oddright

wrongeven

ecr. l'inf.

The Post-Garde (or Absence) (A Fifty-Fourth Letter to a Young Imaginary Visual Poet)

I am a creator (writer, poet, drawer, thinker) of at least bifurcated influences and traditions. Not moored to one dock. Not moored, but floating. Not waving, but there seems another way about this. So that's where I come from, which may be nowhere, or nothing, or the substitute we make for nothing when nothing isn't handy.

Just, I know, verbal legerdemain, but my fingers type so fast they seem to float, and I am filled with words I need to spill now: spit, urine, glowescent seed, the various syrups of the body and how they coat the world around us.

I like your question, certain, always do like them. It was just that I had run out of time to respond, or effort, for there's always something to put aside, sometimes sleep, often sleep, for sleep does no good except that it prepares us for unsleep. You know my recent projects, my self-imposed deadlines, so I hope you understand that silence, but to ask me a simple question twice seems almost rude, at least leaning in that direction.

But I've an answer: No.

Seems, it really does, that this answer might not suffice. The avant-garde seems pretty much dead, or, possibly, I'm inured to it, thus unable to recognize it. But I see nothing avant-garde anywhere. It is difficult for me to imagine what the avant-garde might be today, and I say that as a writer who has ridden one think wave of the avant-garde for year, for, you see, there is still some power to it, some kinetic energy running itself through, and that is where I am. Sometimes, at least. But I don't see it as avant-garde. The wave crested decades ago.

So there are those post-gardists who imagine themselves as the leading force of some scimitar'd army slicing through the ranks of the dull, but, strangely, the most vibrant avant-garde performance I've seen in the past few years was a dadaist reading, essentially a revivification of an old set of mannerisms, but presented with great power and excitement. But power and excitement aren't avant-garde, newness is, and I can't find anything that meets that definition.

Certainly, people are doing new things, creating in new ways (new tools, new products, for poetry is a product). I look at these all the time and enjoy them often. But everything is a new tool utilizing an old trope. We carry a bag of tricks, and that bag is quite new, and stylish, but the tricks themselves are still old. We create new things with the, but not the new.

I mean, what would a new thing be? Take visual poetry. It is simply impossible to reduce text beyond the point that Bob Cobbing did and still have even the re-echo of text--and Cobbing is no longer with us. With sound poetry, the great innovations in practice were all in place by the 1970s. We can create more dramatic soundscapes with today's technical tools, but the core remains. People have created punctuation poetry for years now, and the focus on those textual ornaments is understood seemingly fully. In the world of textual poetry, what is there to do? We have poems a single word in length (pwoermds), some as small as three characters, maybe even two, and we have poems that are many long books long. Size has been tested in all directions. The physical presentation of text has been fully explored, and we've had multimedia texts for a while. (Okay, maybe there's a little more experimenting to do there, but it builds on previous hypertextual works.) We have seen enough experiments with syntax to know that poets have already completely dismantled syntax and then, even, obscured the meaning of the unconnectable words. So the post-syntactic revolution is completed. And we have had many digital texts that create themselves randomly or semi-randomly (with input or encouragement from a reader). So what is left to do? What new?

Sure, the creation of a fully-sensual textual experience (olfactory, aural, verbal, tactile, visual) remains illusive, but those will always be rare. The avant-garde is played out, leaving behind nothing but its trajectory, which we can follow, and which we actually do. It moves in a shallow arc forward. We know it will hit the ground soon. So what can we do? Start running on impact.

Maybe every way has been created, but every thing has not.

My friend Nico Vassilakis believes that a big change is coming in visual poetry, and soon, but I don't see it. I look over Nico's shoulder, just in case. I watch closely what he does, just in case. But I'm confident the big new thing will be the revamped old thing, maybe a little shinier, a little louder, a little more apt to garner some attention, but not avant-garde.

The avant-garde is dead. All that remains of it is the mourners, and we're a boisterous bunch but we still cannot wake the dead.

Now, is all this something to worry about? No. Permanent newness was always an impossible dream. We are mixers, we are alchemists, we are the ones left behind to play with the ideas of our elders and see what things we can produce. We have a giant history to work from. This rich history doesn't allow us to be new, but it allows us the chance to see things from a different perspective, even more than one at a time, ad that will allow us to create signature works of art, if we're lucky and hard-working enough to be in that tiny few.

And you can be part of that. What else could matter? You can't be a god; you can't create everything.

ecr. l'inf.

