Geof Huth's Blog, page 25

the shape of't

I dreamt I held a poem in the shape of crystal

I believed that I spoke a poem in the shape of crystal

I decided that I thought my poems out of me in the shape of crystal

I ate out of a poem in the shape of crystal

I drank from a poem in the shape of crystal and held in my crystalline hands

I thought that I had made a poem in the shape of crystal

I resisted the desire to make myself in the shape of crystal

I desisted

ecr. l'inf.

Two

Stephen Vincent, "Two" for GH (2001)
Sometimes, if the day offers us one gift, that is enough for a living.

A few days ago, Stephen Vincent sent me a numeral 2 that fills entirely the space of its creation. The two is a magical number. A sense of one in it without being one. The sense of two ones in one. A number important enough that some languages have dual forms of nouns (along with singular and plural). It is the color blue, which was my favorite color as a child. (Now an adult, I have taken pink as a favorite color, making it seem that I'm changing sex roles, but pink was the color denoting boys even in the early 20th century.)

Even the simplest of symbols provides for a string of thoughts. The gift of thinking is the gift of experiencing the world and of digesting that experience.

Today, Stephen Vincent sent me the photograph he took of a simple glyphic graffito in his neighborhood, which is the Mission District in San Francisco, which was my grandmother's neighborhood for the first three decades of her life, which is where she was when at age six, in 1906, a great earthquake hit the city. Stephen asked me if I were in his neighborhood making such things, but I could never create such a glyph. The fluidity and freedom of the brushstrokes are not like my brushstrokes, which are defined by their control. I'd love that freedom, except that I don't know how to handle it.

It may be that freedom comes through sleeping, by dreaming, by allowing one's brain to do what it will unhindered. It may be that even an artist encumbered by thoughts of freedom is never free when creating art. It may be that dreams would be our best works of art, if only we could capture them accurately.

To sleep now.

Stephen Vincent, "Huth 'sign" (found glyph) (2011)ecr. l'inf.

Asemic Writing for Moria

Geof Huth, "Asemic Piece" (11 July 2011)
To be a poet is to grow tired of words and to understand how words come so often to nothing and make so little better. To be a poet is to understand that the word works through many ways, even suggestion. To be a poet is to yearn to make your sense with a wordless but vocal performance with a wordless but textual manifestation. So it is that we come to the point that Bill Allegrezza decides to arrange for an asemic issue of his online journal, Moria. Poetry without semantic poetry is poetry that has achieved its goals. The best poems are about nothing and written with nothing and said with nothing and heard everywhere and seen everywhere.


from Bill Allegrezza:

i'm putting together an asemic issue for Moria (www.moriapoetry.com), so please send me some work at editor@moriapoetry.com. i'm looking for individual pieces as well as any theory pieces (i think a conversation in interview form might be interesting, especially since i've read some interesting e-mail conversations on the topic).

deadline: Aug. 5th, 2011

www.moriapoetry.com
(an experimental poetry e-zine edited by william allegrezza)

ecr. l'inf.

At the End We Have Collage because Collage is All There Is

Harlem, New York, New York


Starting in January, Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick, the proprietors of Peep/Show, the online journal of textual and visual seriality, began to present to the world an issue on international visual poetry that I curated, and now, in July, all ten of those series of works are available online.

The final installation to this online exhibit is the collage work of Keiichi Nakamura, and I think it's some of the best work he has ever done.

There is a bit of magic to collage, how it takes disparate fragments of the reality we stumble across every day and arranges these into a whole that coheres even as it struggles to tear itself apart and free its pieces to return to their own rightful places in this indistinct world of ours.

There's a little bit of Magritte in these collage poems, a bit of discontinuity, a bit of surrealism, a bit of the need to define and understand and name the world.  So it is not only the bowler hat that makes me see this. These collages are divided into two columns, each with a stack of four images (some of them images of text), and each of these columns is stitched together, almost literally, by a bit of text in Japanese. The rectangles of images are, in part, pieces of a clear set, and sometimes seemingly random images, and the text that stitches them together is sometimes itself in columns, and sometimes a single column of Japanese cutting straight through the gap between the columns or set off at an angle.

