberry jam—and these are actually works I know in Finnish), but we didn’t see fresh lakkahillo until we were walking through the enclosed market in Turku today. Unfortunately, we didn’t think they would survive the heat of the next few hours we’d be in Turku, so we left them there. Dees will be glad to know that later today in Turku I finally mailed out a few cards to him from Finland, to join the one I sent from Estonia.

The Equivalent of Billboards in the Central Plaza of Turku, Finland
At four o’clock, Karri, Christian, Nancy, and I headed out to Turku to pick up my reading handouts, look for art supplies for making visual poems, and have dinner. Turku is a large city in Finland (about 180,000 people) with a cosmopolitan feel and plenty of old buildings among the new, so we had an enjoyable walk through the city and along the River Aura.

The copy shop where I picked up my large-format booklets for the reading was quite stylish and efficient. The handouts look fine, but I’ll have a hard time getting used to the size and cumbersomeness of the handout, which should have been half the size with a sturdy little cover. I’ve decided, however, to consider this my Finnish style of handouts.

After picking up the handouts, we went looking for an art supplies store, finding one just as it closed for the weekend. Then we wandered the city a little, visiting the enclosed market, which was filled with fresh foods of all kinds: meats, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, as well as teas and everything else. Eventually, we made our way to an enclosed mall and found a bookstore with a good selection of art supplies and a fairly meager selection of poetry. On the way out, I suggested that we stop at Mövenpick for ice cream, so as to avoid missing it altogether, and I was once again amazed by the superior quality of the ice cream.

The Turku Cathedral from a Bridge over the Aura River, Turku, Finland
(photo by Nancy Huth)
We had dinner at a restaurant called blanko, which was quite good, though the portions were huge. We sat beneath a painting that reproduced the text of one of the two central jokes from Annie Hall, this one (appropriately) the one about the idea that the food at a Catskills resort is terrible, and the portions too small—just like life.

Although we talked about many subjects at dinner, including car games we played as children and the differences between Europe and North America (coming out on the side of Europe most of the time), the most interesting point of the conversation was Christian’s: that we might be the last generation of people not to live forever, that if we can live until 2050 (when I’ll turn 90) science will probably have ways to keep us alive forever, that we might be like the people who died on Armistice Day, just before our lives were secured. But that wasn’t my favorite part of his discussion. My favorite was the idea that in the future we might be the first generation who can write and perform our poetry for a non-human audience: to machines imbued with artificial intelligence and to intelligent animals, dolphins and chimpanzees, for instance. He thought that this would be a boon for poetry, since it doesn’t have a human audience anymore!

Karri Kokko, Christian Bök, and Geof Huth Turku, Finland
(photo by Nancy Huth)
And then we walked around the city and along the River Aura a little and headed home to Mietoinen, seeing no moose along the way.

ecr. l’inf.

Finnish Poetry

2009-07-17T19:03:00.003-04:00

I know very little about Finnish poetry. I've read some Pentti Saarikoski, and I know a number of contemporary Finnish poets (and have met many of them this week). But I do write poetry in Finnish occasionally, even though I do not know enough Finnish to create even a simple sentence.

Since I won't be able to recount the day's events today, I would like instead to present my most recent poem in Finnish, a little bit of light verse that I won't even explain for the non-Finnish readers. Let me simply note that puns are involved.

A full account of the day will follow soon.

What Counts

15. kuusitoista

30. katajatoista

60. koivutoista
ecr. l'inf.

Mooseless in Finland

2009-07-16T23:59:00.001-04:00

Saari Residence, Manor House, Room 206, Mietoinen, Finland

(Another posting posted a day late.)

After last night’s late night, Nancy and I slept in until ten for the second morning in a row. I decided that I had to get ready quickly, since a newspaper reporter from the Turun Saromat out of Turku was coming to interview me this morning. As we were finishing breakfast, Karri arrived and we chatted as we awaited the reporter, who was a young woman named Anni Teppo accompanied by a photographer named Meri. Anni asked me if I could create some visual poetry for her, so I grabbed my notebook and a pen and we went outside at the picnic table that has served as the venue for some of our previous discussions of visual poetry.

Geof Huth, Anni Teppo, Meri, and Karri Kokko, Outside the Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
I began my discussion as I always have when I meet another Finnish person on this trip, by noting that it is too hot in Finland. Next, as we sat out in the bright sun, I said to Meri, “I don’t know how you’re going to be able to take a picture of me out here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have much hair on the top of my head.” She seemed determined to move forward anyway, taking quite a few pictures of me talking or drawing visual poems. It is difficult, I have to admit, to create a visual poem on request, but my first one (“Instructions to the Forest”) was a reasonably successful asemic piece. My next few were reasonably weak, and became weaker with subsequent attempts, but I have fragments of ideas that I can work with later. Karri joined us for the conversation, and helped out by answering a number of questions in Finnish.

The interview was a pleasant way to spend an hour, and part of my real life’s work of promoting visual poetry. However, I’m not sure how good a job I did, since my answer to the question “How popular is visual poetry in the United States?” was “About as popular as it is in Finland,” this after she noted she’d never heard of visual poetry. But I went on to explain that, in the US, poets generally have some idea that visual poetry exists, and that is where the real knowledge of it lies. In my definition of visual poetry, I explained the reaches of visual poetry, and I used the draft poems I’d created as examples of what I was discussing. Meri took pictures of me working on and showing these poems, so let’s hope they don’t reproduce any of the weaker pieces.

After the interview, I spent most of my time working on what I’ve spent most of my time on today: creating a reading handout for the reading on Saturday. I decided not to create this at home because I simply wasn’t sure what to use until I made it to Finland. I had to assess people’s ability to listen to this much English, and I had to consider how much music and how many images I needed to bring to the reading. My choices ended up including a good selection of visual poetry and quite a few pieces that depend on sound—not sound poems, but poems that depend on cadence and delivery. Throughout the day, I also cut down the number of poems I thought I would read. I will, of course, end with an extemporaneous poemsong, something understandable in any language.

Karri Kokko Giving His Presentation, "dumb Poesy," Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
The early afternoon brought our next presentation of the workshop, this one a presentation by Karri Kokko entitled “dumb Poesy.” (We thought the small d was intentional until Karri began his presentation by noticing the small d for the first time, but we liked it that way, thought it appropriate, and Christian Bök noted that the small d mirrored the b at the end of the word.) Karri was discussing visual poetry and its connection to painting, and he chose “dumb” because of its meaning as stupid and without value and its meaning as “mute.” Since it was Karri giving the presentation, it was filled with execrable puns and pun sequences—and that is what I love about Karri: He is always in touch with the sound and instability of language. He understands that the pun is the highest form of literature. Of course, my favorite line from Karri’s presentation was the self-deprecating, “I don’t have anything to say. Believe me, I really don’t,” a contention belied by the quirky and thought-provoking presentation that followed.

Karri spent most of his presentation considering the “literal” (letter-based, writing-based) aspects of different writings, though he did this without directly addressing the issue of what is visual poetry and whether these works constituted visual poetry. He considered the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock as a form of asemic writing, something that had never occurred to me but something that seems unavoidable (and in need of more attention) now. He talked about Jasper Johns’ use of letters and words in his paintings, which was fairly loose in the examples given. Still, Johns’ paintings have at least as much verbal content and significance as a large number of visual poems. Karri considered Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings and erasures as forms of mute communication. And, finally, Karri looked at detail at a couple of “Apollo” canvases of Cy Twombly (though not before considering the puns in the painter’s name: sigh, sighgh, tomb to womb—“the two bookends of human life”—and ending with the idea that Twombly’s name—since it ends with “ly”—must simply be an adverb). The paintings of Twombly’s were incomplete as separate units, part of a larger piece, but they clearly form the basis of a significant visual poetry sequence, though one not recognized as such.

In the middle of his discussion of an “Apollo” painting, Karri created this remarkable pun sequence, maybe his greatest work ever:

Apollo

pollo (Italian)

pullet (English)

poultry (English)

poetry (English, the three-syllabled "poultry")

pöllö (Finnish)

owl (literal meaning)

(wisdom)

dumbhead (colloquial meaning of pöllö)

so

wisdom

and

stupidity

are

the

same

thing
And what does this have to do with Apollo and Rauschenberg? Maybe nothing, maybe everything, but the purpose of punning is to undermine the language, or show how unsteady it is—and to entertain us while it’s doing it. And this punning sequence does that, over the course of four languages.

Karri’s presentation was followed by a “footnote” to the presentation by Kristian Blomberg, and this focused on extending Roland Barthes’ idea of the power of a title over a painting, how the naming of a thing makes a thing something else that if it remains unnamed—or differently named. Kristian’s prime example for this was Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters.” These made an interesting little pair of presentations, and all I wished for it in addition was some consideration of what visual poetry tastes and smells like—and some thought of the work of Robert Indiana, which is clearly and consistently vispoetic.

Theatre Quo Vadis, Opening of the Performance, Inside a Yurt Inside a Barn, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
At five o’clock, our band of poets met at the far end of the Saari Residence to watch a performance with the other group of artists at the residence with us—the Quo Vadis Band, an almost nomadic theater troupe that travels Europe and northern Africa and that performs in a special yurt that benefits from the advantages of a little Finnish technology. The yurt itself, which serves as the venue (the stage and the seating) for their performances, is a remarkable construction—strong enough that actors can climb its size, intimate enough that a member of the audience can hear every sound clearly no matter where they are within it, padded enough that even loud music isn’t uncomfortable at all even though you experience its power, and spacious enough that it can hold sixty spectators and twenty performers.

Theatre Quo Vadis, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
Otso Kautto, who is the leader of the band and who shares the second floor of the manor house with some of his family and comrades, and Nancy and me, began the performance by explaining what we would be seeing. And then we began. Quo Vadis is a band of seasoned actors, but the youngest is about six years of age. The children in the troupe grow up in theater, they move across the face of the planet from place to place, and they learn to perform. We had a great time watching the performances. The first was a sequence of very short, usually silent pieces, which Otso referred to as silent poems. These were performed behind a line of sheets strung across the back of the yurt, allowing for plenty of space to hide actors and props. This set of skits was broadly acted but quite funny, though I noticed the North Americans (Christian, Nancy, and I) laughed throughout these, while the Finns hardly laughed at all.