Comic over Cosmic, Ocular over Oracular

Roy Arenella, "ORACULAR" (14 November 2009)
Since I do not regularly post mailart I send or receive anymore (the requirements of time not allowing me to tend to all my desires), I sometimes allow striking pieces of work to pass under my eyes without remark, but I cannot do this today for this tiny visual essay I received today from Roy Arenella. Roy has lived less than an hour from me for the past few years, yet we are more likely to send each other mail, on paper and decorated with stamps, than to communicate in any other way. This card from Roy is a standard piece of mailart from Roy: numbered 271, it is a 13c postal card (Robert Morris is the person on the postage), superillustrated with an extra 3c Edgar Allan Poe stamp, and two 5c stamps recognizing the 700th anniversary of Dante; this comes to me from KORES POND, the world where Roy works; and the back of the card is covered with Roy's careful handwriting and rubberstamping. And, more importantly, the essay on the back of the card, which is a note appended to the floating title that tells us everything, is focused on an issue central to Roy's poetics: the eyedea that a poetry of the eye is better, stronger, purer than one of the ear.

Roy argues this case from time to time, believing that the ocular effects of poetry are too often overrun by its aural effects, those that are more recognized as being in the province of poetry. Visual poetry is less than a poor relative of "normal" poetry. It is not even recognized as poetry (often, not even by me). I may be a poet who tries to work with the three modes of language (sight, sound, and sense), but I am always drawn to the visual, always recognizing how people ignore it, always accepting that all poetry (except for certain sound poetry created as it is first performed) are visual, that poetry distinguishes itself from prose by the importance of its shape on that page, that we are still more a textual than an oral civilization.

And yet we are beasts of sound. We can't escape it. Even though my pwoermds, for instance, usually have to exist as textual (and, thus, visual) objects to exist, to be understood, they are still oven aural experiences as well, or potentially so. (It's just that they work best as signs in space, rather than signs in time.) We still write poetry that is for the ear, and that is both an aural and meaningful aspect of poetry.

I will end by noting the ironic sonic dimensions of Roy's note: how he contracts the comic (eyepoetry) with the cosmic (earpoetry), how he finds the sound "ocular" within "oracular" (thought this is also a visual discovery), how--even--the giant O in the final word of the essay gives a certain stress to the word "pOetry."

And yet how perfectly visual is Roy's essay, how it holds together for the eye best of all.

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for instance, the gr ligature

Detail of Logo of Gryphon Teashop, Savannah, Georgia (4 November 2009)
tho we will have to hope for a better design for this ligature before it becomes widely used:

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poems so small they fall between the floorboards and are lost

As I sat here wondering how to begin this little attempt at writing, I started to draw glyphs with my fingernails into the microfiber nap of the couch. The fiber performs much like a magic tablet. If I smooth the nap in one direction, I can erase everything I’ve created and start anew with a blank slate.

But today I wasn’t working with a blank slate. I was trying to find the multitudinous slates I’d filled with information and stored willy-nilly in my house and on the Internet. I was trying, finally, to find every last pwoermd I’d ever written and collect them all in one place. And I’m doing this because I’m preparing a manuscript for the UK publisher if p then q, and I’d promised James Davis to have the manuscript to him about two weeks ago. Unexpectedly, the manuscript I’m preparing is called flintsteel: the collected pwoermds of geof huth, which is a title a created recently without any thought that I’d have cause to use it for many years.

Truth be told, this collected pwoermd won’t be quite a collected anyway. Almost immediately I will create pwoermds that won’t appear in the book. The book won’t include any of my visual pwoermds, and I have quite a few of those. This won’t include any of the 300 pwoermds I wrote with mIEKAL aND (and that’s too bad, since those would push the number of pwoermds in this book over one thousand.) And I’m still sure there’s a pwoermd or more somewhere that I haven’t yet tracked down.

Still, I see the value in the book. It allows me to collect all these pwoermd together, some of which have appeared in books, but most of which have appeared only on blogs or on slips of paper no-one besides me has ever seen. This book will contain the complete text of the second edition of wreadings, my first book of pwoermds (and which is still in print); all the pwoermds that form part of any other book I’ve written, whether published or not (and this includes at least ten different books or chapbooks); all my pwoermds (I hope) from my blogs dbqp: visualizing poetics, InterNaPwoWriMo (International Pwoermd Writing Month), and m+i+n+i+m (a tumblr blog I abandoned at the very beginning of 2008); the pwoermds from my often too-busy Twitter microblog, which I call atwhich, even though I don’t mark it so; any pwoermds that have been published in magazines; and a few pwoermds that have not been collected or published anywhere previously.