Unfortunately, I am sure that knowledge of Japanese would help me understand these works better and make better sense of them, just as with Magritte we are occasionally required to understand French to understand his paintings. In visual poetry, the words that appear within the frame of a composition always carry some meaning and, frequently enough, that meaning is linguistic. Still, these poems of Nakamura's are significantly visual, so we know how to read them well enough.

Keiichi Nakamura's series of visual poems is the last of the ten in this issue of Peep/Show, which I devised to give people a sense of the geographic and esthetic breadth of visual poetry today. This issue of Peep/Show has some very textual works that are almost not visual at all, it includes asemic works at the farthest edge of the non-representationalism of written language, it includes works of what we might call code poetry, it includes a wide variety of styles, and it includes two other notable features: First, I made sure that half the participants were female and half were male, so that people would understand that visual poetry is less a male-dominated domain than it has been for most of the past seventy years. Second, it includes no work from North America, because the editors wanted this to focus on the rest of the world, but it includes work from every other continent except for Antarctica and Africa. It remains desperately difficult to find African visual poetry, though if I were putting this together today there is a female South African mailartist whose work I would definitely included.

Visual poetry is an international poetry in two ways: It is a poetry that now covers the globe, and those of us working in visual poetry are usually connected to visual poets in many other countries. Because visual poetry is not focused on individual language; it is focused on the poetry itself.


ecr. l'inf.

Celebrating Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Harlem, New York, New York

An announcement from Temple University:

Please save October 21st for a full-day conference on the life work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

"A Celebration of the poetry and criticism of Rachel Blau DuPlessis" will bring together critics and poets to explore the wide range of contributions Rachel Blau DuPlessis has made to the field.  In addition to lectures by poet-critics including Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Libbie Rifkin, and Eric Keeneghan. Rachel will be reading from recent work as will other members of our poetry faculty, including Jena Osman, Brian Teare, Pattie McCarthy, and Kevin Varrone.

Other poets from the region and alumni from our program will join in a final celebratory poetry reading, including Emily Abendroth, Holly Bittner, C.A. Conrad, Tom Devaney, Sarah Dowling, Ryan Eckes, Lucia Gbaya-Kanga, Chris McCreary, Michelle Taransky, and Heather Thomas.

Please plan to join us for what should be a delightful day of intellectual and creative exchange on October 21, 2011. The event will take place from 10 am to 5 pm at 1810 Liacouras Walk on Temple University's main campus.

ecr. l'inf.

Waking and Walking

i.

They walk
slowly, they
walk slowly

into your
memory of
their walking

maybe towards
you, maybe
ever away.


ii.

You cannot
remember the
dead except

the fact
that they
are dead.

They walk
slowly back
into life

or something
like it,
they walk

slowly into
your life
that has

accepted them
as dead,
dirt thrown

over them,
yet they
come back.


iii.

They know
they are
dead, so

they speak
slowly and
only about

the past
you remember
of them.


iv.

They know
they must
return to

nowhere, they
know they
must return.

They gather
in urges
to return

for they
know they
are dead.

Since they
know they
are dead,

they walk
slowly through
the woods,

slowly through
the city
back to.


v.

But he
returns to
you remembering

only pasts,
he returns
to tell

you of
the day
he died,

the day
he died
and didn't

tell you
he loved
you without

saying it,
to tell
you why

he didn't
talk to
you that

day, to
tell you
he thought

of you
all day,
but when

you cry,
he just
walks away.

ecr. l'inf.

Poetry and What It Might Be

Poetry and What It Might Be by Geof Huth

Maybe I am a podcaster. Here is a 13-minute essay spoken on the back porch of my house tonight. It's about poetry, its need for variety, the varieties I recognize, and it ends with a short poemsong that uses no words but is made from the sounds of the voice.

ecr. l'inf.

