Geof Huth's Blog, page 39

inksinks

Didi Reports She is Going Back to Painting a Few Poets

Didi Menendez' Portrait of Geof Huth (29 January 2011)No day is the day we imagine it will be, but some days run dramatically counter to expectations or they include something never imagined.

Today at 12:37 pm my time, the ever-productive Didi Menendez sent me (and others, unknown to me) an email asking for a photo or two of me, because she was ready to paint portraits of poets again (after a break that I'm sure was quite short). This was her message:

Going to add a few more poets to the series. Could use some new photos looking into the camera so if want to take one or two, just send it over. Maybe I will be inspired.

Almost four hours later, at 4:20 pm my time, I sent Didi three photographs of myself, each quite a bit different from the others, and two of them self-portraits. At 4:46, Didi responds: "OH I am going to do one of these for sure. I already have the gesso drying and was waiting for something to come along!" At 6:35, Didi sent me a few photographs of a portrait "in progress" that seemed pretty much finished to me. And at 8:35, she sent me a link to her Flickr site, with a note that she'd paint my other portrait tomorrow. So she painted my portrait in about four hours, and did a great job.

Geof Huth, Self-Portrait, Astoria, New York (5 December 2011)The photo she used of me for this portrait was a self-portrait I took on a cold day in Astoria last month, and it is something of a paean to baldness, though Didi decided to leave out a bit of my forehead in her painting!


Menendez Portrait of Geof Huth from Geof Huth on Vimeo.
Didi Menendez discusses her portrait of Geof Huth on 29 January 2011, the day she painted the portrait.
Along with the photographs Didi sent me, she sent a video of her talking about the painting, and I've listened to it a few times, because I like her voice and that wandering POV shooting style that's common enough to the videography I do.

For a look at Didi's huge collection of portraits of poets, visit her aptly titled blog, portraits of poets, and be amazed by her indefatigability. I think all of us born in 1960 tend in this direction.

ecr. l'inf.

Digital Archiving Practices of Writers

Today, not from one of the archivists working on or who knew about this project (even though I am an archivist), I received a twice-nested forward of this message about a project considering the digital archiving practices of writers:

I've put together a survey to study the digital archiving practices of emerging writers. My co-investigator, Collier Nogues (a poet with a book coming out from Four Way) and I are trying to get a sense, basically, of how people are saving/archiving their work, and how this might affect their writing practices and the practices of special collection librarians (like you) in the future. We're presenting our initial findings at the personal digital archiving conference in San Francisco next month.

So, if you have the time and/or inclination, please take our survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/digitalarchiving and pass it out to any writer you think might find it interesting.

And so I pass this message on to the readers of this blog, and below I include my response to the survey. I've made a few tiny corrections (elimination of a word here and a letter there) to my responses, but otherwise it is as I have submitted them. But if you decide to take the survey yourself, don't cheat and copy my responses.


1. Disclaimers, etc.

[I've left this part out, which was the only part without any questions.]



2. How you compose
Here we ask what you write and what you use to write it.

1. What genres do you work in? (Choose all that apply)
√ Fiction
√ Poetry
√ Nonfiction
- Drama
- Other (please specify)

2. What's your primary genre?
- Fiction
√ Poetry
- Nonfiction
- Drama
- Other (please specify)

3. How many books, or other major works (play, screenplay, etc.), have you published or produced?

- 1
- 2
- 3
√ 4
- 5
- 6 or more

4. What kinds of devices do you own or have access to for writing? (If you own one of the below devices but do not use it for any writing purposes, do not select it.)

√ laptop
- desktop
- ipad or other tablet device
√ smartphone
- PDA
- Other (please specify)

5. How many devices do you own or have access to for writing?

- 1
- 2
√ 3
- 4
- 5 or more

6. What operating systems do you use on your devices? (Check all that apply.)

√ Windows
√ Mac OS
- Linux
- Android
√ Other (please specify)

iOS (previously iPhone OS)

7. Do you work on one device primarily? If so, what is it? If not, how do you manage your files and drafts between devices?

Please elaborate.