I thought this would be a simple project, but it is quite complicated. I have been forced to recall where I’ve stored all these pwoermds, and then I have to find them all. I’ve been working on this project for a couple of months now, but I spent my entire day today working on this. I didn’t shower, I didn’t read any books, I didn’t even write anything (except for this, a few emails, and a few blips on Google Wave—as I try to become fluent in that means of communication). And, now, by the end of the day, I think I have a good first draft of the document.

All I have to do now is proofread the document (which can be a challenge with pwoermds, since they often resemble misspellings), create a bibliography explaining where these pwoermds appeared in the past, and typeset the book. That will take me a while, but maybe I can find some time tomorrow night to catch up on the blogging of some interesting events in my life.

Before I go, here is one of my favorite pwoermds, and one of only two pwoermds in Finnish in the book. What this pwoermd does is make all the a’s in the Finnish word for incomprehensible into ä’s, thus changing the meaning of the word, and making it almost incomprehensible, but not really. This pwoermd elicited a laugh from the primarily Finnish audience for my reading in Turku, Finland, this past July.

käsättämätän
And there’s part of the joy of pwoermdy, even if it doesn’t work for most of us English speakers.

And that’s only one reason out of about 700 to purchase a copy of flintsteel: the collected pwoermds of geof huth when it comes out sometime next year.

ecr. l’inf.

fr, for instance

The limited number of ligatures common in type design doesn't necessarily mean there is a limited need for other ligatures. (Every week, I wonder why a certain ligature doesn't exist even in limited use.) The cause seems primarily a hewing to convention. Ligatures are invisible to most people anyway, so why not create hundreds more just to see how they might be used?

ecr. l'inf.

Sauna Poetry, or Gertrude Stein Creates Everything

As I like to say, I’ll go a long way for poetry, so after work yesterday I drove a little more than an hour to Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson to hear Rachel Blau DuPlessis give a reading. I don’t normally pay attention to the readings taking place at Bard, but our friend Anne Gorrick had given Nancy and me a few days’ forewarning, so I was able to make it—not Nancy, however. She had a bit of training after work. At the moment her training ended, an hour away in Albany, DuPlessis was preparing to read in the Weis Cinema in the Bertelsman Campus Center at Bard College.

Arriving at the campus center, I asked a young woman for directions to the reading. As expected, she’d no idea that a poetry reading would be going on nearby, but she discovered where it was and gave me bad directions to where it would take place: down a hallway, and I’d see it on my right. Unfortunately, I saw no theater on my right and returned down the hallway to ask for clarification. On the way, I ran into my friends Anne Gorrick and Lynn Behrendt, and I immediately told them they were in charge of finding our way to the theater. They did this by looking on the left hand side of the hallway. And, once again, I learned that I can focus so much that I miss everything.

Once upon the sloping floor of the theater, we noticed we were the only people there even though the event was set to start in twelve minutes. A man in charge of the theater was working on the microphone at the time, and he explained that people would begin to arrive a little after six. We did not explain to him that we had attended poetry readings before in our lives. Then the four of us discussed the distinct but subtle scent of burning wood in the theater, noting that the building was probably not burning down and that the smell was quite pleasant.

Soon Joan Retallack arrived with Rachel Blau DuPlessis in tow, and almost immediately Retallack discovered that she’d left her introduction to Rachel at home and that an introduction for someone else was resting on the podium. Even though Retallack doesn’t know me (we’d spoken only once and briefly), I suggested she simply use the found introduction and substitute Rachel’s name for whatever name was on the document. Rachel said she liked that idea, but Retallack did not, so she left to fetch the real introduction.

Left alone with the three of us, Rachel sat down next to us and asked us who we were, and we began talking. She asked me if I taught, and I explained that I could never teach (though I didn’t explain this was because I’d taught freshman English for a year and I couldn’t stand the thought of grading papers ever again). She asked me what I did, and I explained that I was an archivist at the New York State Archives. She then showed some knowledge of archives, essentially asking if I worked for a collecting or an institutional archives. I wondered how she even knew to ask such a question, and she explained that her husband was an historian. She next asked me how I came to be an archivist, and I explained that I was a poet but (as Anne explained) poetry is not a lucrative field, so I decided to go into either archivy or lexicography—and, as Rachel added, there are even fewer jobs in lexicography than the field of archives. I congratulated her on her unusual insight.