Theatre Quo Vadis, Opening of the Performance, The Second (the Sex) Act, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
The second “act” was a short skit about children talking about their parents having sex. Since all this was in Finnish, the tables were turned on us for this skit: The Finns laughed constantly and hard, while I noticed the word “kolme” (“three”) had been used—finding out later that one child said to another, If they’ve already broken three of the legs of the bed, why don’t they just break the last one? The acting was good, but the humor required knowledge of Finnish we didn’t have.
Theatre Quo Vadis, Otso Kautto as Lead Singer, Musical Performance, Saari Residence, Mietoinen, Finland
The third part of the show was a performance of poetry (in French, Finnish, and English) to rock music—catchy and fun. The Quo Vadis Band (AKA Theatre Quo Vadis) will be joining us on Friday for our poetry reading, and performing their poetry and music.

During this Quo Vadis performance, Teemu Manninen left us. We were sorry to see him go, but we had to accept his leaving us. He was married on Thursday, and had already spent about half of his married life with us—and his wife seemed intent on his attending their honeymoon in Austria.

After watching Quo Vadis, Karri Kokko, a far too kind man, took Christian, Nancy, and me out to dinner in Naantali, and this time the night was warm and the village was teeming with people. It was so busy that we never received any service at the first restaurant we stopped at, so we moved to another one, which was quite nice, nicer than the first one. I had a fish soup (a staple of my diet) and a fish sampler as an appetizer, and Nancy had a game stew that apparently included elk and some other antlered beast—though no moose. Apparently, moose are even difficult to find as food this time of year. Our conversations were about poetry, visual poetry, food, and, particularly, money in poetry. Christian is hugely busy as a poet—as a performing poet—and he noted that he sees books as thick business cards now, because he makes more money a year at readings and other events during the course of the year than he does on royalties from his book. He said he had made fifty international trips last year, a spate of traveling greater (certainly in distance) even than mine, and I travel almost constantly. After thinking about his point for a while, I had to agree with him: The same was true for me. I’ve made more money this year at poetry events than I ever have from any books, since my earnings from books is in the negative dollars. (However, my recent spate of poetry travel is not the norm, while Christian’s is.)

Interestingly, without having been at our session yesterday, Christian asked the question, “What’s the difference between a graphic designer and a visual poet?” And he had another answer: Graphic designers make money doing what they do. Of course, we know that no poets make money by making poetry, so we know Christian’s conclusion is true. But some poets make money, even make a living, by being the poets they are. They are paid to speak or perform somewhere, or they might be hired as a college professor just on the basis of their poetry. All of this is much less common with visual poets, but it also still happens.

St Birgit Procession, Naantali, Finland
(photo by Nancy Huth)
After our fine white-tablecloth dinner, we strolled Naantali, enjoying the sites and looking for some Mövenpick ice cream (the most incredible ice cream I’ve ever had), but the stall was closed, so we found a restaurant selling ice cream, bough a few cones and headed out to stroll through the streets of Naantali, filled with quaint wooden houses. Soon, we came upon a procession that occurs only once a year, on St Birgit’s Day. Somehow, we had managed to be there not only on the right night, but just as the procession was starting out. It was quite fun to watch the disorder of the little procession, celebrating the woman who is believed to have invented beer (though, of course, that cannot be true).

Our right home to the Saari Residence was filled with joking and stories. In the interest of accuracy, I asked Christian if he had respelled his last name (as I, by the way, respelled my first—it was originally Geoff). He said that, yes, he had done that because he thought it might be a little too funny be both a writer and an English professor and have the name “Book.” (He still pronounces the word that way, but its look is much different.) He also noted that people ask him if he is the Christian Book, and he replies, “No, that is the Bible.” But, most fun of all, he was teased for his name in school, until he was saved by the appearance of a girl named Shandel Lear. Some people have no luck.

And neither did we tonight. We saw no moose on the drive back to Mientoinen, but upon returning to our room I discovered that a dear friend of mine, Carole Parker, had had a near miss with a moose in her car in Vermont today.

Some people have all the luck.

Blurry Mooseless Countryside between Naantali and Mietoinen, Finland
(photo by Nancy Huth)

ecr. l’inf.

What is the Difference between Today and Tomorrow?

2009-07-15T19:34:00.001-04:00

Saari Residence, Manor House, Room 206, Mietoinen, Finland

Typewriter and Other Supplies Karri Kokko Brought for Us to Use to Create Visual Poems, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
(Yes, this entry is being written a day late but being predated to avoid confusion.)

It is difficult to go to bed in Finland in the summer, because the sun keeps shining till midnight. We just don’t feel tired, since it is quite quite bright at 10:30 in the evening. We are constantly misestimating the time of day because of it. Also, because of this, we slept in until ten this morning. Strangely, the sunshine, which starts filling the sky at 3 am, doesn’t wake us at all, even though we left our shades open last night.

Today’s event started a little after 1 in the afternoon, and it consisted of Teemu Manninen discussing interest web-based applications that people might use to create visual poetry or conceptually based visual poetry. Unfortunately, the application I most wanted to use was the one that doesn’t exist. Teemu opened his talk by describing his plan to work with his brother-in-law to develop what he called a writing machine for writers who want to write visually. He envisioned a very simple interface (unlike, say, that of Photoshop) that writers could use quickly and easily.

Teemu Manninen Giving His Presentation, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
Teemu asked one of the important questions of our time together, but one that we never came around to discussing: “What’s the difference between a graphic designer and a visual poet?” I think there are many ways to an answer to this question, but one of them would be that a graphic designer works for money and a visual poet works for love. A graphic designer is concerned with selling something, and a visual poet is concerned with the meaning of text. A graphic designer is concerned with pleasing, and a visual poet is concerned with perplexing. There are certainly more correct answers to this.

I liked Teemu’s talk for the way it uncovered possible news tools—especially since I think tools themselves are important methods of inspiration—but I wish we had had some time to discuss these tools and how we might use them as visual poets. I think what we can most valuably do at this workshop is discuss. Still, here is a rundown of some of the interesting tools Teemu has discovered:

Zxing (“Zebra Crossing”): Used to encode text into a barcode (visual text); might be used to create barcodes to visual poetry websites’ URLs, so that these could be posted in cities and accessible automatically by people “reading” the barcodes with their phones.

Microsoft Tag: A similar application, but it creates full-color barcodes.

Kodu: A visual programming language for creating videogames.

NetHack: ASCII-based art site.

Oou, the Insane Language: a site “documenting” a self-contradicting language; an example of language invention as art.

Japanese Emoticons: as a source of increased textual possibilities.

The Unbook: a site to support the development of e-books as open source development projects where books are never completed entities but come complete with version numbers (1.0, 2.1, etc.).

ViaPost: one of a number of sites on the web from which you can send hardcopy postcards to people.

The PocketMod: a site where you can easily design a little booklet that can be printed onto a single sheet of paper that can be folded into a booklet that requires no binding of any kind to hold it together. (The folding scheme they use is an old one, but few people seem to know it.)

Tabbloid: provides a way to design a little only magazine created out of your favorite RSS feeds.

Drawdio: an attachment you can put on the end of a pen or a pencil to create the sounds of your drawing (or writing)—and I think maybe it records that sound?

Google Sketchup: for 3D design.

Blender: an animation program.

CamStudio: free videostreaming software.

Photosounder: makes sounds out of digital images.

Wordle:: generates word clouds based on text fed into it. (Certainly the most well known of these applications.)

Abstract Comics: the blog.

Teemu Manninen’s “Smiley’s” (Created out of Cuneiform Characters), Projected on a Wall, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
Almost immediately as the session ended, Karri, Nancy, and I headed out to Turku, about forty minutes away, to pick up Christian Bök, who had called Karri to announce his arrival at the bus station a little bit before Teemu’s session ended. Once we arrived at the bus station, I hopped out of the car in search of Christian. As I was about to walk into the station, I saw Christian sitting on a bench outside, so I called out to him. At first, from a distance, he thought I was Karri (especially since he had no idea I was coming), so I introduced myself. He also wondered how I’d recognized him, and I noted that I see his face multiple times a day in the Twitter feeds I read.

Teemu Manninen and Satu Kaikkonen Preparing Dinner, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
Tonight at the Saari Residence we did something we should have been doing every night: we all had dinner together, using food that each of us had contributed. The main chef was Teemu, who explained that he likes to cook, but others were working on preparing the meal, including Satu Kaikkonen and Henriikka Tavi. Dinner was great: a nice chili, a salad, and a simple but good stirfry. After dinner, Christian asked where we could buy alcohol, and soon he was off, with Karri and Teemu, to buy beer in nearby Mynämaki.

In Conversation: Christian Bök, Karri Kokko, and Kristian Blomberg, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
Once the folks returned, with beer and potato chips, we spent the rest of the night talking (until 1 am). Christian and I disagreed about the value of the work of Kenny Goldsmith, Christian defending Kenny’s conceptual poetry, and my contending that it remained too boring to interest me. What I forgot to note was that conceptual poetry is often interesting to me, just not in Kenny’s case—though the man himself certainly is. We had quite a bit of talk about beer, since beer dominated the table. We talked about language (particularly Finnish) and grammar and translating. But the main point of discussion was poetry: how poets are more interested in reading about poetry than in reading poetry (this was my point, which I refined to “Poets are interested in poetics rather than poetry”), the relative value of contemporary lyrical poetry as compared to poetry that is more experimental (the bias went in the likely direction), stories about poets we have known. The discussion was long, detailed, sometimes intellectual (Christian used “rebarbative” at least four times), and interesting. It was a good, if tiring, night, and this night gave us the discussion we really need here. Tonight was a success as a night of fun and as a part of our workshop.