Primarily on my Macintosh laptop, but occasionally on a Windows-based laptop, and often on my iPhone. Everything on the Windows-based laptop I transfer to and consolidate on the Macintosh. The iPhone either goes directly to the Web, from which I download some of it to maintain or create drafts, or I transfer the material off my iPhone and consolidate it on my Macintosh.

8. Do you also use pen/paper/typewriters to write, or do you use only digital tools?

- Digital Only
√ Digital primarily, with some non-digital work
- About equal work digital and non-digital
- Non-digital primarily, with some digital work

Please elaborate on your process.

Most of my output is standard textual poems (words in lines on a page) or essays. These I create only digitally. I also create a large number of visual poems, video poems, and sound poems digitally and maintain those digitally. I also create poems directly with digital cameras. However, I do create a significant number of visual poems by hand on paper or other solid surfaces. And I occasionally still write short poems by hand, usually in small books.

9. If you do use non-digital tools, at what point do you go digital, (e.g., notes on paper, then first draft on computer) or do you go back and forth between digital and non-digital work?

If I create a textual poem by hand, I eventually create a digital version of it, and it is from this version that I create subsequent drafts. With handwritten visual poems, in which the handwriting itself is part of the poem, I eventually create final versions of these by hand, and I scan those so that I have distribution copies of those. In this case, however, the original paper copy I consider the true or record copy of the poem.


3. How you save
Wherein we ask you how you save your work

1. How do you (or, do you) save your prewriting/notes?

I save notes made on paper as paper. Notes made digitally I save digitally, usually appended to the bottom of the first draft of a piece of writing.

2. In what format do you save your digital files?

√ Microsoft Word files (.doc, or .docx)
√ PDFs
√ Other text based file such as rtf
√ Other file type
If you marked other, please specifiy what file(s) you work in. Or elaborate as you see
fit.

Most of my textual poems I save in Microsoft Word files for drafts, saving the final versions of entire manuscripts as PDF/As. I save most visual poems created on the computer (with Adobe Illustrator, inDesign, or Photoshop) temporarily in their native formats, but as PDF/As for the final version and often JPEGs as distribution copies. The final recorded copy of sound poems (this does not include scores for sound poems, of course) I save as WAV files, but they are usually created as MPEGs. For videopoems, I usually save them in their native format, which is usually .mov, but I have used other formats, such as .wmf. My goal would be to normalize these as Motion JPEG 2000 files, but I have not.

3. Do you save drafts of your individual works as you go along, or do you simply save over what youíve already written?

√ I save drafts.
- I save over my files.

Please elaborate, if you would.

Not all drafts are saved of digital files, but I usually save my drafts. For textual poems, I save drafts as electronic and paper files. For digital sound, video, and visual poems, I save drafts digitally. For my essay-like writing to the web, I never print it out.

4. What are your naming conventions for your files, notes, etc.?
example: thewasteland_1.doc, or thewastelandNEW.doc

For textual and visual poems:

Name of File.ext
Name of File v2.ext (to indicate a later version)

Sometimes, I also use a number (001, 075, 134, etc.) [at the front of the filename] to indicate the order in which poems appear in a manuscript.

For sound and poems as audio or video files:

YYYY-MM-DD Name of File, City, and State or Country Where Created.ext

YYYY-MM-DD Name of File (Draft), City, and State or Country Where Created.ext (to indicate an earlier draft or aural or video ìnotesî towards the creation of these poems)

5. How did you develop your archiving practices? Did you emulate someone? Were you given instruction? Did your saving conventions and storage techniques just develop through your writing?

I am an archivist and records manager, so my practices try to conform to advice I would give people who were creating digital literature. Still, I would say, my practices are incompletely in place, because Iím note quite caught up naming all my files, and because I do not back up as frequently as I believe I should.

6. Do you print out your writing to revise it?

√ Yes
- No

Please elaborate, if you would.

Not always, but I sometimes print out drafts, usually only of textual poems. Some writing, such as my voluminous writing to the web, I never print out.

7. Do you save any paper copies of interim drafts?

√ Yes
- No

Please elaborate, if you would.

See above.


4. How you back it up
Wherein we ask you how you back up and archive your work

1. How often do you back up your work?

- Once a week
- Once a month
- Once every six months
- Once every year
- Never
√ Continually (e.g. using a device or a cloud service such as dropbox)

Other (please specify)

Everything on my computer is backed up automatically as I work. But my backup procedures are more complicated than that. See below.

