Geof Huth's Blog, page 30

The Eyes Have It

Clotilde Olyff, Pebble Alphabet
It is difficult to account for imagination. Hard word has to be part of it. Raw determination itself. But something must be innate as well. Otherwise, how can we explain huge differences among the members of a single family. Finally, luck has something to do with it. Some innate talents are never born, I'd assume, because those people never stumble onto enough opportunities to grow that skill.

Which brings me to Clotilde Olyff, a graphic designer I know almost nothing about, but teaches at the National Visual Art School of La Cambre in Brussels. This page reproduces two of her works, both playful and imaginative, both obviously the results of many hours of work, and each requiring significantly different skills to produce it. Though the power of the eye to find the right thing is evident in both. (Note to Jonathan Jones: You need to meet this woman.)

It was her pebble alphabet that first drew my attention, partly because I've tried to find letters in pebbles but with little success, and partly because there is an amazing eye at work here. First, let me note that I searched for letters eaten into pebbles, because I found a few of the easy ones that way: an I, a U. But Olyff searched instead for pebbles shaped like letters, something I expect is much more difficult, and she succeeded enormously. But look more closely: in a few cases, she found the letters within the stones, changing her point of view entirely. This gives us an X and the 7. One might see this as cheating, and certainly it is, but it is also genius. Given the lack of lettershaped stones, other stones were required. My mind would like be too rigid ever to see that 7 or that X, but she found them. She proves the sensitivity of her eye. It is a beautiful alphabet, a little awry but better for it.

Her Alpha Bloc font consists of letterforms almost hidden within square black blocks. It is a massive typeface, one that fills the page with ink and only lets light slip through here and there. Read that first line: "drains" doesn't appear right away, but the typeface teaches us, Olyff does, how to read it. The font is about ink and weight and keeping us from seeing right away. Looking at this typeface is like looking in the dark: our eyes have to adjust. And they do.

But how does someone design both this ornamental font that will hardly ever be used but which will be beautiful when it does and that delicate and weathered pebble alphabet? From whence does this set of skills come? Are they tied together by their obscurity, how they hide themselves from us except in the context of themselves as a whole? How can two such different forms of beauty be found by the same eye?

Clotilde Olyff, Alpha Bloc Fontecr. l'inf.

The Performance of Poetry

Holiday Inn, Room 204, Helena, Montana

I'm in the middle of my first of three trips I'll take over the course of three consecutive weeks. First, there is this trip to Montana (with an unexpected layover in Salt Lake City yesterday) to give a workshop on managing electronic records. Next week is the Text Festival, one of the biggest events in my year. The week after I return from England to travel to Virginia to give another workshop on electronic records and to give a presentation at a professional conference. I may be tired by the end of all this traveling.

The Site of My WorkshopToday, though, was a good day. The flight to Helena was unremarkable. I gave a seven-hour workshop in four and a half hours, which was probably better for all of us, and afterwards I spent a few good hours talking to colleagues, first at a reception at the Montana Club, an exclusive club for Montana's nineteenth-century gold rush millionaires, and then at a local brewpub.

One interesting part of the day was my planned meeting with Devin Becker, who is a poet and archivist (not as rare a combination as you might imagine, or hope) and who is also one of the two archivists who organized the recent survey of the digital archiving practices of writers. Devin told me that he had been reading my blog for a while but had only recently determined that I was not the British academic he had already assumed I was. (Apparently, my first name and my connection to the Text Festival were the source of this confusion.) Along with Devin was his girlfriend Kristin (whose last name I don't know), who is an artist who has produced visual-textual works, and his supervisor Garth Reese.

I was dead tired from my travels, lack of sleep last night, and hours standing giving a presentation, so my body and personality responded as they usually do: with manic and animated talking about what I have a passion for. I talked way too much, using spoken words to expel the tiredness from my body. Devin wanted me to talk to Kristin and him about my work as a visual poet anyway, so I obliged, launching into too many details, thinking out my ways of being, my work as an artist-poet-archivist, which brought me eventually to a discussion of a recent poem of mine that I'd carved out of two ex-lover's letters to each other in 1812. I told the story of the letters, the archival story of the breakup of an engagement, and the man's desperately sad letter explaining why he didn't understand the woman, which was a letter he never sent, a letter he ended in the middle of the word "love" (with an unexpected "lo"), in the phrase "evil consequences of lo."

This story and poem bring together my life as a poet and archivist, my amazement at how an archival record can revive the long-dead reality of an ancient act, and my similar amazement at how a good poem can give a body a sense of life. All of this comes down to the word and the image, the working parts of the visual poet. These are the messages from the past that work best on us, that pass the most information through our bodies.