In Conversation: Satu Kaikkonen, Marco Niemi, Teemu Manninen, and Christian Bök, Saari Residence, Meitoinen, Finland
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Cranes, Granite Gravel, Signs of Huth, and Moomin World

2009-07-14T19:45:00.000-04:00

Saari Residence, Manor House, Room 206, Mietoinen, Finland

Today was the first real day of the visual poetry workshop, and we were scheduled to meet in the manor house, one floor down from my room, at 10 am or so. I showed up a few minutes beforehand and waited until about 10:45 before starting my search for people. I found people down the road at their building and we had a good chat while we waited to begin. We even had a chance to watch about ten cranes circle languidly above us. I had a good time joking with everyone, and increasing my Finnish to about 30 words. But I can’t say any sentences more than one word in length.

Satu Kaikkonen, Hernriikka Tavi, and Nancy Huth Reading the Poems of Kristian Blomberg on a Computer Screen
Karri Kokko suggested that we meet outside around a picnic table, which is exactly where we met yesterday afternoon. At that time it was too chilly, but this morning the sun was shining brightly and it was both too hot and too bright, so we moved to the shade of some maples. We began with a presentation by me. I explained my life in poetry a little, only because everyone else had done this yesterday—and then I began to ask questions: What are visual poets? What is visual poetry? Why does visual poetry fail? How do you make visual poems? I encouraged people to discuss these topics, and I brought what I knew of their work into the conversation. The talk went reasonably well, but we were soon out of time, since it was lunch time.

Nancy Huth, Hernriikka Tavi, Satu Kaikkonen, and Jouni Tossavainen
We did, however, look at the poems Kristian Blomberg created using the syntax of comics. It was so bright when we did that Nancy helped the people on her side of the table see these on a laptop screen by covering it with her black sweater. I looked at the poems myself from beneath the table where I found a little shade to darken the screen. Once there, I asked Kristian about the poems—before looking at the Finnish and saying, “These appear to have been written in some invented language.” We discussed Marko Niemi’s idea that some visual poems nowadays were not poetic enough, which I interpreted to mean they did not contain enough language. I asked Marko to respond to the idea that some of his digital poems, which play with the concept of the stability and meaningfulness of the letter as a carrier of meaning, might be accused of the same fault.

Karri Kokko, Marko Niemi, and Kristian Blomberg
We discussed the Teemu Manninen’s contention that humor was an essential part of his work, which explains his interest in flarf, but also his personality. We discussed how Jouni Tossavaien integrates poems and photographs in a way designed to multiply, not simply repeat, meanings. We talked about Satu Kaikonnen’s poems in bottles, the reading experience she expects a reader to have with those, and the idea of the official version of a visual poem. In her case, the question is whether only the physical bottle itself and its contents are the true poem or if the photograph she takes of it is also the poem. (She says both are, though the reading experience differs between them.) Henriikka Tavi told us that she doesn’t really see herself as a visual poet, or even a particularly visual person, but that she has become interested in concrete objects as carriers of meaning, and that is something she wants to investigate.

A Photograph by Jouni Tossavaien, and the Photograph Printed with its Poem in the Book Kuusikirja
After lunch, we met in the manor house, where Jouni had set up his photographs around the room in a little impromptu exhibition. What he was showing us was the color photographs, how they looked, and how they worked as pieces of visual art, and he showed us his recent book of poems with photographs, so we could see the black and white reproductions and examine how his translations work. I stumbled through a translation of the shortest poem, with my trusted palmsized Finnish and English dictionary, but it didn’t help much. (Anyway, Finnish is a difficult language in some ways. For instance, Jouni’s book is focused on spruce trees, a Finnish symbol of death, and “spruce” is “kuusi,” but—and talk about polysemous confusion—“kuusi” is also the number “five,” and finally “kuu” is “moon,” but if you add “si” to the end of it, producing “kuusi,” then that means “your moon” or “my moon”—I forget which. So the possibilities for punning in Finnish are remarkable.)

Two Photographs by Jouni Tossavaien
Jouni’s photographs were often quite striking, and I chose three in my head that I thought Karri should use for the exhibition that will somehow be made of the work we produce in this visual poetry workshop. I’m only sorry that my Finnish is so miserably poor as to be nonexistent, because I need to understand how Jouni’s poems work with these photographs. He seems to have a good verbo-visual imagination, and I want to see it in action.

Karri Kokko, Kristian Blomberg, Marko Niemi, Henriikka Tavi, and Jouni Tossavainen
After Jouni’s presentation of his pieces and our careful study of them, we looked through a large pile of paper printed by letterpress with various designs upon them. And we chose from these some pieces we would use to create visual poems. We all took a while to find what we thought perfect for us. Kristian even gasped once when I uncovered a card he was particularly interested in. I didn’t even see what it was, but I’ll be interested in seeing what he does with it.

“IITUT,” Naantali, Finland
After dinner, Karri came over to talk to Nancy and me and offered to drive us to Naantali, a little tourist town near here and one of the few towns in Finland that still has a large number of original wooden houses. (Most towns burned to the ground a number of times over the years, as has even this manor house we’re in right now, though the foundation dates back to about 1560.) Naantali is also the home of Moomin World, though it was closed at the time, and the summer home of the president of Finland is viewable just across the water from the town. We had a great time walking around the town, though it was a little chilly for Nancy and Karri, but what I liked most were the signs (though false) of Huths. The first was a business with the name “IITUT,” but Karri and I both immediately read it as “Huth.”

“Hattu,” Naantali, Finland
The next Huth was the word “Hattu,” apparently a surname on a house in a town filled with such signs. I read “Hattu” as “Hat,” which is the literal meaning of “Huth,” and then Karri explained that “Hattu” actually means “Hat”! There’s a rare cognate between English and Finnish for you. It must be a loanword through Swedish.

The Night Sky Near Mietoinen, Finland, at 11:30
On the way back home through the countryside, it was nearly midnight, so we spent our time scanning the fields for moose, since I live near moose but have yet to see one in the wild. We failed in our quest, but what we saw were good views of the brightness of the sky near midnight. The darkest part of the night now is between 1 and 2 am, and I’m sorry I know that from first-hand experience.

Door to the Manor House, Saari Foundation, Mietoinen, Finland
Nancy’s and my night ended when we arrived at our manor house, our home for two weeks. The colors in this photograph are all wrong, created by a filter on my camera designed to handle sunlight, but this is a beautiful set of colors. It is not only reality that is beautiful.

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Speaking Pwoermdish in Finland

2009-07-14T07:21:00.002-04:00

Just now I wrote a pwoermd in Finnish:

käsättämätän

As with all pwoermds it is a lie--that is the only way to the truth. This reminded me, however, that I've written pwoermds in Finnish before. I can't even find all of them at the moment, but one is

kuurunomeri

which I explained in a blog posting recently. A couple appear in my poem, "The Finnish Breadfruit of Hawai'i," which I'll be reading this weekend. And I did a number of visual pwoermds in Finnish: Visual Pwoermd Translating Aram Saroyan into Anglo-Finnish for My Finnish Readers.

I present these for my Finnish friends, with the understanding that there are more. Somewhere.

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Geof

Three Posts in a Day

2009-07-13T19:53:00.001-04:00

Yes, I'm been without Internet access here in Finland, so I did not publish to this blogs posts as I wrote them. But I wrote them over the past three days, so three new ones now appear below.

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The Sun Never Sets in Finland. It Just Hides beneath the Horizon for a Few Hours

2009-07-13T19:45:00.002-04:00

View from Our Room, Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietonien, Finland
Saari Residence, Manor House, Room 206, Mietoinen, Finland

As I begin to write this account of my day’s events, it is nearly 11:30 at night, and the sun appears to have set but the sky is still bright, and there is no need for me to use a flashlight to walk around the grounds of the Saari Residence, which is owned by the Kone Foundation, which is hosting this two-week visual poetry workshop. Still, all the Finns tell me that it is getting dark here much earlier since the summer solstice.

Karri Kokko picked up Nancy and me in the late morning, and we drove through the grey rain and under gray clouds, through giant tunnels bored through small hills (to protect the habitat of flying squirrels), by land that might have reminded us of the Adirondack, except for the lack of mountains and the presence of streetlights down the entirety of the four-lane highway we drove here. We had a good time on the trip, and Karri learned a bit more about us, finally asking me why I was funny in person but my writing wasn’t funny at all.

Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietonien, Finland
At the Saari Residence, Nancy and I are in the manor house, on the second floor, with a view of woods and fields and a bit of the sea. Our room is beautiful and comfortable, and the design of everything (the lamps, the shower, the bidet) is crisp and Finnish. Simple touches like large almost silent toggle switches for the lights give everything here a sense of perfection—or at least the yearning towards it.

We toured the grounds, meeting some of the other participants, and then we went shopping, where I almost convinced the cashier I knew what she was saying when she was talking to me in Finnish, at least until Karri told me (in English) that I needed to buy the bags to bag the groceries. I’ll have to save my “kiitos” for the next time. (We bought both cloudberry and buckthornberry jam at this store, since we cannot get either at home.) Back home, we made a simple dinner (a salad, a soup created out of bouillon and tortellini, and bread), and I fell asleep while trying to get our computers to connect to the Internet.