I introduced Lynn to Rachel as one of her biggest fans, and Lynn and Anne began to compliment Rachel, who seemed honestly amazed that there were people who were fans of hers, that someone might drive to Bard from distant Schenectady to hear her read. It seemed impossible to me that Rachel wouldn’t know she had such fans, but I came to believe that her modesty simply forbade her to believe it.

Before it was too late, I asked Rachel to sign my copy of Drafts 39 – 57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis. She inscribed it “to Geoff / a for / from the poet / Rachel Blau DuPlessis / @ Bard / Nov 2009,” giving my name an extra f.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Jacket Waiting for her Reading to Begin, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (12 Nov 2009)
Soon enough, Joan Retallack had returned and the cinema had filled with an audience, one consisting primarily of students, but the stately Robert Kelly came and sat next to me. He said hi to Lynn and Anne, and I reintroduced myself. Just before the reading started, I noted that the rooms smelled like a sauna, and it was not merely the slight scent of smoke that made me think that. That sudden return to Finland, one of my favorite countries, might have helped make the evening as enjoyable as it was—though I think it had more to do with Rachel Blau DuPlessis herself.

Joan gave a detailed introduction of Rachel, focusing on her importance—as a female known for writing a “long poem incorporating history,” a form usually associated with men. She also explained that the event we were experiencing would combine the reading of poetry with the reading of essays, along with questions from us. Then we began.

Rachel put her poem in context, explaining that it is “very strange to write extreme poetry,” “a long poem taking twenty-five years.” She discussed the publication of the poem, putting it in context for us. Then she began reading “Draft 93,” which she explained was “one of the short ones,” along with Drafts 31 and 62, and she asked us to wonder if that was an accident. Afterwards, she read “Draft 95: Erg.” At one point in the reading of this poem, Rachel misread one of her lines, and she interrupted the poem to say, “I should know my poems.” She did something similar the other time or two she made a mistake, and there was something ingratiating about this. Rachel presented herself to us as Rachel (hence my use of her given name), unpretentious, authentic, even unconcerned about how people viewed her, and totally comfortable with her own place in the world. Her manner made for a good read because she was completely accessible—even as she read for 20 to 25 minutes at a stretch.

At one point, she talked about how that during the writing of a poem “decisions are made in a second,” something I experience in my own life. But she almost took that back when she noted later that each of the poems in Drafts takes her at least a couple of weeks and sometimes several weeks, which is something I cannot imagine. I must flush the poem from my system or remained haunted by its possibility forever. But Rachel claimed to be able to create poetry in a flow yet still take a long time to complete the poem. I don’t doubt her, but I find that state of affairs to be an interesting conflict.

As she continued with # 95, she let one line lodge itself firmly in my mind:

the Pentecost of every now
As she continued reading # 95, and making references to pens directly and as parts of words (cf “Pentecost” above), he would hold the pen up straight and vertical, so that the physical pen could serve as a reference to the physical pen referenced in the Drafts. At one point, she used the phrase “dream of a pen,” and she held the pen horizontal, as if it were sleeping in bed.

Geof Huth, “fidgetglyph for rachel blau duplessis” (12 Nov 2009)
During her reading, I did something I hadn’t done before. I created a fidgetglyph in response to her reading. Some of the shapes I drew were letters or words based on what she was saying and others were glyphlike shapes made to represent parts of her poem. This is a messy and centerless little fidgetglyph, structurally unlike my usual pieces, and that is what I like about it. This piece isn’t good enough to stand as is, but it’ll serve as a draft for a piece that may someday be good. My thanks to Rachel for the inspiration.

One of the most interesting of Rachel’s discussions of her poetry preceded her reading of “Draft 88: X-Posting,” which she calls “a free variation” on Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Keine Delikatessen.” She translated the poem, extended it, and then rewrote it, leaving in very few of the original words of the poem. And Rachels’ own reactions to this act of hers were interesting: “But this was a very shocking act to me,” but it “seemed a very necessary act.” She talked about seeing “appropriation as a necessary cultural act.”

She followed up the reading of “Draft 88” with one of “Draft 89: Interrogation,” which is an examination, in the form of a dialog, of what she had done in # 88. As she read this playlet, written in couplets (one voice per line), she alternated her voice. The voice of the question was quick and loud, but that of the response was slow, measured, and quiet.

Rachel continued with a discussion of feminism, one I found interesting, open, and inviting. One that accepted the need for women to receive the respect of equality in this world, but also accepted that that equality was merely good for the world.