And I tried to say something about this today, in my workshop, in my conversations with my friends, and two good friends, Terry Baxter and Donna McCrea, joined us for the conversation (along with Anne, an archivist for Yellowstone National Park). It made for a good evening, though I still talked too much, and though I couldn't really seem to convince anyone of what a great artist the performance artist Marina Abramović actually is.

Still, I spoke passionately about her work, passionately about poetry (visual and otherwise), and passionately about archives. It was a good day, tiring and successful, and fun, and I had the chance to meet Devin, who is the archivist who processed Mary Ellen Solt's records for her famous anthology of mid-century concrete poetry, Concrete Poetry: A World View, and the chance to answer his questions about my friend Christian Bök and the spelling of his last name.

The Entrance to the Montana Club  (the swastikas of which are not nefarious)
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He Said it Was Min

Albert Min, "roving, stop" (2011)
Delta Flight 95, JFK to SLC

The other day, on Saturday, something unprecedented happened at dbqp headquarters in Schenectady, New York*: Someone stopped by to pick up a copy of a dbqp publication (derek beaulieu's "db"). Since dbqp's birth as a micropress in Horseheads, New York,† no-one had visited the headquarters of the institution for the express purpose of picking up publications. Some had come by and been plied with publications, but that might have been entirely against their will.

A couple of weeks ago, a young man named Albert Min asked me if he could stop by to pick up a copy of "db." We corresponded a bit to figure out how to do this and to see if it would not be easier to do this when I was in New York City on Sunday, but we set Saturday as the day.

Albert showed up somewhere in mid-afternoon, just as planned, and I handed him a copy of "db." He asked if he could have another, and I handed him a second. Then I talked to him a little about his interest in derek beaulieu (he had just learned of him through my posting about "db") and poetry (he studied philosophy in college, but grew an interest in poetry).

And I asked him about his own work, which is interesting. He takes photographs of his urban landscape (New York City) and slightly alters the text in the pictures (see above), and then he pairs these pictures with paratactic prose.

You can see more of his work at his blog, and I'd write more about showing Albert around and plying him with dbqp publications, but my plane is beginning to descend.

_____


* There is no other Schenectady, by the way.

† I don't think there's another Horseheads, either.

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Staring into Evening

I am given over to writing, which reduces my ability to write. Every paradox is two things at once, neither orthodox. If I thought poetry was writing, I would not sing or draw or swim through the words. Give it up if you think the game of language can be won. We love text because it is unnatural, a pox to lay waste a civilization, an infection burrowing through us. A word is not a particle of the heart or the spleen, of goodness or evil intent, nor the first half of "love" left out into a call to attention ("lo!"), but it is, instead, an action of the mind and, as such, takes the shape of emotion or drained and pallid skin however is required by the action of word. Text is the better part of speech. A lung is worthless, sans music, without the tongue, the palate, the esophageal squeezebox of the throat. I gave up poetry for words years ago. Words are but particles of meaning, but they form chunks too large to swallow. Speak in the form of a single floating letter. Write in the manner of the minim. See Valhalla in the arching forms of punctuation. We are all stigmeologist, and what hang from the floors of the sentence are whatever we have come here to steal. Do not forgive me my silence just as you would not forgive my speaking of words. Conscience is not the most exalted form of science, not does it come with science into being. A pun was never once a time.

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Content Not in Evidence

Geof Huth, "Content Not in Evidence" (16 April 2011)
In a couple of weeks, I'll be in Bury, England, for the Text Festival, masterminded by Tony Trehy. As part of that festival, I was responsible for providing two sets of artworks for exhibition to the Bury Art Gallery: 100 calligraphic visual poems on cards and a single electronic file that representing a modern tradestamp. (Tradestamps, apparently, are marks stamped on freight containers to indicate the contents through images so that they would be interpretable by people no matter the languages they spoke or their levels of literacy.)

I sent the cards in March in two shipments, the latter shipment leaving Albany, New York, on 21 March 2011. The trade stamp, however, I kept mulling over. I had no real idea, though I had the idea of preparing a visual poem within a rectangle and having it made into a rubberstamp. Not much in terms of content.

The cards were the easy part, even though I made each card specifically for the Text Festival, and even though I created at least half of the visual poems specifically for this event. I mailed them off in two boxes to enhance the chances that something would make its way to Bury. Also, the week between mailings allowed me the time to make the second set of cards.