Later, we met up with all the visual poets here for the workshop and talked a little about their work. I said little (besides jokes) myself, but everything they said gave me something to day, which I’ll save for tomorrow. The people around our picnic table outside, in the slowly coming dusk (we ended at 10:30, and it was still quite bright outside) and in the increasing chill (I even felt a need to roll down my sleeves by the end) were

Geof Huth (me)

Nancy Huth (the only one of us not required to talk about her work)

Henriika Tavi (a poet and translator, trained as a philosopher, Hegelian in tendencies, and who is thinking about the possibilities of children’s books and visual poetry)

Satu Kaikkonen (a prolific poet and visual poet, who works often with Troy Lloyd of Georgia)

Jouni Tossavainen (a poet and novelist, a professional writer, who has been creating poems that accompany photographs he takes, or vice versa)

Mikael Brygger (a poet and editor of a Finnish poetry magazine, along with Henriika and Kristian)

Kristian Blomberg (a poet and scholar, who is using the semiotic structures of comics in his poetry, without creating poetry comics)

Karri Kokko (the man who brought us all together, a poet, a visual poet of extreme asemic tendencies, a funny man—though not as funny as my writing is—and the person who assures us we are here for ourselves, not for any audience)

Marko Niemi (a digital poet, and the first person to translate anything I’ve written into Finnish, and the proprietor of Nokturno)

Teemu Manninen (a scholar, the most garrulous of us, a man knowledgeable in all manner of poetry, and a man with flarfist ideas filling his head)

These are only the people here for our talk tonight. The videopoet JP Sipilä was also here, but went off to be with his two-week-old daughter. (Teemu, by the way, was married this past weekend.) And there are a number of other people coming later.

Everyone is assigned to give a presentation, and mine (due tomorrow morning) is almost done. My one set of advice about these presentations is that we treat them as conversations, that the presenters lead discussions and simply tell us when they want us add our thoughts. I’m looking forward to two weeks worth of discussion and plenty of new ideas for all of us.

(And don’t miss Nancy’s view of the past couple of days.)

View from Our Room, Manor House, Saari Residence, Mietonien, Finland, at about 11:15 pm
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The Textual Imagination in Tallinn; or RetroFuturism

2009-07-12T23:53:00.007-04:00

The View from Our Bedroom at 3:30 in the Morning, Helsinki, Finland
Villa Kivi, Guest House, Room 1, Helsinki, Finland

We spent the day in Tallinn, Estonia, today, leaving on a small but quick ferryboat that left us beside a set of crumbling steps that were the remains of the Olympic venue for rowing during the Moscow Olympics (and which the Estonians are apparently allowing to fade from memory), and returning on a huge ferryboat carrying multiple full-size tractor-trailers and hundreds of people in a multi-deck ship that included at least four restaurants, various shops, and a “supermarket.”

Tallinn itself was, at its core, a beautiful city. Its heart is an ancient walled city (with most of the wall still in place), giant and usually ornate churches for various faiths, and literally scores if not hundreds of very old but immaculately maintained buildings. It is also one of the most touristy cities I’ve ever visited, but it’s impossible to squeeze dead its heart. Every turn down a new street leads to a new set of wonders, some small, certainly, but many grand.

What struck me most about Tallinn was how the new mixed with the old, and vice versa. In one case, the architectural features of an old building were allowed to remain in place, even though the rest of the building had disappeared, allowing the old to extend out of the sides of the stucco replacement of some old limestone façade.

But I am a man of text, and it is text that engaged me in this city—text as image and text as the reminder of language. I found it interesting that there was almost no Cyrillic text left in Tallinn. There was some, here and there, but nothing to give evidence to Estonia’s years in the thrall of the Soviet Union. The Estonians had almost wiped it out, replacing it with Finnish (which had probably always been there) and English. Simply everyone spoke English and Finnish, as well as their native Estonian. While looking down from Tompea (the hill that grows out of the city) to Tallinn’s patchwork of roofs, I listened to an Estonian vendor speak to a couple of Austrians—in English, because that was the language they shared. I did use a tiny bit of Estonian today, ordering my soup in Estonian and saying my thank-yous that way. But I didn’t need to. Everyone’s English was excellent, and the city was filled with tourists from all over, mostly Finnish, but with many Americans, and plenty of others.

On one ancient building, we discovered an old stone sign, a tabula almost gone rasa, that once might have been something important, but now was not. And it was the text that taught us this, the text allowed to rot away.

Most of the graffiti in the city was of a fairly uniform variety, using the same rote set of design skills and tagging the world just like so much dog’s urine in an alleyway. But there were cases where the graffiti, maybe even accidentally, exceeded the limitations their creators had set for them. In the arch for one door, I discovered the delicate tracery of one layer of graffiti over another layer of a solid color more thickly applied, and the resulting text, even though not carrying much meaning for me, was beautiful. On a couple of doors in the city, huge repetitions of tags, by different people, created collaborative pieces of art brimming with energy.

Cyrillic was so little in evidence that I barely recognized it when confronted with it. Our first encounter was with a simple love graffito, but one etched carefully into stone (a preservationist’s nightmare). The orthodox church, however, had the most Russian anywhere: many books in Russian, and beautiful old-fashioned Russian calligraphy painted onto the inside of the walls and written in such a way as to allow the letters to interlock with each other, heightening the magic of this devotional text and causing me some initial confusion as I tried to identify the script. (Unfortunately, but understandably, photography was not allowed in the church, so I have no pictures of the text.)

From the top of the city, stairs lead downward, in hairpin turns, to the ground below and the watery remains of the moat that once protected this vaunted outpost, and at the top of these stairs there was a little message in Estonian, black against the white of the walls, and which in English would read, “Does television imitate life or does life imitate television?” This is a question of a modern city.

Maybe the saddest texts were handwritten down a narrow street. On a windowsill, a man had written,

Alps always love his Niler
But she forsakes me

The spelling in the this sentence is a little off (“forskikere” “corrected” to “forsakere,” but Alps’ interest in Niler is obviously, yet a few steps further on we read, written in the same hand, these words:

Alp hates Niler

What love vanquishes, it vanquishes.

This city of many languages was a treasure house of textual interest, more than I can recount in a night. The Strømnes & Strømnes logo, which weds S to S in a way that multiplies them is one example. Another was a manhole cover embossed with a text more elaborate than any manhole cover should be. And one of my favorites was the “Käsitöö Handycraft” sign, which carefully mistakes how to spell “handicraft,” but in doing so merely illuminates the meaning of the word, its essence, and thereby shows us how words have resonances that not each of us alone can perceive.

The word that sums up Tallinn for me was “RetroFuturism.” Spelled with those two capital letters and edited by Lloyd Dunn, the magazine of that name was filled with visual poetry, xerographic art, and essays, and I was associated with it until the Art Strike shut it down. When I found a slightly ornamented version of the word written on the wall of a restaurant, I just had to take its picture. When I saw a simpler version of it in red around the corner from the first, I took that picture as well. But only Karri noticed the second “i” in what I had not realized was actually “RetroFuturiism.” The man who speaks a language where the doubling of vowels in words changes their meanings would be the one to see this minor difference.

We see what we were going to see. We read what we knew we would read.

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Everything is Aligned at Yksitoista Yksitoista in the Evening

2009-07-11T23:45:00.002-04:00

Villa Kivi, Guest House, Room 1, Helsinki, Finland

As I begin to write these brief literary notes on my day, it is a few minutes from midnight, and there is clearly light still in the sky—a few hours from sunrise and we still have the sun casting its gaze into the upper regions of our sky. Because we are in Finland, in extreme southern Finland but farther north than Nancy or I have ever been. Our trip here was long and included a stopover in Dublin, which was the first time we had ever been in Ireland, Tomorrow we take the ferry to Tallinn, Estonia, which will be our first time there. Maybe our only time ever. If life is merely a sequence of experiences, some never repeat each other, even as others repeat seemingly interminably. Though nothing never doesn’t end.

I’m tired enough now to question my ability to write a coherent sentence—though not at all tired enough not to write. With only a few hours of sleep behind me in the last 30 hours, though, I’ll have to think of sleeping soon.

It is great to be in Finland for many reasons. It is a beautiful country, very modern but still wild, and with a sense of design that has to appeal to a visual poet. Being here for the first time, I can finally hear Finnish in its natural state and learn how to pronounce “Ruotsalainen Ä” (the letter Ä, the antepenultimate letter of the 29-letter Finnish alphabet, which ends with a trio of vowels) and “raparperi” (“rhubarb”), and “hyväntekeväidyys” (“charity,” which is a little harder to pronounce than it appears). As a poet of sound (if not always a sound poet), I have to be affected by these new sounds—not totally new, but arranged in different ways, and presented in a mesmerizing lilt that stresses the first syllable of each word.

We have had wonderful meals here, definitely Finnish. At the S Market (which looks more like the SS Market to me), we bought a handful of slightly foreign looking pears, a rich butter, sourdough rye bread in a circle with a hole in the middle, two Finnish cheeses (one peppered with holes and almost like a very mild cheddar, the other a baked cheese, very milky in flavor, but almost rubbery, enough so that the cheese squeaks when you chew it), a pure raspberry juice, a refreshing lingonberry juice cocktail, smoked salmon, cloudberry (“lakka”) jam, lingonberry and coffee yogurt, and a potato and a carrot tart. Some of these made for a great lunch this afternoon. Others we will make into a great breakfast tomorrow.

Dinner included plenty of traditional Finnish food, though in a clearly nouvelle cuisine fashion. Nancy had reindeer, both a nice soft set of tiny steaks, rare, and tender well done reindeer neck meat, cut into tiny cubes—both delicious. I had a smoked salmon steak with mashed potatoes and morels. Karri had whitefish. I regret not having ceps, the famous Finnish mushrooms, but I will eventually. We also had as a set of tiny appetizers a herring mousse, lamb served almost as carpaccio, salmon ceviche, blue cheese with red gooseberries, and prawns, and we ended with a raparperi tartlet.

Everything here is about words and language. I keep looking for the words for things and divining the words for other things (figuring out that “maito” is “milk” during my shower). Karri and I keep testing each other’s knowledge of the other’s language, stuck right now wondering if “tiira” is indeed “tern.” We talked about the differences among the Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, and Hungarian) and about languages in general—how we learn them, how we lose them, how we use them.

That’s what I’m here for. As a poet, I’m here for the words.

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Before Flying

2009-07-10T16:56:00.004-04:00

John F. Kennedy International Airport, Gate A2, Queens, New York

At this moment, I am awaiting the call for us to board a plane to Dublin, Ireland (not Ohio, for any archivists reading this), from which point we will take a flight to Helsinki, Finland. Since I'll be in Internet darkness for at least another seven hours, let me simply point people, this afternoon, to a few interesting online journals:

First, Drunken Boat has just released its tenth anniversary issue, a Rimbaudesque extravaganza that has a large visual poetry section, along with a number of surprise: Valerie Blau DuPlessis?