An End, if Not The, to One Million Footnotes

Tonight, I powered through the creation of a handful of footnotes at my One Million Footnotes blog, a project that has been in development since 2004. That brings me to the point of an end of sorts, because I decided, years ago, that when I had written three thousand of these, I would extract them from the blog and make a book out of them.

When I originally conceived of One Million Footnotes, I had meant it to be a daily project, though even at a tiny numbered prosaic ("of prose") poem a day I would never reach one million. Strangely, the number isn't even a goal, and certainly not a reasonable one. The poems are fragmentary observations (some of reality, some totally of the imagination) pulled out of the narrative of a life no-one ever sees because no-one ever lives is. These are the fragments left as footnotes in a giant conceptual narrative that does not exist. All that's left of the story are these notes, which are conceived of as those pieces of information interesting to know but not important enough to put in the general stream of that narrative that does not exist.

Especially this year and last, as I was writing a long poem to a new person every day for 365 days, I allowed these footnotes to slip out of the grasp of my hands that write them. Even a tiny string of words sometimes seems like too much to try to do. But I now have three thousand of these things, another book's worth of poems to edit, another book I might never finish even though I have just finished it. I am a poet, not a finisher.

It has taken me more than eight years to write three thousand of these, so it's possible I might make it to ten thousand, if it were possible for me to live another seventeen or eighteen years, if it were possible for me not to become bored with these quotidian observations from the bottom of the page, observations that are sometimes humorous, usually not, sometimes clever, sometimes cryptic, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, sometimes all that I can accomplish over the course of a long day.


One Million Footnotes: An Almost Random Selection from Each of Its Years

Monday, May 31, 2004
7.
Taking a cloth to wipe her brow, he rubbed her all away.


Sunday, October 16, 2005
739.
Language, he thought, as he considered his wife's leptodactylic hands, doesn't work well enough for us.


Monday, June 05, 2006
982.
Three men, then a man alone, and finally another emerged from the restroom with saffron sheets wrapped around their bodies and cornmeal yellow socks.


Tuesday, July 31, 2007
1481.
Every night he was away, he left her a note that he allowed anyone else to read.


Monday, September 22, 2008
2244.
He had devised exactly how to write each sentence but had forgotten the details before he had a chance to write it, so every sentence he wrote was a ghost of a sentence he never had come to write, a sentence whose birth was merely an imagining.


Wednesday, July 08, 2009
2542.
The last orange streetlight in a row of glowing orange streetlights was the moon, low and seeping through the trees.


Monday, January 25, 2010
2708.
The man or woman, the ghostly figure he saw cross the yard that night and so many nights, through their glass door as the television shone upon his face, he thought had to be the reflection of something that was crossing the screen of the television, yet there was never anything approximating that movement there, so he was left with the ghost, and the thought of the ghost, occasionally crossing his yard, from right to left, possibly all through the night, even as it disappeared each time half-way across the yard, which had become wet with the melted snow under the day's heavy rain.


Saturday, February 12, 2011
2930.
She read the paper, she washed the dishes, she put the dishes away, she put the dog, rickety and old, outside.

ecr. l'inf.

I'll Be a Beautiful Woman

I write these words minutes after talking to my friend Dave whose mother has just died, so it's unlikely that whatever I write here will have much of the shape of what I had planned to write. But that is as it always is. There is a huge difference between imagination and the eventuality we struggle towards by the dim yet urgent light of that imagination.

The germ of the idea guiding my night's thoughts is the voice of Antony Hegarty, and the music of Antony and the Johnsons. This musical group, but particularly Hegarty and his remarkable voice, take shape within me as my current musical mania, for I am run by manias for certain sounds I want to hear over and over again.