What I didn't count on was the fact that my fear would come true. It's now been 25 days since I sent the second set of cards, and they have yet to arrive in Bury. Because of this unfortunate turn of events, I decided on a possible tradestamp a few days ago. It is nothing more than a manipulated scan of my receipt for my customs declaration for the box that never made it to Bury. My customs declaration declared what was in the box, just like a tradestamp. My contemporary tradestamp declares, by its distorted information, that the contents are unknown, the box is lost, there is nothing to know about the contents of something that doesn't exist.

In some sense my tradestamp is akin to derek beaulieu's, the story of which you can find at his blog. derek sent, by UPS, a box of nothing but a single sheet of paper (he says an A4 sheet, but since he's in Canada I assume it's a letter-size sheet), and the markings on the box label, along with the usual explanation of insurance costs and the barcodes, serve as the tradestamp for this conceptual work. (Read derek's blog for more explanation.)

I didn't insure my box.

derek beaulieu's Box of Nearly Nothing to Bury
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Peep/Show Goes White

The online journal of the poetic series, Peep/Show, edited by Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick, has added another page to its issue of international visual poetry (which I curated). The latest is by the British photopoet (who lives in Belgium) Helen White.

Her talent is to put small numbers of lettered words in the real world and photograph them as if they were the tiny animals of a small planet. So this is a poetry of recontextualizing poems in space that is the natural world, the human-processed world, the world off the page or screen. In the selection in Peep/Show, she shows us words as they weather, as we all weather, so the picture above is one view of a chronological sequence.

Helen has recently finished installing her poetry in the Bury Art Gallery for the upcoming Text Festival there. I'll see her in a couple of weeks, and I'll be anxious to see what she's done once again.

ecr. l'inf.

Mutations, and Infinitely Continued

Athanasius Kircher, "Mutationes, & sic in infinitum," in Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni (1650)

Since I accept poetry made out of nothing but words that don't exist, poetry made out of nothing but letters (neobetisms or real ones) that make no words, since I believe in poetry where the words have been replaced with images, a poetry created from punctuation marks alone, it is not difficult for me to believe in a poetry made of nothing but numerals and the sense they make.

I have to admit, though, that there is not much poetry in Athanasius Kircher's "Mutations, and Infinitely Continued" [my translation], which crisscrosses mathematically across a line slanted to allow for the growth of the created number as a numeral to the right of that line is multiplied by a number one line below it and to the left of the line, and where the process is continued with the numbers on the left side being merely sequential to 24, but the power of multiplication makes the numbers to the right grow long and snaky.

It is certain that all that is happening here are mathematical equations, but they are used to inspire. This poem is about the concept, about reaching out to infinity, about the speed of doing it through multiplication, about the power of imagination. And, unlike so many of the poetries I make and inhabit, this is actually made out of characters in our language, made out of numerals, which are all named and thus speakable. And the mathematical operations here are repeatable as well. This poem is not made for solving problems. It is created to cause one, and to cause some sense of awe in the face ot it.

In the face of everything, infinity, and so in the face of absolute nothingness, too.

ecr. l'inf.

The 320th of 365

I suppose I can note that I must be participating in National Poetry Month by writing a poem a day for the month of April because I'm participating in my own International Poetry Year, wherein I write a letter in the form of a poem of some kind every day for the 365 days in which I am 50. This is a long process, and sometimes tiring, but I at least have some poems to show for it, and I've been able to send letters to hundreds of people, always on paper, and all over the world, to six continents (not Antarctica, unfortunately, where I know no-one), and to 320 people. Forty-five to go.

Today's poem is five pages long, and is a collage poem for Cecil Touchon. Nothing in his style (for he is primarily a poet of monumental collage, wherein the letter is reduced almost past its letterness, but maybe this is something he will enjoy. The images here are of the last two pages.


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Poetry is

I've taken, over the past two days, to responding to tweets with short sentences beginning with "Poetry is." And this is either my celebration or criticism of National Poetry Month (not that I should care about such a thing since I'm nearing the end of International Poetry Year). By the end of April, I'll collect these together into something (a poem? an entry in my poetics). For now, here's the opening, done in two days.

The first is particularly cryptic, so I won't explain it.

Poetry is a cupcake.

Poetry is pressure not publishing.

Poetry is wound and suture.

Poetry is in a moment.

Poetry is a hinge.

Poetry is headlights.

Poetry is dismantlement.

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Three from Willette

Tonight, Tim Willette, whom I hadn't heard from in a while, but whom I'd recently sent a real live letter to, wrote to me, sending me three pwoermds for International Pwoermd Writing Month. Each has its own different touch, so each is worth posting here:


certaint

midnighght



panoughtpicon

One a great pun, one a reference back to the most famous pwoermd, and one enticingly spelled.

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