Second, the smaller, but no less interesting, Cricket Online Review, has its own smaller selection of poetry, but it also does not ignore the visual.

Plenty to keep one busy, so much so that I haven't had a chance to look through any of this in detail in the days since these have come online.

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Näkemiin, Amerikka

2009-07-09T23:19:00.001-04:00

Hello, Finland.

(almost)

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finnish soonish

2009-07-08T23:37:00.004-04:00

Geof Huth, "aH(f)WZ" (8 July 2009)
Tonight, Nancy and I had to drive an hour into the Adirondacks to leave our cat Gate Wilder Squid (AKA Gate) with my in-laws. They will be watching him for the next few weeks. While I was there, I decided to take the time to put together seven simple mailart cards, each carrying the form of a fidgetglyph I created on the fly while out in Caroga Lake. At this point in time, I like this little humanoid glyph, which almost seems to be a Nameograph, but no-one is named "aH(f)WZ," at least not yet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Today, Nancy began adding content to her travel blog for our trip to Finland. I would urge anyone interested in humorous travel writing to follow her blog somääniivowels because she will be much funnier than I will be. I haven't written much humorous prose since high school. When you visit the blog, note the subtle use of Finnish colors.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As part of my preparation for Finland, I'm ordering Finnish stamps bearing copies of a visual poem of mine. Then I'll be able to send cards to friends of mine bearing my art forth for all to see.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Helsinki and Turku are now only a few degrees Fahrenheit colder than the Adirondack woods I've just left behind, so I don't think the cold will be of much consequence to us. I am surprised, however, that the temperature is as warm as it is. This trip will take us the farthest north we've ever been.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When I think about the value of any poetry I create, I remember the poet William Yerington. Because no-one else will. I know nothing about the man except that he had a book of poetry, East Windows, published in 1926 by the Syracuse University Bookstore. Despite the quizzical choice of publisher, it is a fairly standard book of poetry for its time--well, maybe a little old-fashioned. Every line is somehow dramatic, and Yerington seems intent on being a passionate poet, and one inclined to create passion in others. This desire comes out even a quarter of a century after the book came out--in 1950, which is when he inscribed the copy of the book I own with these words:

Not God, but the God-hunger--
that is best.

William Yerington
October 15, 1950.

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The Horrors of the Archivist Poet

2009-07-07T23:00:00.004-04:00

Order is the order of my life.

I do not necessarily keep things in order, but I must put them there. And my ordering is manic even if it is inconstant, like a heart beating against itself, beating against the walls it's created. There is this tension in my life between the orderly and the chaotic, between the mind that is always looking for a way to organize something and the mind that reacts without thing, that finds connections but only to cause little shivers of discomfort in the reader, the viewer, the person whose role is to take it in.

Tonight, I am in the last throes of preparing for my trip to Finland. I'm trying to figure out how to bring as close to nothing with me so that I will have nothing that I haven't absolutely needed. It is a difficult goal to reach. I used to travel light, but now I travel with supplies, so I can write and draw wherever I am, so I can create simple little visual poetry cards each night and mail them out the next day. This is all disorderly. My suitcase is usually packed neatly only at the beginning of the trip. But I'm about order even in this case. I keep track of the cards I mail and who I mail them to. I number the sets of cards in sequence (sometimes making errors along the way), and have made it to 314 so far (though I think I've actually produced 317 sets of cards--order and disorder are one in me).

As I prepare for Finland, I am also finalizing my plans for the two-week visual poetry workshop I'll be "giving," though every participant will be presenting and adding to the conversation significantly. I'm thinking about how to sustain interest in visual poetry, in production, in thinking about the shapes of words, for two weeks, thinking about how we have to inhabit the space we'll be in to find productive inspiration there. Thinking about how we should be something more by the end of these weeks than we were at the beginning of them.

It seems to me that if you bring together thirteen or fourteen poets, visual and otherwise, together along with a few literary academics, for two weeks, then you should expect something to happen, something to grow out of it. That many artists rarely convene to do anything even vaguely related to visual poetry. There is an opportunity here I want us to make something of. This is a remarkable group of poets coming together, representing a few different mother tongues, but working in English. We will talk together, create together, travel the countryside and make poetry in the environment together. We will eat together, and some of us will sleep together (chastely).

This is a great opportunity, and the orderly person in me wants to ensure the success, the progress, of this residence at the Saari Foundation, and the disorderly person in me simply wants to explore. Somehow, these two beings are the same person, and that must be why I try to be a poet and try to be a writer about poetry at the same time.

I work through the totality of my conscious mind and the totality of my unconscious every day. Everyone does. I just notice how the two ghosts who haunt me rub up rudely against each other through the day.

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The Atomic Structure of a Visual Poem (A Fifty-Second Letter to a Young Imaginary Visual Poet)

2009-07-06T23:02:00.003-04:00

Yes, I have to admit that I've been too busy recently and that that has slowed this response of mine. I apologize for this delay, but that's part of living in the world, or part of living in the world and not wanting to give up on any experience. Experience is, after all, everything we have: the experience of the world, of the senses, of our thinking flowing thoughts, and all of these coming together, holding together, in a chain of experience, everything connected to everything else merely by being experienced by one of us, in the full movement of a single life.

Somehow everything is connected to everything else and still each of us is discrete and unconnected to the rest of humanity. Concatenations and isolations. An atomized existence, but the atoms that represent fragmentation are what make up our solid flesh. We live in a Milky Way so large we cannot imagine it, and every star of it is an atom in the body of existence. Look deep enough into the structure of our bodies and there are vast spaces between the atoms that allow us to roll a pencil in the curved palms of our hands and the nothing that takes up whatever space isn't taken up by substance. A millionth is merely another way of looking at a million.

So we move on, write forward, extend into thought and experience, finding what meaning we can along the way, or being flummoxed by our inability to make sense out of whatever we discover. So it is that I am amazed that two journals that are publishing visual poems of mine are holding launch parties in New York City this month. The first occurs four days from now, on the day I leave from New York for Finland, but it begins an hour or so before my plane takes off, so I cannot make it. The second occurs on the day I return to New York from Finland, and it begins an hour or so before my plane lands. I will barely miss these two events, though I didn't know about the first until a few days ago. If you can, try to find your way to these events. I doubt they'll focus on visual poetry much, since these events always focus on reading, on the voice, but tell me what you make of them if you can.

That is all we do, or that's what I'm saying tonight in my late-night grandiloquence. There's something about the night that makes my mind churn and then move in many directions, all of which are but the same direction as seen from different points in time. I can't even remember your question at the moment. Not that I want to avoid it, but I'm probably not ready to deal with another set of thoughts right now. I still have plenty to do this week to prepare for my trip, I still have a lifetime of thinking to do about visual poetry, I still need to figure out what's going on.

ecr. l'inf.

A Few Visual Poetry Announcements

2009-07-05T23:54:00.001-04:00

To help make sure visual poets try to remain active workers in the world, I’m posting information on three opportunities designed for visual poets.

Electronic Magazine of Visual Poetry

The Centro de Poesia Visual Penarroy-Pueblo Nuevo, in Cordoba Spain, wants information about US visual poets. They have an on-line magazine, Veneno, and a website:

Revista electrónica de Poesía Visual "C.P.V.": http://centrodepoesiavisual.blogspot.com

their email is:

Centro de Poesía Visual de Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo

Visual Poetry at the MaOAS

From Matt Stolte:

I will be showing visual poetry works & books by visual poets as a part of MaOAS (Madison Area Open Art Studios) October 17 & 18. Feel free to send me some work to show/sell—it'd be great to have work by many different artists.

visit Word Work for more & updates.

Matthew Stolte
19 S Franklin St Apt 1
Madison WI 53703-3078

None of the Above

None of the Above: Assembling, Collaborating and Publishing in the Eternal Network

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

In an ambitious assembling-style project, Minnesota Center for Book Arts invites any and all to send 125 copies of anything (within reason – see below) that will fit into a 9” x 12” envelope. This project is in conjunction with MCBA’s upcoming exhibition None of the Above: Assembling, Collaborating and Publishing in the Eternal Network.

An assembling project represents the ultimate in democratic art. Everything submitted will be included in the publication (or series of publications, depending on how many people participate). In return for your efforts, you receive a selection of 89 different works created by others who participate.

Who’s invited? Artists, writers, printmakers, zinesters, poets, photographers, xerographers, pamphleteers, cartoonists, diagrammers, visualists, mail-artists, transitionalists, minimalists, maximalists, pencilers, stencilers, composers, medics, bookleteers, decoders, conceptualists, transcribers, documentarians, historians, storytellers, manifestoans, CDsters, designers, anti-artists, ventriloquists (make the paper sing!), book artists, book artists who are ventriloquists, whoever so chooses and those chosen – meaning you! Plus, you can exercise reckless editorial control or lack thereof by forwarding this invitation to others.

What to send? Any means of expression is fine (paper, CDs, stickers, popsicle sticks) but it can be no larger than 8.5” x 11” (21.6 cm x 27.9 cm) and 1/8” thick (.3 cm). It can be folded, stitched, crushed, flattened, etc. Shrunk-via-shrink-ray submissions are okay. If you need a theme, submissions will be compiled in publications titled “None of the Above.” How’s that for clear direction?

How many to send? Submit 125 copies. 89 of these will go to other participants. Additional copies will be archived, distributed to donors/volunteers, and a small number will be sold as a fundraiser for MCBA.

What else to send? So that we can send you your copy of the publication, include a sheet of paper with your name and postal address. Also include $5 in U.S. funds – checks payable to Minnesota Center for Book Arts – to cover the cost of envelopes and postage.