Yet I learned of Hegarty only two days ago. He was the only part of Julian Schnabel's film Berlin, a concert film of Lou Reed performing his classic concept album of the same name long after he was able to recapture the music and magic in that set of songs. I knew all the songs well, had listened to that album many times, but I could not stand to hear Reed destroy his own songs by using the voice he now has, one less musical even than my own. I listened through the movie, but desultoriy, until I heard Hegarty sing "Candy Says," until I heard him reimagine the song. One particular part that struck me, beyond the trembling musicality of his voice, was how he had taken a part of the song where he is meant to sing two notes, but instead he lengthens a single note through time. Subtle maybe, but not to someone who's heard "Candy Says" hundreds of times. It was a beautiful change, one maybe only his voice could pull off. And thoughts of the movie made me stand on my enclosed back porch and record a little extemporaneous talk, a verbal essay, about Lou Reed, "Berlin," and the redemption of art:


"Considering Lou Reed's and Julian Schnabel's Berlin" (29 June 2011) by Geof Huth

And since that time, I have been listening to Antony Hegarty sing over and over again, various songs, but especially a few of them. I am amazed by the range of his voice, which can be delicate and powerful, though somehow always plaintive. And I've been surprised by the difference between his dull and flat speaking voice and the pure music of his singing voice. And within all this song are his lyrics, and I am haunted by his lyrics. Take the song above, "For Today I am a Boy":

One day I'll grow up to be a beautiful woman
One day I'll grow up to be a beautiful girl
But for today I am a child
For today I am a boy

This song is quite beautiful and moving, and it is about the desire of a man to be a woman, about the confusion of sexes in a body, about the unwittingness of desire and how it propels us, about wanting what one wants, about accepting what one is, and it comes at us with the simplest of words. You have here almost all of its lyrics, which are merely repeated through the song. It's hard to understand, especially being as prolix as I am, how a few simple words are all one needs.

What I'd meant to talk about tonight, before death overtook me, was about how one piece of art can inspire a completely different piece of art, such as my inferior song, "Pounding Song," below. When I recorded this song, I pounded the floor of my dining room and the top of my dining room table and I clapped and pounded a kind of beat as I listened to Antony Hegarty sing "For Today I am a Boy." The drumming is punctuated, but only rarely, by my roughest and rawest singing, little more than yelling, and yet it is a song, and yet it is a song I created while listening to an entirely different song. My rough and untrained voice against Hegarty's always loses, but I'm glad enough that both exist.


"Pounding Song" (30 June 2011) by Geof Huth

Friday was a wrenching time for me in many ways, especially late at night, and late into that night the New York State Legislature passed a marriage equality bill that our governor, Andrew Cuomo, immediately signed. By next month same-sex couples will be allowed to wed in New York State, and we will all be a little bit freer because of it, even those in the state who are against the change. My friend Dave, whose mother died tonight, is a gay man, a married gay man, married in next-door Massachusetts on a grey and rainy day, in a tiny ceremony that I was proud and happy to attend. Because I want people to marry despite their sex. Because I want love, not the right mixture of genitals, to be the measure of a marriage. Because when two people who have lived together as a couple for fifteen years marry, when this couple who had no thought they would ever be able to marry until the last few years marry, there is something achingly sweet and sad about it. And it is the bittersweet that makes us human and real. It was a beautiful day.

My friend Dave and I spend much time together because he reports directly to me at work and we commute together. So we talk constantly, often seriously about political topics we agree about, but also just as frequently about those where we have no agreement at all. Most of the time, though, we just tell or make up jokes, and all I can tell you about this is that our humor is always inappropriate, and in all ways. We are not politically correct humorists, and most of our material is X-rated in some way, and always tasteless. We are both nice people, but I tell Dave sometimes that it is good that people don't hear the jokes we tell, because if they did we would be pariahs.

But I'm not worried about our being found out. Instead, I'm thinking about how today has become a day about deaths, small and large. Yesterday, two of my staff learned that the most important women in their lives were dying. One of these women was Dave's mother, and the other was the wife of another hard-working and positive colleague. The deaths around me have been numerous recently. Two other colleagues lost parents in the last two weeks. So I'm thinking about death and the difficulties of life.