She ended with “Draft 75: Doggerel,” a funny poem in rhyming couplets—which she explained was “a form difficult to write well.” She encouraged the audience to laugh ahead of time by noting, “If you think it’s funny, you’re probably right—it’s funny.” This poem makes many references to pet-peeve grammar rules in English, and it is chockfull of puns, many based on the word “dog.”

Rachel read for over an hour, probably for 90 minutes, but I lost track of time. I recorded the audio of at least half of the reading, and the files I created were huge, but while listening to her read everything seemed to go by quickly. I didn’t notice the time. Part of the reason for this was Rachel’s reading style, which was very colloquial, completely natural, and lively. She gave life to her words, and she gave them clarity. I could see her poems better than ever by hearing her read them, which was a pleasure.

The evening’s festivities came to an end with a too-brief question and answer period. I wanted to ask Rachel what she saw as the purpose of her punning, which is sometimes quite goofy (intentionally so—and I see no problem with that, but I wanted to understand her purpose). Also, I wanted to know more about how she used appropriation in her work, so that I could compare it to what I do. I noted to her that I had appropriated a little bit of Drafts in one of the poem I just finished, and I thought that appropriate since she had appropriated others’ work all throughout that long poem. Rachel’s answers to people’s questions were always illuminating, though they didn’t always illuminate the question at hand. My favorite part of the Q&A was the end where she made (and backed up) the claim that women were the progenitors of modernism, one woman creating stream of consciousness, another created the glossed text as poem. Someone asked her “What about Gertrude Stein?” and Rachel stopped, said she was surprised to have forgotten Gertrude Stein, and then she said exactly what I was thinking: “Gertrude Stein creates everything.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis Speaking to Anne Gorrick and Lynn Behrendt after her Reading, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (12 Nov 2009)
After the reading, I climbed over the row of seats in front of me to buy a copy of Rachel’s Torques: Drafts 58 – 76, specifically the copy that she had read from that evening. (Lynn was the only other one to buy anything and she bought the other copy of that book and a copy of Drafts 39 – 57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis.) I had Rachel sign this copy as well, explaining that there was only one f in “Geof.” She offered to cross out the extra f in the other inscription, but I noted it was unnecessary and no problem. She signed this book “to Geof— / with spelling error / corrected! / Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” which I enjoyed quite a bit. I asked Rachel if I could take her photo and she said yes, but she wanted me to take a photo of her with Joan Retallack and Anne Lauterbach, who was in the audience, but the three of them never came together, and Joan was anxious to get to the next part of their evening (dinner, I believe), so I took a shot of Rachel talking to Anne Gorrick and Lynn Behrendt.

As Rachel left, I thought of something she had said earlier (that she was writing a book about “masculinity in literature”), so I told her, “Be sure to include Ron [Silliman] in your book on masculinity in literature.” She replied, “I think Ron has progressed beyond that.” And she was gone.

After the reading, Lynn, Anne, and I were quite excited by our evening of fun. We headed off to nearby Tivoli (yes, the one in New York) for dinner. We spoke about the evening and the reading, debated how well “Draft 75: Doggerel” worked, ate plenty, talked about our recent writing, discussed Anne’s two upcoming books of poetry (a paired set) and Lynn’s first full-length book of poetry, laughed, and had a great time.

Then I drove home in the dark, making it back here before midnight.

Quite a long story, I know. And I left out the part where, on the way to Bard I spilled a huge amount of tea on myself (mostly on my white dress shirt), stopped at a convenience stored and cleaned my shirt with hand soap and water in a sink, walked out of the restroom dripping wet, turned the heater in the car up to high heat and full blast, and somehow dried up completely, looking reasonably presentable at Bard.

Or maybe I didn’t leave out that part.

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Things Left to Write About

Meeting Aaron Tieger in Cambridge, Mass.

A visit to the Storm King Art Center.

Rachel Blau du Plessis reading at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

And those are only the recent events I have not written about.

I still have a visit to a visual poet's studio, another reading or two, and even my last day in Finland.

Just now I'm back from Bard, and this weekend I visit Purchase to see a play.

I can either live more or write more. I'm choosing living, but I'm not sure it's the right choice.

Right now, I'm choosing sleep.

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The Two Phoenixes

I would have posted tonight commentary on Nancy's and my trip today to the sculpture park just south of Newburgh, New York, that goes by the name Storm King Art Center. But I cannot get any photos to post. So I return to an easy but interesting story. The phoenixlike rebirth of two blogs.


First, Tom Beckett.