2. Where do you back up your work? (Check all that apply)

- thumbdrive
√ external hard drive
√ on my computer (in another folder or some other way)
√ on cloud drive (online services such as dropbox or .Mac)
- on disc (DVD or CD)
√on paper
√ via email (I email files to myself)
I do not back up my work, I just save it on my computer

Please elaborate on your process.

I back up my audio and video files (except for drafts) via online services as I create them. I do not have a good program for backing up other files onto hard drives. Currently, I save a large volume of work on a 1TB hard drive, but that is often the only copy of each of those files. This is my big danger, but I do have paper backup of the textual poems.

3. Do you use any cloud-based file systems such as Dropbox, or a .Mac account?

√ Yes
- No

Please elaborate, if you would.

This is not exactly cloud-based, but close enough. I back up almost all of my audio and video poems in public online spaces from which I can download it if I need to. I back up my audio files at The Internet Archive, and I back up my video files at Vimeo. I also keep video files, for public distribution only, at YouTube.

4. If you have files saved in more than one location, how do you keep track of them?

Itís all fairly simple. The master files are always either on my 1 TB hard drive or my computer, but other backups are as explained above.

4. How do you save the work you're finished with (i.e., published poems)?

Examples: move finished work to FINISHED folder, or print out copy and keep in file

Finished works in digital form are saved to my external hard drive and are kept in case I need to distribute copies in the future. I also can search through them more easily by keeping them in electronic form.

5. Do you keep print copies of final drafts? How do you organize them?

Always, for those forms of my writing that can be printed out. These are arranged in a series of Art and Writing, subdivided by type of writing (such as Dictionaries, Essays, Fiction, Poems, and Visual Poems), each of those is subdivided by the title of the manuscript, and I also keep multiple versions of drafts of poem, marked by date or by draft number.

6. How about the media you've been published in—do you keep copies of the print journals? Do you keep track of web publications in some way?

I keep copies of all print publications I have work in. I track all of my web publications on a link list on the sidebar of my primary blog. I used to keep a database of all my works, along with detailed metadata on their creation and publication, but that is now quite a few years out of date.

7.Do you have any standard archiving practices?

Example: a typical length of time after which you move files off your laptop onto an external hard drive

√ yes
- no

Elaborate, if you'd like.

My archiving practices are to remove large files off my computer almost immediately, so audio and video files stay there generally no more than a few days. And digital images, some of which are poems, I usually transfer off the computer once a year at the beginning of the year (but I've been too busy this month to do that yet).


5. How you feel
Wherein we ask you some short questions about the topic

1. Have you ever received or sought out (e.g. read online) information about methods for digital archiving activities?

√ Yes
- No

Comments?

I read such information as part of my professional practice. And this particular issue is of especial interest to me. Just yesterday, I was giving, on behalf of the Society of American Archivists, a webinar on managing electronic records, and I gave some quick and sketchy advice on the issue of dealing with digital manuscript materials, which have the potential of being one of the great voids in the archival record. One thought I have about this survey is that it is focused exclusively on one type of record that writers produce: their writings themselves. But there are plenty of other related records I think must be address, including correspondence (now, primarily email) and event records (such as video files of readings or other literary events), all of which are part of documenting the life and work of a writer.

2. Would you be interested in receiving information about recommended practices for digitally archiving your work?

√ Yes
- No


6. And finally …
Thank you for your time! We really appreciate you indulging our curiosity in this way. There is only one last (optional) question.

1. What did we miss?

What did we miss? We know we are bound to miss important details about some writersí processes. Here is your chance to think back to what youíve just written and note anything additional, antithetical, heretical or otherwise regarding these topics. You may also comment on the survey itself here, provide a narrative of your process (for those of you narratively inclined), or simply type out a bunch of cuss words. You can also totally skip this. Have a great rest of your day.

This particular issue is of especial interest to me. Just yesterday, I was giving, on behalf of the Society of American Archivists, a webinar on managing electronic records, and I gave some quick and sketchy advice on the issue of dealing with digital manuscript materials, which have the potential of being one of the great voids in the archival record.