And these thoughts of deaths became merged tonight with a small blog posting by my friend Terry Baxter, an Oregonian archivist, who was writing about his colleague Rich, a man who had just been laid off, but who continued to serve the public well till the very end. Terry's posting inspired me to respond:

Layoff notices hit my department today and my building, though I work in a building big enough that I probably don't know those hit. They learned today and have three weeks till their last day. Good luck to them and those of us left behind.

My congratulations to Rich, for holding onto his principles and honor. We have faced many cutbacks in the last few years (human, monetary, spatial, resources of all kinds), and many people are beaten down by this and clearly disposed toward the negative. I try as I can to bring them up to a better place, to put these very bad days in perspective.

Yesterday, two of my people learned that loved ones (a mother for one, a wife for the other) were near death, yet these gentlemen push on, work hard, stay focused, and yet care for those important women in their lives.

We need to be our better selves when times are bad even more than we need to when times are good. But the stress of reality is too much for some sometimes, and I understand that. Just as I congratulate, just as I try to honor, those who carry on in the face of what they cannot bear to face.

And all of these thoughts merged tonight into a twelve-minute verbal essay I recorded on my echoing back porch. Somehow these thoughts about how we struggle through this life and then into death seem of a piece, just as this essay you are reading seems to be of a piece to me. Life is a single unremitting ribbon of experience.


"Death and its Aftereffects" (30 June 2011) by Geof Huth

I created these recorded words, which are personal, which are so much about my own experience, for Dave. These words are my condolences to him. Maybe I will not send him a card, but I doubt I'll skip that step. (I missed sending a condolence card to one of my colleagues, and it continues to bother me.) Given the wide-ranging nature of these words, I'm not sure Dave will quite see the connection, but it was his text to me tonight at 11:10 that made me want to say these words, or made me want to find out what words I would say. And this is the text:

Mom just died...hoped to see her again tomorrow..oh well.

Simple, full of acceptance, but heart-breaking. So I'll end with my favorite story about Dave.

At the time, Dave was in his late thirties and had been living with the man who is his husband for about a decade, yet he had never told his mother he was gay. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn't want to know, but no-one knew. I told him that he needed to tell his mother, that it was time to do so. But I wasn't sure he ever would. Then one day I received a call from him while I was sitting in my office. Actually, I was specifically in the room that was my office at the time but which is Dave's office now. He told me I would be proud of him, and then he told me that he was sitting on the couch with his mother and had just told her that he was gay. His mother cried, he told me, but not because she was sad, or because she didn't love him (her youngest of six children) any less. I think she was crying because she was freed from wondering. I think she was crying because Dave had given her the gift of knowing for sure, had given her the gift of being able to show she accepted and loved him as he was.

And I was proud of him and told him so. And I always am proud of him because he is a kind and decent man who has made life a little better for many people. And I think we have his mother to thank for some of that.

Be well.

ecr. l'inf.

Between Doing and Done

Geof Huth, "in Go at" (27 June 2011)
Silence abides.

Silence abides, though I can never accept it. Watch a movie and you will know you are listening to it for most of the time, but what you see is what you feel, what you know, what you accept as what you are watching. You watch, after all. The acceptance of silence, even the use of silence, we overlook, me more than most because I am a construct of words—sure, words written or said or thought, but words nevertheless.

So I've let this space go silent.

For some of the days of these silences, I've thought to myself, Well, I have nothing to say, nothing to write about. But I know that this is not the case. It is just that nothing attached itself to my body, nothing took to me parasitically so that all I could do was to accept it and take care of it, as a gracious and reasoned host. I am overtaken by thoughts. It is not that I am a creator of them. I find them in the creations of others. Or sometimes even within my own.

Silence is retreat. It is death. We know this. We know that a blog dies the death of a dozen days left fallow. But it is a digital space, and time to its own devices improves no environment, allows no seed to better grow the next time it is planted.

It is not that I am announcing a disappearance. It is not that I am disappearing, for (truth be sold) I have never really been here. Only a few words have been, words replaced by other words. And nothing here ever disappears, though I occasionally edit those that remain here.