Well, Tom deleted his most recent blog, which had reached only its third entry, but he has replaced it with L'amour fou ("Foolish Love," let's call it), and he has begun (re-begun) his well-loved form of blogging. Tom tells me this is "[w]hat might be a final attempt at blogging--" We will wait to see, but I hope it lasts a good long time. Tom's touching blog, filled with interesting thoughts, is one I always read--under whatever title he might decide to give it.


Next, but not lesser, Bob Grumman.

Almost humorously, though I am too kind to laugh, Bob's old blog--a strange affair he had put together on a Geocities account was deleted when the server-tenders at Geocities deleted all free blogs. And they did this even though Bob was a paid member, but he also had some fee-free space he never used--so everything vanished. In that blog's place, though, we know have a simple stylish Wordpress affair, that goes by the name and URL "Poeticks." It has now become impossible for me to forget this dozen-letter URL, and for that I am grateful. Bob is blogging as he always has--lots of discussion of esthetics and taxonomy, criticism of poetry (visual and otherwise), and reference to his life in the world right next door to Paradise, but still in Florida. One interesting feature of this new space is his growing collection of criticism (by anyone, not just him) of indvidual visual poets' works, allowing us an easy place to track down some writings on our favorite visual poets' works.


Check out both these blogs. These two poets are friends of mine but also very interesting human beings and thinkers.

ecr. l'inf.

The’re is No The’re The’re (or maybe the’re is)

Today, I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old, [imperfect/ in perfect] health.

Something like that. This line is almost stolen from Ted Berrigan, but his number of years was 48. That is because a year ago I was 48 years, 5 months and 16 days old, so I wrote a poem with that line within it. This line of Berrigan’s came from his poem “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” which was the penultimate poem he ever wrote, finishing it about six weeks before he died. Berrigan’s original includes the phrase “In perfect health,” which I changed to “imperfect health” in my poem. Ted’s own use of the phrase was, of course, ironic; he knew he was dying and that time was slipping away, that his years of testing his body were ending. That idea, of a brave facing of death via a transparent lie about his health, appealed to me, especially since I was facing my own mortality last year. I was also entranced by the fact that I could write a poem when I was exactly the same age Ted Berrigan was when he wrote “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” so I waited three months and wrote the poem, “Bearth: Day,” which carried too many puns within the basin of its first word.

I found this poem I had created interesting. It was written in a single stanza and almost in a block, ending at exactly the twentieth line, included text appropriated from somewhere, and I add typographical pipes to serve as visual caesurae to the poem to indicate rests within the poem. Some have complained about these pipes, seeing them as ugly presences that slow down the reading, but I see that annoyance, the foreignizing of the reading experience as something important, and also as a second level of pause after the line break. These features of the poem led me to give this loose verse form a name: vigesimon (vigesima, the plural form), after the fact of its twenty lines. Twenty has been an important number to me, for two reasons: 1. It represents the Mayan “full man,” the full count of digits (fingers and toes) of a man, thus the complete man, and more importantly so since the Mayans appear to have had a base-20 numbering system; 2. My twentieth year was the most reckless and difficult of my life, and turning 20 seemed like a irrevocable transformation into the adult I never wanted to be, making my twentieth birthday almost a harrowing experience, and who else has had that ridiculous reaction to twenty? Birthdays neither bother nor please me now, and I expect no untoward reactions to turning fifty next year.

With a verse form in hand, I decided to investigate its uses, so I wrote a number of these poems, soon realize that I was writing a book of these poems. This book became part of my writing project entitled be, comma, to, an examination of isness, which is to say of everything, though my everything, even in the face of 154 poems, seems a bit more limited than reality’s. As part of that project, this book carried and carries the title The’re, serving as a contracted contraction of “They are,” since all the books within the project are based upon the conjugation of the English verb “to be,” the most irregular in the language—and thus the individual books in the project are designed to be quite different from each other. I may end up changing the title of this book, or using Th’ere as the structural title, the title within the scheme of be, comma, to, rather than the main title of the book.

I continued writing poems for months until, probably when I was in Manchester, England, I realized that the vigesimon was my equivalent of the sonnet, so I decided to write 154 poems, the same number as the number of Shakespeare’s sonnets. That would make this a big book, one made bigger by the fact that I allowed myself to write the occasional vigesimon that was longer than twenty lines, but only if it consisted of a sequence of subtitled sections, each of which was a vigesimon itself. This means that some of these poems are 2, 3, 5, or 7 stanzas long, thus the book itself will run roughly about 180 pages in length, before the addition of notes showing my sources and appendices. The appendices add information to the poems, and consist of “An Index to Discarded Titles” (keyed to particular poems, but created after the writing of the poem), “An Index to Last Lines” (keyed to poems, but different from the actual last lines of the poems), and “An Index to Memorable Lines” (keyed to poems, but not appearing in those poems or any others in the book). I did one practice run producing this faux metadata for the ten poems I wrote on my trip to England this spring, so I know I have much work left to do.