One thought I have about this survey is that it is focused exclusively on one type of record that writers produce: their writings themselves. But there are plenty of other related records I think must be address, including correspondence (now, primarily email) and event records (such as video files of readings or other literary events), all of which are part of documenting the life and work of a writer.


If you're interested in some recommended best practices for preserving digital files, please visit the below site, which was set up by the wonderful librarians at Yaleís Beinecke Library:

http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/digital-preservation/

ecr. l'inf

Turkish Texts

Ayşegül Tözeren, "diyalektik kırılma kusurları" ("dialectic refractive errors") (2010)Peep/Show's issue of International Visual Poetry continues to grow, adding this time the work of Ayşegül Tözeren, one of many talented visual poets in the vibrant Turkish visual poetry community. Her work is always dramatically typographical but interested in distortions and how that adds meaning to the works. Her contribution is a cohesive yet various series of works entitled "Okuduğum kitaplar" or "The books I read." Go read it, and if you think you can't because you can't read Turkish, have no fear. In the style of the 1970s anthologies of concrete poetry, she's provided glosses to her works, so we can figure out the meaning of her words, and see the puns she is using.

ecr. l'inf.

mbiguou

Defining "Visual Poetry"

I was standing in a bookstore about a week ago when I discovered the meaning of "visual poetry." Until that time, it had escaped me, but suddenly I knew.

Or not.

Or I knew one definition. Maybe not even a definition that formed a clear lemma, maybe not an accepted use of the term. But what would "accepted" even mean in this case? I've found enough uses of the term "visual poetry" in the world of cinema and photography to have to consider this a reasonably standard use of the term. Just as "poetry" is meant to mean anything particularly beautiful, even though poetry itself is usually considered boring nowadays. The meaning and use of the poem fight against its meaning and use.

Of course, language is various and indistinct. Terms and individual terms are often polysemous, carrying multiple meanings with grace and only a modicum of confusion and still allowing for communication and the extra benefit of paronomasia.

And how is meaning made? As I always say, but I base this only on the facts of linguistic life and the clear agreement of linguists, meaning is something achieved by consensus usually forged under the natural practice of speaking and writing. Because sequences of shapes and sounds have no natural meaning; meaning is affixed to them by human practice.

The human practice of communicating.

For that reason, language is messy, illogical, given to contradictions, and human, thus perfectly usable.

I accept many definitions for the term "visual poetry," even those that seem to (but really cannot) deny the fact that visual poetry need not include words at all, need not (in fact) even contain letters. How can this be? Simply by the fact that the physical facts of life change faster than words do and by the fact that we live quite gracefully without multifarious distinctions for subtle varieties of things. And sometimes we do not, and sometimes there are such distinctions. But it matters not if there are multiple distinctions or not. We live with either fact. Distinctions arise when there is consensus that such distinctions are needed. Sometimes, such a consensus is general and affects the speakers of the language in general and sometimes it is specific and affects only the experts.

(I am reminded at this point by the rich vocabulary of botanists and the lack of need most of see to know what an aril or a botanical key is. "Seed" suits most of us just fine. Just as most of us live full and meaningful lives without knowing that the "flowers" of the flowering dogwood are not flowers but bracts.)

Enjoy the language. If it is messy and inexact. If it is neat and precise. But remember that language only works when two or more people agree that it does.

As I like to say, I call visual poems "poems," but that is just a short form, another meaning of "poem." They are not poems but visual poems. Tone poems are not poems they are poems. Visual poems are sometimes beautiful movies and photographs too.

ecr. l'inf.

virture

Poetry on the Sidewalk

Holiday Inn Express San Francisco Airport South, Room 246, Burlingame, California

I've been in California for a number of days now but focused on doing my part to bury my aunt Jeaneen Ferraris, so family matters have occupied my time. As they have today. I leave here tomorrow early in the morning, but before I do, I'll present a couple of extremely brief videos of two poems I found on the sidewalk today.

Jack Spicer Poem on Sidewalk from Geof Huth on Vimeo.

Geof Huth walks over a Jack Spicer poem on the sidewalk in San Francisco on 22 January 2011.

The first is a simple Jack Spicer poem I don't recall, even though I'm fairly sure I've read all of his published poetry. Maybe it is an extract from a poem. Nice enough, but short.