Where to send: None of the Above, c/o Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1011 Washington Ave South, Suite 100, Minneapolis, MN 55415

Deadlines: If we receive submissions by August 21, 2009, they will be displayed as part of the associated exhibition. To be included in the publication, submissions must be received no later than October 24, 2009.

A special collating event will occur at MCBA on Saturday, October 24, 2009. For those who would like to participate, you may bring your 125 copies that evening rather than mailing. There is no fee. Please email Jeff Rathermel, MCBA’s Artistic Director (jrathermel@mnbookarts.org) by October 16, 2009 if you will be participating. Arrive at 7 pm, assembly lines commence at 7:30 pm.

If you have questions about the publication, contact Jeff Rathermel at jrathermel@mnbookarts.org. To learn more about Minnesota Center for Book Arts, visit www.mnbookarts.org.

ecr. l’inf.

bindithoughts 17

2009-07-04T23:04:00.003-04:00

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Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

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If you’re looking for poetry in Buffalo, New York, you will not do better than Talking Leaves, which has one of the best selections of in-print poetry (large and diverse) I’ve run across. It’s not quite like being in Berkeley, but it’s strong and valuable for the lover of poetry. Doug Manson walks in front of the store in the picture above.

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This July 4th, I decided to celebrate the birth of my country by starting to read Ron Silliman’s Tjanting, only to find this on page 20:

Who holds what truths to be self-evident?

followed on page 28 by this reworking:

Holds who what evidence to be self-truth?

I’ll have to read further into the book to see how this phrase becomes further distorted.

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The big news in my family this week is that Nancy won a writing contest, probably the first any of us has won in decades. Her haiku

Beans, fresh corn, bay leaf
Roma, potato, onion—
Any soup is good.

was chosen randomly by the food blog Cheap Healthy Good to receive a $25 coupon to Sonic. If you are skeptical, check here. I have wondered how great a prize this really is, since the nearest Sonic is in Kingston, about ninety minutes from our house. That would have to be a great $25 meal to make it worth the three-hour drive.

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Nancy and I leave for Finland this Friday, leaving from JFK just thirty minutes before…

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The exhibit Ed Sanders: Glyphs 1962-2009 opens at the Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been able to uncover only a single one of Ed Sanders glyph-poems (which bear no similarity to my handwritten fidgetglyphs, little doodled visual poems), but I’d love to see an entire collection of them. Here’s the announcement:

A rare exhibition of nearly half a century of Ed Sanders’s glyph-poems produced between 1962 and 2009 will be on display at The Arm in Williamsburg [Brooklyn, NY] from July 10 through July 31. An opening reception will be held on July 10th at 6PM.

Building on a long history of utilizing a highly visible language that continues into the present, Sanders’s glyph-poems fuse image with text, and image as text. Political, personal, ephemeral, historical, uncanny, and humorous―the glyph-poems on display at The Arm appear in several different mediums, including original drawings, collages, mimeographed pages from Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (1962-’65), plus a number featuring color images, and an artist’s book. Over 200 Glyph-works will be featured in the show.

In addition, Glyphs 1962-2009 will feature new letterpress prints and a limited edition catalogue produced on location at The Arm.

Edward Sanders is a poet, historian and musician. He is at work, since 1998, on a 9-volume America, a History in Verse. The first five volumes, tracing the history of the 20th century, have been completed and published in a fully indexed CD format, over 2,000 pages in length, by Blake Route Press. Another recent writing project is Poems for New Orleans, a book and CD on the history of that great city, and its tribulations during and after hurricane Katrina. He has been granted a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, and other awards for his writing. Other books in print include Tales of Beatnik Glory (4 volumes published in a single edition), 1968, a History in Verse; The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, The Family, a history of the Charles Manson murder group, and Chekhov, a biography in verse of Anton Chekhov.

Sanders was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs, which has released many albums and CDs during its 45 year history. The Fugs have recently completed a CD, Be Free, The Fugs Final CD (Part 2), featuring 14 new tunes. Be Free will be released in late summer. Two of Sanders’ books, The Family and Tales of Beatnik Glory, are under option to be made into movies. His selected poems, 1986-2008, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War will be published by Coffee House Press in the fall of 2009. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues. Sanders will perform a section of America, the 17th Century, tracing the voyage of Henry Hudson up the Hudson River in 1609, at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock on August 8, as part of the 400th anniversary celebration of Hudson’s discoveries.

Opening reception for Glyphs 1962-2009 on Friday, July 10th from 6PM.

All inquiries may be addressed to:
Daniel Morris
The Arm
281 North 7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
dan at thearmnyc dot com

Maybe I’ll have a chance to see this show upon my return.

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After Tom’s and my reading a week ago in Buffalo, which included an experiment in live and read interviewing, I’ve been thinking a bit about reading and what it means, how it succeeds and how it fails. I liked the experience, but wished desperately for better acoustics. I can’t stand using a microphone, so I didn’t use one for my solo portion of the reading. (After all, I wander the stage.)

But my thinking about reading was broader than these concerns. I was thinking about the meanings of “reading” and how they reverberate against each other. Think of reading as the silent reading by a person of someone else’s work. In doing that reading, that reader invents a new meaning for the text, one always latent in the text but one probably not quite what the writer had imagined. Or think of reading as an interpretation of a text, not just a silent reading but the reading followed by the words used to replace, to explain, the original text. Or think of a reading as a writer reading aloud the writer’s own work. Here we might imagine a perfectly correct presentation of the text, but how is that possible? How would it be possible for any reading to be a perfect representation of the text, since every reading-aloud of a text will be slightly different, suggesting something different.

So “reading” means “polysemy” more than it means anything else.

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Coincidentally, about an hour before Nancy and I land at JFK on our way back from Finland, there will be a launch of the journal P-Queue, which includes an essay by me and a large selection of my fidgetglyphs. My chapbook Eyechart Poems will also be released as part of that event. Here’s the full announcement:

How’s this for exciting? P-Queue has been invited to launch the 2009 volume at BOOG City this July! We’ll celebrate the release of volume 6, along with a welter of new chapbooks pushed through the Queue Press.

Here’s the post from BOOG City editor/organizer David Kirschenbaum:

Boog City presents

d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press

Season 6 finale:

P-Queue/Queue Books
(Buffalo, N.Y.)

Tues., July 28, 6:00 p.m. sharp, free

ACA Galleries
529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

Event will be hosted by
P-Queue/Queue Books editor Andrew Rippeon

Featuring readings from

José Felipe Alvergue
Stephen Collis
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Stephanie Strickland

and collaborative poetic-visual arts projects from

Mark Stephen Finein and Erica Lewis

There will be wine, cheese, and crackers, too.

Curated and with an introduction by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum

We plan to have on hand:

-The Precipice of Jupiter, a book-length collaboration between poet erica lewis and visual artist mark stephen finein
-Eyechart Poems, a series of interrogations of the reader’s ability to read, by poly-poet Geof Huth
-us look up / there red dwells José Felipe Alvergue’s multi-genre investigation of space and memory
-Pre-Chewed Tapas, poet Lytle Shaw’s translation of visual artist Jimbo Blachly’s Spanish journals

AND volume 6 of P-Queue! featuring work by:

Tyrone Williams
Lauren Shufran
Geof Huth
Divya Victor
Rob Halpern
Stephanie Strickland
Joe Harrington
Roberto Tejada
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Stephen Collis
Emily McVarish
David Brazil

Subsequent posts to the P-Queue blog will detail the bios of each reader. Thanks to David Kirschenbaum and BOOG City for this great opportunity, and thanks to all our wonderful readers!

I won’t be reading at this event for the simple reason that I won’t be able to make it. Given that it’ll take me about two hours to get out of JFK, I’m certain I won’t even be able to make it into Manhattan for the end of this shindig.

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It is possible that I’ll be the only person this year to be published in these two journals: if p then q and P-Queue. Not sure of the significance of this coincidence, but there must be some.

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In Buffalo, Tom Beckett asked me how many fidgetglyphs I’d created. I estimated that it was about 1500, but I’m sure it must be larger than that. I created, for instance, forty-two in a single day last month, and probably did a total of 100 that month as well. I don’t work on these constantly, but when I do I’m quite productive.

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A few weeks ago, Nancy (who follows the links to my blog much more assiduously than I do) noticed that Harper’s had a link off its website to a recent zombie poem of mine. Not much of a link to my—simply the words “a zombie poem” with an otherwise undescribed hyperlink to the only one of my zombie poems about Haitian zombies. It did, however, draw some readers to these pages.

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If I knew where I was going when I started to write, it wouldn’t be worth the trip.

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A friend gave me a small dictionary on Friday, a copy of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language from 1845, a nice little dictionary, and my only copy is from 1848, so this was a good addition (and edition). When I received the dictionary, I did what I always do with a new dictionary: I looked up the definition of “afterbirth,” which in this case was “the secundine.” Not entirely helpful, I thought (of the definition).

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There’s only one venue where I’ve read poetry twice, and that is the Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. The first time was with Nico Vassilakis and Erica Kaufman, and the second was with Crag Hill. The first was a sweaty affair in July, and the second was on one of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent in New York City. And I had a good time both times.

But now the Stain Bar is closed, and with it goes a good supporter of poetry in the person of Krista Madsen. Here’s her announcement (from the end of May) about the closing of Stain Bar.

It is with great sadness that I write the official goodbye now from Stain Bar. We've been somewhat quiet about our struggles to renew our lease since we always retained the hope that we would find a way to continue at 766 Grand. Alas, greedy landlord plus bad economy equals imminent demise. This weekend we'll be selling off whatever isn’t bolted down (well, we'll sell that too), so if you've ever lusted after a chair here or admired a knicknack, come on down to our cleaning-out party and cry into your last beer and remind us of all the good times.

I have so many memories I’ll have to write a book about it someday. Lots of people say that, but I mean it. I plan to write my bar book, with that cast of characters everyone promised me I’d meet when I opened a bar five years ago. It was the unlikeliest thing: woman with 6 months bartending experience embarking on this crazy venture. But against all the odds, it worked, not in way of wealth obviously but Stain became exactly the artistic community I dreamed it would be (and more)—supportive, welcoming to all kinds, open to any voices, if perhaps a tad overly fond of odd costume bashes.