So silence has been extended in this space.

In the meantime, I have slowly begun to finish projects, so that silence in one direction is not the same as silence in all directions. I'm just a few days beyond a month from the point where I had finished writing a 1500-page book of poetry, and I still have five or six of the letters to send out to their recipients. (My printer died in the last few days of the project, and I have yet to mail out those final poems to the recipients. Sometimes, the smallest impediment holds me back for the longest time.)

I'm cleaning up. Boxing up books, boxing up papers, neatening the life strewn or piled throughout this house. I'm in search of order and looking to clean away what I don't need. Maybe some of the 5,000 books I estimate (conservatively) I have in the place. After a life so long in one place, things (objects, possessions, even dust) accumulates. And I have to clean it up.

I'm writing fewer poems now, though still plenty, still (if memory serves) too many. But I'm also focused on finishing some books. I'm typing out the 366 poems of This, Thine Earth, the book of poems I wrote, one a day, for the year 2010, each one based on a page of devotional text, which I find all the more appropriate from someone so undevotional.

Sometime soon, I have to look at another yearlong project of mine, They are as You First Saw Them. If I have any good poems, they probably reside in there. Or I should finish the final edit of my book of minimalist Twitter-fed poems, atwhich. There rest, somewhere near me at the moment, a number of books of visual poetry I must put together soon. I have books to assemble from the pieces of my life, all of which pieces are words.

I am stunned by the sunlight in the morning, and I need to change the sheets on my bed, but I don't do it. I am living in the past of the words I've already made, and the words I cannot take back. Poems after goddamned poems, little rivulets of words drip down my arms, in swirling patterns red as blood. These words are cautious, extemporaneous, violent, damaged, thoughtful, quiet, virulent, bestial, beautiful, redundant, revelatory, dull, dumb, and essential. Though only to myself. I write for the pressure of silent sound against the barricades of my inner ear.

Today, I was overcome, for seconds, mere seconds, maybe only two, but twice, so twice times two, by tiny spells of dizziness while gently pushing the lawnmower against and across the thick and velvety lawn. When I knelt to pull a few of the billion weeds (miniature maples, slightly larger oaks, violets, crabgrass, clover, plantain) out of my yard and garden, my heart fluttered (my cardiologist's word). To me, it was a crunching, the heart cracking against itself. All together, these events amounted to six or seven seconds of my life, and meaninglessly so. My cardiologist thought nothing of them, and I did too, noting to him that I would have forgotten all about these tiny events if my appointment with him had been scheduled for tomorrow instead of today, which the day my heart told me it was still there.

(Today, I learned that I weigh one pound more than I did the day I graduated from high school 33 years ago.)

But the reason for this story is that my cardiologist, when he saw me today, smiled brightly and thanked me for the poem I had sent him. It was the most life-affirming response I'd received to one of these 365 poems I had sent out, unarmed, into the world, for he responded as a man who had told me how much poetry had confused him, how its indirectness led him nowhere. I had, for sure, written him a poem made for a man with this issue, but not one made simple and transparent. The poem was made to make him think, to make him work, to make him enjoy the poem, and he seemed to. It's a poem I still like, though I know that liking one's own poems is like enjoying one's own image in a mirror.

Still, to reach a non-poet, someone perturbed by poetry, with a poem, seems to me an accomplishment. And it is good to have accomplishments, even if fleeting and evanescent rather than substantial.

I draw my poems with my hands. I write them with the blood of my body. I sing them out of my chest. I have incorporated my poetry into my life, because these are creatures of my body, a body tired from not sleeping for years, one worn out in some ways, but always pushing out, with some crazy and life-filling intensity, into the world. If I have to live in the world, I'll love it with my entire body or hate it with the entirety of my soul. Or both.

I am not done, but I am between there and this incessant and unavoidable doing that keeps the blood in me moving and the heart pumping clear and steady.

ecr. l'inf.