Issa Poem on Sidewalk from Geof Huth on Vimeo.

Geof Huth walks around an Issa poem on the sidewalk in San Francisco on 22 January 2011.

The second is a translation of a haiku by Issa, one of the four master haiku poets of Japan. Again, brief and sweet.

I'll allow them, and the bells ringing in the first video, to speak for themselves. In the end, every poem is on its own.

ecr. l'inf.

A Constraining Force (A Fifty-Sixth Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)

Delta Flight 2863 over Utah

No, it isn't that I've forgotten you or about you, though I can understand why that thought would pass through your mind only to find purchase. The explanation is simply that I've been too busy to remember what I want to do, so I do whatever is most presently at hand. Since the end of May, that has meant writing a letter (in the form of a poem) to a different person every day, one day a male, one day female, back and forth for 240 days now. It's a tiring process, but it does get to your question at hand--or your point of conversation. It is not as if you're merely asking me questions anymore, so be sure you realize that.

What you call a "liberating shackle" is what I'd call a constraint, what we used to call little more than poetic form or prosody. So just as a certain rhyme scheme is a constraint, so is the decision you've made to create on sheets of paper 24 inches by 36 inches. That size holds you to its size (not much holding going on there there), but it also gives you certain freedoms and certain inspirations. Poets have generally dispensed with regular meter and rhyme, but they've replaced it with all manner of constraints, all of which promise something simple: opportunity.

A constraint is the germ of an idea absent the idea itself, yet it still works. Or it can work. Nothing is certain, and certainly not in poetry.

So what's the constraint in these letters I'm writing? Am I hewing closely to a certain style of writing? No, or at least I'm trying not to. I'm actually trying to write poems, to write letters, as different from each other as I can imagine them. So maybe one constraint is that I'm supposed to think up a new way to write a letter/poem ever day. But that really can't count, because I don't succeed at that, because the constraint is too vague. Can't I always argue one poem is different from another?

My constraint is a physical constraint, a temporal constraint, a test of stamina. I'm forced to write a poem every day, and a fairly long one, from three to twelve pages in length (though usually three, and occasionally even two). And I like that constraint. I cannot wait for inspiration. Instead, I have to create it every evening (for I usually write at night).

It is a hugely demanding process, physically and mentally. I just don't have the imagination for this, but I go on with it. I force myself to write when I'm tired, when I have no ideas, when I'm not sure who to write to. (And I should write one to you, but I'm not sure it makes sense to.) And sometimes I say to myself that this will kill me. I've written 240 poems so far, just finished the latest one, so I have 125 to go, and that's a large number of poems to write in a year, let alone a few months.

By the end of this, I'll have a huge manuscript, something the size of a collected poems, yet it'll be only a small portion of my total output over my life. Probably 1300 manuscript pages in length. Too much for anyone to read. So it is, in a certain sense, a conceptual practice. The poems are too numerous to be read, or even appreciated if they are read, so the project exists as an example of mania, and it is understood in a fragmentary way. Those who receive letters read their own letters, and understand that small part of the project. Only a very few people have read them all. This is an unpublishable book, and that's one reason why I post every poem as I write it.

And you'll be happy to know that all of these poems are not textual poems. Some of them are visual poems. Some are sound poems based on scores I present online. They cover a range.

I get them done only because I work on them diligently, only because I've always been able to ignore the physical to complete whatever intellectual or physical project I want to finish. I'm stubborn, and this is a project, a program, maybe a life, born out of stubbornness. I'm stubborn enough to be writing this to you from an airplane, and I've already written today's poem on this same flight, and already published online while I've been flying.

That way it can't be lost, even if this plane crashes. That is the secret of small pieces of paper covered with words: they can prove we were here and give people some sense of us even after we are dead.

I'm flying to a funeral now, so I'm thinking of the dead, but I don't work for the dead. I work for the living. I don't even work for the sake of a dead me. I work for the life of making something. It's the way you are. That's why I noted the ink under your fingernails that one time we met, why I noted the ink filling the whorls of a few of your fingerprints. The art is you. The need to make is in you. You cannot expel it.

When you try, all you do is make a poem.

ecr. l'inf.

aethics