Then I had a real baby (Stain was more of a pre-schooler by then) and needed some help. Luckily I found it in Caroline and Craig who have done such an amazing job of running the place and honoring its original vision, I am forever indebted.

Now it’s time to rest, reflect, and gather our strength up for the next big adventure. So stay tuned for maybe some Stain Bar The Sequel near you someday. And that novel.

With much love and gratitude to all of you who made this bar such a special place,

Krista Madsen
Founder, Stain Bar LLC

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Alex Gildzen is working on a tie project, or maybe a chapbook project. He is sending ties off to poets and asking them to keep the tie but return photos of them wearing the ties, which he hopes to print in a chapbook. Since Tom and I are both involved, we took our ties to Buffalo, so Nancy could take a picture of both of us wearing the ties.

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A week from now, Nancy and I will land in Helsinki.

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ecr. l’inf.

Voices

2009-07-03T23:04:00.002-04:00

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

Stilled, every voice is stilled sometimes, by lack of time, lack of energy, lack of reason (to). And sometimes only lack of sleep. We give in to the physical urges. We always give in. There is always a reason not to write. Mine tonight is sleep, and the fact that I have already written something: this.

ecr. l'inf.

What Stays the Same in the End

2009-07-02T23:58:00.004-04:00

Last week, at Doug Manson's apartment, the families Beckett and Huth were brought, face to cover, to their pasts, their published pasts. Tom and I both found evidence of ourselves in magazines Doug had out in his apartment (maybe in anticipation of our visit). The bulk of these magazines were student literary magazines from Kent State, which included dozens of poems (mostly minimalist) by Tom. In reading through these tonight, I'm struck by how much Tom was Tom even back in 1974, how his voice, the voice of his poems not his person, comes through, even in these tiny poems of a learning poet. I'm not sure if it is a gift or a burden to always be oneself, but it is a continuing revelation. Even as we change and ameliorate, we still are what we were in the past. We are never the same, of course, but neither are we different. We shuttle between difference and similarity. And just to make this point, if tinily so, here is a tiny conceptual poem by Tom from the year of my fourteenth birthday. (I give my age, since I'm not sure of Tom's at that point, probably very early 20s.)

ecr. l'inf.

Three Short Sections from an Ongoing Poetics

2009-07-01T23:17:00.001-04:00

13. Rumor

Poets don’t want to read poetry. They want to read about poetry. It is not poetry that fascinates them. It is the idea of poetry, the idea of some transcendent form of human creation that they never really experience. In the absence of poetry that resembles what they yearn for poetry to be, they read the stories of those who think they have found it. Poetry can function as it must only in those rare instances where it transforms as life as it is rumored to do.

14. Experience

Poetry as a product is merely experience, and the poet sells that experience. Poetry is valuable to the degree that it provides an experience not otherwise possible, a special torquing of the mind against the word, which might actually be a fulcrum. There is nothing that makes experience particularly the product of poetry; it is the only product we ever buy: a house, a beer, a movie, a dinner, a vacation, a poem—they are all experiences we purchase, for we live only for experiences. They may be varied, but they are merely that.

15. Material

My poetry is about the materiality of language, about the word as image or sound. It is a dirty poetry, one that dirties the hands and the teeth. My tongue is covered with mud, my hands are caked with dirt and covered in scratches from all the word worlds I try to create.

ecr. l'inf.

Protracted Life (or A Kind of Staring Poetics)

2009-06-30T23:49:00.001-04:00

Nico Vassilakis has been talking, for at least the last few months, about a change coming in visual poetry, some grand realignment of energies. Originally, the discussions focused on his own work, with him saying that he felt he had to go in a new direction and put his old work behind him, move on to something new. He is now presaging a new era in visual poetry—he knows not what—a sea change that will present us with a radical new concept of the visual poem, with a new way to head with those experiments.

I welcome change because I welcome variety, but I cannot see into the future, and I cannot sense the coming of a change. I can see a change while it’s happening but not before. So maybe some big change is coming, or maybe not. And I’ll count on the latter, since most changes are slow and evolutionary, rather than fast and revolutionary.

While we wait for this change, while we even hope for it, while Nico continues to think about it himself, wondering if visual poetry has met a wall that it cannot pass over or through—as all this is happening, it makes sense to me to look into the past, the past of Nico’s own visual poetry, a couple of decades of work playing with the letter and the visible word, of reducing the visual by focusing, of finding and making what are (through tightness of closeup and connections) reverberation verbo-visual constructs. It might satisfy our thoughts (or the desires of our thoughts) by allowing us to find what is transformative, even transcendent, in the work of visual poets, those people possessed by the idea of the typographic object as a a textual object of desire.

To do this I could I could spend my words here examining a dozen or so of Nico’s visual poems in the recently released book, Protracted Type, highlighting certain series of works (because Nico works in series) and showing the beauty of these poems and the meaning that hides in plain sight, before us. Instead, let me assure you that this book is filled with over 250 pages of visual poems, probably a few hundred, and that these poems exhibit a broad verbo-visual imagination, one focused usually on the letter but interested in the word, one that understands the architectonic structure of written language and its various characters, one that ranges wildly over a veldt of unimagined breadth, one that carries the soul of humankind in the upturned palms of its careful tiny hands. But you can download a free PDF of Nico’s book from the link above, and you can pore over its pages in a few minutes, like water from a shower head, and you can be drenched in his poetry, cleaned of the grime of the unimaginative letter, in a pocketful of minutes, ready to dry yourself off and prepare for the day.

So I want to discuss Nico’s poetics, because he is so often mute about that, telling us little beyond the importance of staring, what I call a focus on the textual object of contemplation. This is important because Nico is one of the important visual poets of our time (assuming such importance is even measurable, let alone comparable) and because his words also tell us something about his process (one that reminds me of my own—more of a succumbing than an attack).

So I will present and respond to a few of the examples of Nico’s poetics, which are scattered through the pages of Protracted Type, a solid little brick of a book as sturdy as Nico’s own poems.

A kind of Staring Poetics

This line appears alone on a page, and pages from any other prose, yet it tells us the story. Nico’s poetics is about staring, about how staring during the production of a visual mind frees the mind from active thought and allows the subconscious mind to make beautiful connections, and how the created visual poem is made alive again by the action of staring, of heady concentration, of allowing the poem to be seen and consumed.

You wait for time and it reveals. Composition comes in view. Again staring, the procedure is to get. Then get lost. Then stare your way back into focus.

The visual poet is an actor in the creation of a visual poem, but mostly as a discoverer, someone who discovers a connection to make, a way to arrange letters, a new way to make them. The visual poet cannot allow too much conscious thought (too much of the thinking mind of the visual poet) to enter the poem—at least in Nico’s processes—because the visual poem is about finding a means to understanding by dtaking the time understand.

Writing as field recording device. Stenographer’s translation. How uncomfortable is it to say, I document what thinking arranges for me. It’s a situation I observe. Where my thinking goes. Watching my thinking think. Documenting my staring. Evidence against the collapsing scaffold of convenience. Getting ready to write for writing. For documenting.

Writing a visual poem is capture not creation to Nico, a translation of something seen, a creation of the mind at play. The mind functions on two levels: the conscious and the unconscious. And the conscious mind watches what the unconscious creates. Imagine your fingers moving things into place (through play) without any conscious thought about how things work together. You can imagine it because you do it all the time, then realize you are done. You know you have made it, but do not want the credit. Consciously, you give over to the unconscious.

As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further.

Staring pulls apart the apparent structure of letters, of words, of meaning, and allows other meanings to arise (to be created, to be seen). There are deeper meanings and connections and contexts within letters and between them than our thinking mind imagines, so another mind creates the visual poem and that same mind comprehends, apprehends, it.

Each letter contains a history that is both personal and communal.

Nico is a man of the textual imagination. He understands that letters, even individually but more so in groups, in contexts, carry meanings beyond the normal range of literature. He understands that a letter has personal significance (maybe the V for him more than for the majority of us) and that language and letter are shared traits of a culture, that they mean, in some ways, for one as they do for all. He understands.

I let my brain do the thinking. I watch it think for me. There’s an enjoyment I get seeing where it goes… I’m not in charge of this activity. I’m not willfully in charge. I’m not drirecting the seeing. My brain looks up, acquired information, and it sees for me… It makes the connection and I am simply viewing.

The brain, you see, is a separate thing from the body, maybe the consciousness of a Martian, for it is Martians that are the source of all inspiration, all ideas for poetry. We watch the Martian make. We view it making. We see what it makes.

These few words of Nico’s, though there are a number more—though not a huge number—give us some insight into Nico’s work and what he sees that work as doing. I see it as important to understand how Nico thinks about visual poetry. I tried, once, in the early part of 2005, to interview Nico about his work, but we made it only a few questions into the interview before Nico wanted to take a break. Explanation isn’t his ballgame, so when he does explain he is poetic rather than direct. A good way to be. But it is good to have some additional insight into the work of an important visual poet, so I’m glad to have this scattered and clearheaded poetics within Protracted Type. I don’t think that understanding Nico’s processes and poetics is essential to understanding his poetry, but it is interesting, and we’re here to be interested (or to move on).

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Vassilakis, Nico. Protracted Type. Blue Lion Books: West Hartford, Ct. and Puhos, Kitee, Finland, 2009.

ecr. l’inf.

Huth/Beckett

2009-06-29T23:57:00.000-04:00

After a long winter, Buffalo, New York, becomes warm, too warm maybe for two middle-aged poets wandering the city as they waited to give a poetic performance that was part-interview, part-poetry, and even part singing. We had no plan for the day, so it resembled life more than art.

By mid-morning we’d decided that we, along with Nancy and Tom’s wife Barb, decided to visit Doug Manson, who had set up this event for us, and that visit was a revelation. I never expected to see old copies of Luigi-Bob Drake’s tabloid TapRoot Reviews lying out, with the issue featuring my press, dbqp, lying on the top. And I’d no idea he had a collection of old student magazines, many of them with poems by Tom Beckett from the early 1970s, when Devo was the hot local musical act.