Sometime in September, I discovered that I’d written almost no poems for the book in May or June and none at all in July and August—for some reason, I tend to write fewer poems in the summer—so, in the middle of September, I began a strenuous process of poetry writing, which meant I had to write a vigesimon almost every day for almost two months. I complicated that process yesterday by deciding I had to write the longest vigesimon ever, a 140-line behemoth, as the penultimate poem of the book (taking the place of “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza” in Berrigan’s oeuvre). But somehow I finished the book on time today. The writing of poems kept me so busy that I gave up blogging almost completely for two months, but tonight marks my return to that daily grind, though I expect other entries will be a bit more interesting than this one—and maybe even shorter.

I wrote these poems all over New York State, while riding in airplanes and trains and cars, in New Jersey, West Virginia, England, Georgia, and North Carolina. But I wrote not a single one in Finland, where I was focused on other writing, including another book. I’m glad to have this first draft finished—one that takes up three file folders when printed out will all its metadata—and now the editing begins. With any luck, I’ll be done with that a year from now.

The poems in this manuscript were meant to be different from one another in focus and style, and sometimes they are, but I notice a sameness in them that I’ll have to fight against during the editing. And, now that I’m finished with the book, I’ll have to give up the vigesimon and focus on other forms of writing. Once I’m finished editing this book, and once I’m finished putting together the manuscript of my next book, something I’m behind on.

I write because I enjoy it. No other reason really. Or, in the end, no other reason. So I enjoyed this process. And, while reading over some of the poems yesterday, I noticed that I enjoyed most of them. That’s a good sign, I suppose, but one I don’t expect to hold. Editing will be a bear. Soon, I’ll begin to focus on another way of writing poems. For now, I present the final poem of the book, not its strongest candidate, but as good as today.

Water of Life

ffor I will consider the tissues and fissures of life
the vague disparities | between connection and
correction | a basket of pears not yet sweet | the bite
of ginger at the point of the bite | A fire rumbles in
the fireplace | slight whistling as water escapes
from wood | The articles of articulation demand
a set of certain rules | A small glass of liquid green
eau de vie de bourgeons de sapin | for the nose and
the tongue | the tang and tendrils of fire | A perfected set
of tanglewords | for the poem left to write | Eyes behind
glasses behind shades | the ghosts we call memories and
the stains they leave behind | Knuckles red from arranging
wood on the fire | words on the page | ffor I will consider
the workings of these words and even the water | Athwart
an ancient quarry | whatever comes of it comes out | Each
windowframe frames a simple picture of the night | black,
blackness | or the reflection back into the room of the room
itself | Today I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old
imperfect | belt fastened a notch looser | I do not have
another year to waste | I do not have the time tonight to try

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Of Archives and Poetry

Doubletree Club Hotel Boston Bayside, Room 535, Boston, Masssachusetts

Today has been a long day. Waking early driving right to the Atlantic (Boston Harbor). Giving a workshop on appraising electronic records. Taking the T to Cambridge and walking around. Buying a quantity if books at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. Having a leisurely dinner with the poet and former archivist Aaron Tieger. Returning to our hotel.

What sticks with me is how today was about all of my lives, even personal, and that Aaron has lived in many of the worlds I have. More on this once I've had some sleep, then I'll finish thinking about this.

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A Poetics (Continued through Number 21)

Hilton Savannah DeSoto, Room 508 Savannah, Georgia

[I'm surprised to discover no Bible in this room.]


16. Ways

There is no one way, no correct way, to write a poem. With a bible of restrictions (without all possibilities available), poets would limit themselves and limit their chances for success. The reason that no way of writing can be denied the poet is that sometimes that way is required to say what the poet has to say.


17. Constraints

Limits differ from constraints. Limits deny a poet some means of expression forever, rather than merely for the poem at hand. Constraints set a temporary restriction that forces the poet into new ways of creating. A constraint is a means towards original and unexpected expression.


18. Bounds

What are the bounds of poetry? Usually, people consider a poem an example of a bit of text on the page, one with specific linebreaks, one maybe with rhyming words at the ends of those lines. Yet poetry, or creatures called poetry, can take various forms, for poetry is merely the deep experience of language. It is an event centered on language. As such, it takes particular forms, but not a particular form. It may be an event that focuses on the intellectual aspects of language, in which case it is likely a textual poem. It might be an event that foregrounds the visual aspects of language, thus designating it a visual poem. Or it might be an event focused on the sound of the voice, the true progenitor of poetry, and it may be a gallimaufry of sounds that allows us to experience the sonic dimensions of language. And all of these are poems.


19. Imprisonment

We are trapped in our own languages, however many or few there may be, and since poems are written for certain languages (even when macaronic) they are always events for a certain segment of the world, that segment that can appreciate the subtleties of that language or those languages. This is a limitation, but it is unavoidable. The material of poetry is language itself. We cannot be concerned with this, since all poems are written for a particular poet’s (or set of collaborating poets’) ear and heart anyway.


20. Prescience

I do not know the poem I am about to write, only the one I’ve already written.


21. Fight

What I fight against in poetry is the tendency to see only one way for poetry, to cut out the heart or the I or experimentation or risk, to eliminate abhorrent ideas, to listen to only one pulse. I hope for poets to disappoint, in some way, every reader they have. In that way, they will succeed. Give people only what they want, or only what they think they want, and you cannot be a poet.

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The Weather Outside

This is only All Saints Day, so the weather isn’t that cold, cold enough, though, I’d think, for someone who is not used to it. (I noticed, for instance, that it’s nearly freezing here, but that it doesn’t feel that cold to me. I’m heading out to Savannah, Georgia, this week, and the temperature there is almost double what it is here, which is to say: warmer.)

I’m arising from my silence right now, however, not to discuss the weather, or not exactly to discuss it, but to note the existence of Weathers, a new blog by Tom Beckett, whom you may recalled killed off his last blog a couple of months ago. Tom has created and killed (totally annihilated) blogs of his in the past that I have come to see him as the slash-and-burn blogger of the world of poetry. The burning of one blog allows for the growth of the next.

That being said, I’m not at all sure that he intends to tend to this blog. He actually began it on the 27th of September, less than three weeks after he’d killed off his last blog. Yet he hadn’t written a second posting until today, maybe partially in reaction to the fact that I commented on his blog Weathers yesterday.

Since a new posting appeared on Weathers today, I left another comment, making that rarest of blogs, one that has comments only by me. Today’s posting is a poem entitled “Zombie Soliloquy,” and it is not quite a new zombie poem of Tom’s, after the fashion of his Little Book of Zombie Poems. Instead, it’s a deft little piece of philosophy, as Tom’s poems always are, and maybe even a request for an audience:

So pay attention to that and see what happens. And, maybe sometime soon, something more will happen here as well.

(Oh, and note that “weathers” in his blog's URL is spelled "whethers.")

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Something Resembling Silence

It appears that I have not been writing much here recently. That is because I have not been writing much here recently. That is because I have been writing elsewhere. Though where I am writing is at the same keyboard, the effect, the distribution of something written "here," is different. What I am writing elsewhere is something like a book of poetry, and I must finish the poems that make up the book by the tenth of November. (And I have other writing projects that must be done within that time as well.) So I have not run out of things to say about visual poetry. I still need to write here. Need, which is something like desire. And I will be back, maybe erratically at first, but eventually fulltime.

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Interpreting Art

Film director David Lynch has stated that no-one has ever come close to describing his interpretation of the film Eraserhead. What Lynch demonstrates with this statement is his realization that meaning is never the purview of the creator, who is actually in charge of surface and who works on meaning at great personal peril. Interpretation is always the role of the viewer, who can discard that responsibility at will.

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Crescent Street, Astoria, New York

Today while working in the Bronx, an emigre records manager I was speaking to, a man whose daughter is a poet, he told me that, if we could somehow download and preserve all of our memories and ideas, the intellectual contents of our brains, that we could be immortal. He told me that his friends thought this a crazy idea, but I noted that that is something that happens with the information we leave behind, the records of our existence, which are sometimes created by others (our birth records, our school records) and which sometimes we create (our poems), that we live forever not as ourselves, not as the bodies and minds that we are, that instead we exist as flashes of ourselves, sometimes vibrant, sometimes hazy, but still evidence of us, and that each of these marks in space (cyber or real) makes us somehow real and allows even those who have never known us to experience something of what we are. One of the reasons to write something down is to maintain evidence of the person who wrote it.


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