For lunch, we ate a huge meal at a Greek restaurant, since Tom and I had a need to quench a desire for octopus. I had a huge plate of octopus, a huge plate of smelts with unusually delicate tasting dandelion greens prepared as a potherb, and a plate of taramosalata. We had a fine meal. After lunch, Doug left us and the rest of us strolled through the Albright-Knox Art Museum, admiring what is always the surprising range and quality of works in this small museum, sending a photo with my phone of a Magritte painting to Mark Young (who goes ekphrastic for Magritte), admiring the single Salvador Dali, taking in the works slowly. After the museum, the four of us rested at a coffee shop on Elmwood Avenue, which is where Tom and I decided what parts to read from our interview. We had plenty of time (about two hours before our performance), and we didn’t want to overprepare.

The Space Tom Beckett and Geof Huth Performed Within, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
The Karpeles Manuscript Library on Porter Street is one of the many such libraries across the country, and one of two in Buffalo itself. This one is a repurposed museum, and Tom and I performed in this cavernous echoing space, on a shallow stage that sat right in front of a giant nonfunctioning organ.

Geof Huth and Michael Basinski, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
The crowd for the reading was quite small, numbering eleven at its height (not counting our wives or Doug), but I was glad when Michael Basinski, a fellow visual poet and a manuscript curator at the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection, arrived. I hadn’t seen him for a number of years, and we had fun talking about being at a conference of archivists in New Orleans about a week before Katrina hit, about how the fiscal problems in the state were affecting our two state institutions, and about poetry in general. One of the biggest surprises was the arrival of Ralph LaCharity, a Cincinnati-based poet whom Tom knows quite well, whom I knew a little, but whom I’d never met before.

Tom Beckett Preparing for the Reading, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
In the minutes before the reading, Tom and I reviewed our notes and tried to prepare ourselves for the reading,

Geof Huth Preparing for the Reading, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
wondering how the interview would work and how our voices might carry and be distorted by the giant echoing chamber we stood within.

Tom Beckett and Geof Huth at the Table, with Doug Manson Introducing Them, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
Adhering to poetry time, we began late. Doug gave a little introduction to us, paying particular to our biographies, which I thought appropriate, considering that we were performing an interview already on paper, but expanding it extemporaneously. The interview, after all, containing plenty of autobiographical information from both Tom and me.

Tom Beckett and Geof Huth during the Interview, Karpeles Manuscript Library, Buffalo, New York (28 June 2009)
(photo by NF Huth)
The interview itself began interestingly. I opened with this question:

Tom, we are stuck on this planet with no hope for escape, except through death. Do you believe poetry gives us a reason to desire to live longer? Can it truly inspire? And if so, why does it seem to work for so few people? Why do people use the word “poetry” to describe something ineffably beautiful (“poetry in motion,” “the poetry of daily life,” “the poetry of nature”)—unless they are talking about poetry itself, in which case “poetry” becomes a term of derision, a marker of what in life we find boring?

After I read the question, Tom looked at his copy of the interview, flipped a few pages, paused to think, paused some more, and then finally said he was going to skip an answer and move on—and so he did. I wondered how the interview would work if Tom skipped all the answers, but he later told me that the question itself has said everything that needed saying. After that opening, we moved forward well. We learned, quickly, how to choose what part of the interview to read aloud and how to add to the interview as we went. We had some fun, told some jokes. Tom even told part of my biography for me. Occasionally, members of the audience asked us questions. We had a good time, though I would have done better with a larger audience. (Anyone who does any public speaking knows that a larger audience is easier to manage, to control even, because people in large crowds become anonymous, lose their inhibitions, participate more fully in the event at hand, and clap with more vigor.)

After this, we took a ten-minute break and lost three members of the audience, quite a large loss from an audience of this size.

Tom opened the readings. He stood at the podium and read into the microphone. He read the long poem “Vanishing Points of Resemblance” (his masterpiece), “This Poem,” and “What Speaks?” taking only twenty-two minutes for his reading. From my point of view, Tom grew into the reading, starting slightly tentatively, but moving forward into the reading, and adding with a muscular reading of the final poem. Tom spoke right into the microphone, and his voice remained as it always is: an example of perfect clarity.

After Tom’s solo reading, Tom and I both occupied the stage, reading poems we had written for the interview itself. At this point, Tom’s voice was the more powerful one, and sometimes I cannot hear myself well on the video Nancy took. I was a little amazed at how long “The Pornographer’s Apprentice” seemed when read aloud. This part of the reading took twelve minutes.

The last part of the reading was me alone. I showed a few visual poems, not reading them aloud (since I didn’t want to make the reading any longer than it had to be). My reading was as it always is: I wandered barefoot across the stage as I read, often standing right at the edge and curling my toes over it. I crumpled most of the poems I read and tossed them off the stage (representing the fact that I’d never read them in public again). I let slip the visual poems slip out of my hands and rock to the floor. At the end of the reading, I sang a poemsong, one that began with a little didgeridoo playing and including a tiny bit of drumming on my Ghanaian drum. For this song, I occasionally yelled up into the great cavernous space of this abandoned church, and I screamed. The room echoed pleasantly. I performed for seventeen minutes

Afterwards, most of the audience left quickly. Michael Basinski told me that the night was a fine experience. Ralph LaCharity told me he enjoyed the didgeridoo playing but not the drums, but said the night gave him plenty to consider, and he wanted to do that alone on his way back home.

Over all, it was good night, and eventually I’ll have some adequate (though dark) video online to prove it. The evening came with two free gifts, though only about ten left the building:

Geof Huth and Tom Beckett. Interpenetrations Buffalo. little scratch pad: Buffalo, 2009. (Available from Douglas Manson.)

Geof Huth. Interpenetrations Buffalo. pdqb: Schenectady, N.Y., 2009.

With Buffalo done, Tom and I are ready for another venue.

ecr. l’inf.

Talking Leaves

2009-06-28T23:29:00.003-04:00

Every leaf of every book talks to us, even if it is nothing but an image, even if it is a blank page.

I had intended to write tonight about the reading Tom Beckett and I had given yesterday at the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Buffalo, New York, but I cannot succeed tonight in posting any of the pictures from last night, so I’ll write about another favorite topic of mine, and one ignored for a while (as a topic, not as an act of commerce): buying poetry.

What I argue, and what I must argue, is that poetry cannot last on its own, it cannot survive without support, so one essential role of poets is to support poetry. Writing poetry is fine and good, but its focus is always on the self, and the self’s need to write, to be seen, to (more importantly) be heard. Poets, though, must support poetry by attending readings, talking about poets and poetry, giving support of all kinds to fellow poets when they need it, and by buying poetry. We, as poets, exist only insofar as someone reads us, without that reading there are no poets, at least no poets who can survive after death. That is why buying poetry is important.

Certainly, it is possible to read books for free, and that is all part of supporting poetry, but the act of buying poetry forces us to prove that we value poetry because, yes, the dollar, the euro, the pound, they all symbolize the value of the poems we decide to read. With this in mind, here are the books I picked up yesterday at Talking Leaves, 3158 Main Street, Buffalo, New York:

6X6 # 14: hill of milk hill of filth (2007).
6X6 # 17: I was ashamed of the poems, and still I’m ashamed (2009).
Antin, David and Charles Bernstein. A Conversation with David Antin / Album Notes by David Antin (2002).
[This interview between David Antin and Charles Bernstein, carried out via email for four months, reminds me of Tom Beckett’s and my recent yearlong interview.]
Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (2005).
Christensen, Inger. Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, translated by Susanna Nied (2004).
Christensen, Inger. it, translated by Susanna Nied (2006).
Creeley, Robert / Marisol. Presences: A Text for Marisol (1976)
[The first image in this book is Marisol’s Baby Girl, which I saw later in the day in person at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo—coincidences, always.]
Cutts, Simon. as if it is at all: Simon Cutts: Some Poems 1995-2006 (2007).
Cutts, Simon. A Smell of Printing (2000).
Grim, Jessica. Fray (1998).
Johnson, Ronald. Radi os (2005).

To be fair, I did receive a few free books yesterday as well:

From Doug Manson:

Bartell, Jaye. Ever After Never Under: 20 Choruses (2008)
Basinski, Michael. Of Venus 93 (2007).
Huth, Geof and Tom Beckett. Interpenetrations: Buffalo (2009).
Manson, Douglas. The Dew Neal (2004).
Skinner, Jonathan. With Naked Foot (2009).

From Ralph LaCharity:

LaCharity, Ralph. Seatticus Knight (1985).

I find it interesting that the name of only one author in that list is from the second half of the alphabet. So I’d better focus on the second half next time. Talking Leaves has a poetry section that is quite large and diverse, so I’ll have to go back the next time I’m in Buffalo.

ecr. l’inf.

Huth Road and Where it Goes

2009-06-27T23:59:00.003-04:00

Hampton Inn Buffalo-Williamsville, Room 200, Williamsville, New York

On the way to Buffalo (from nextdoor Williamsville, New York) today, Tom Beckett. pointed out that we were about to pass Huth Road, a Huth Road I didn't even know about. I immediately turned into a parking lot, parked, grabbed my camera, and then asked Nancy to take a picture of me while I held myself off the ground between the two poles holding up the roadsign. It was an exciting moment, and I have Tom to thank for that.

I also have Tom to thank for this evening. It was his idea that to carry out a yearlong interview. It was his idea to create a poetic performance that combined reading from that interview, extending it, and reading our own poetry. It was he who ran into Douglas Manson, told us about out plans for such a performance, and started the process of arranging for this event. We had a great night tonight, in a remarkable space, but I don't have the will to write about it tonight, so we'll wait for tomorrow for the details.

For now, my thanks to Tom, to Doug, and to those people who came out to see us tonight.

ecr. l'inf.