Geof Huth's Blog, page 4

Techriture

This simple tiny chapbook reproduces linear doodles of Raymond Queneau that appear to precede much of the 20th century work in asemic writing. The doodles are extracted from a small notebook of Queneau's and they demonstrate a form of expression that seems balanced between drawing and writing.

The first of these actually resembles, to a great degree, the work of the French Lettrists, who had not yet begun to write. Most of the other doodles are marginally interesting but would be of little if any interest except that they are evidence of the hand of Queneau. The best work is the last, a "hai kai" "written" in eight "words" and three lines. It's documental structure tells us it's a haiku, which makes this piece marginally interesting, but not even close to as good as the asemic work Scott Helmes has produced in this form over more than a decade.

The book includes two interesting non-Queneau pieces, a "[s]imulated collaboration" between Queneau and Henri Michau created by Tim Gaze (the world's leader in the field of asemic writing), and a piece of Queneau-inspired asemic artwork by Christopher Skinner, which is by far the most accomplished work in the chapbook.

The chapbook itself is a beautifully produced work of art.



_____

Queneau, Raymond, Ecritures (n.p.: Secret Books, 2015). 

AverbalAsemicAsemantic

Pages 30 and 31
The poet, the pure poet, the one minding only the abstraction of words, is enchanted by the word. But the visual poet is enchanted by the suggestion of the word, the hint that a word may be in existence within a visual field, the fragrance left behind by a word now gone. The visual poet is interested in the recreation of the life of text, which can exist in many forms: needled into the skin, ablaze in lights, scrawled in pencil deep into the pulp of corrugated cardboard.

The visual poet works with things, and those things are sometimes words, and sometimes fragments of words, and often things that merely partner with words.

Bruno Neiva in his book averbaldraftsone&otherstories amasses two sets of artful visual poems, one that consists of his pieces from an exhibition held in Spain (where this Portuguese poet lives) and the other consisting of a selection of poems he's published in zines and elsewhere since that exhibition. The poems in the first set are almost totally asemic as their umbrella title suggests: "averbaldraftsone."


Aver Bald Rafts One 

These poems consist primarily of radically asemic works. Sometimes, the smudge of ink is the only vestige of writing in the poems. At other times, dotted lines, methodical found punctures through layers of cardboard, or small clutches of scattered characters provide the hint of writing. Asemia cares not for meaning, of course, but only for the gestalt of writing sans semiotics, the structural hints of writing.

The best of these poems employ found pieces of cardboard and paper that are already marked by use by cans, tape, glue, and markings to present minimalist textual landscapes that are sculptural in their construction and beautiful to the eye. Yet it's their ghostly and cryptic markings the keep the eye looking for meaning for the mind.

Bruno appears to be making a distinction, possibly a political one (because poetry is always political), between two ways of writing poems without semiosis: asemic writing versus averbal writing. The blurb at the back of the book explains that the "shift from 'asemic' to 'averbal' has come from a distancing from the poetics (and tastes) of the so-called 'asemic group.'" Bruno's work certainly fits within the usual bounds of the asemic continuum, but he never employs invented handwritten scripts for his works. Instead, he works with marks and sometimes actual letters from the Latin alphabet.

Pages 52 and 53
Eot Hers Tories

This second (unmarked) section of the book is bigger and richer. It moves from monotone works to works of outrageously gorgeous colors, from sparsity to fecundity, from plain to intricate. Here, everything happens.

All kinds of collaging ensues. Strips of paper are glued upon other translucent slips of paper. Inks and watercolors compete and mix. Letterforms and letterformlikeforms are added to cardboard and paper with Letrast, rubberstamps, pens, brushes. The shapes of these sculptural collages are as varied as the methods used to imprint meaning on them. A world of possibility becomes reality here.

And words appear. A plethora of words, in Portuguese and English, give us purchase in the world of worded meaning, and we can take time to read through their chaotic beauty. But these words intersect with amebalike congregations of asemic letters, with lines crossing the pages in the barest suggestion of writing. Glue becomes a medium of writing.

Pages 56 and 57 &

These few words and the few handheld presentations I present here don't quite capture the beauty of these works or the breadth of Bruno's imagination and the versatility of his hand on the page--even when the page is cardboard in corrugations of gutters and ridges. These are works for the eyes looking for the word, poems anyone should be able to enjoy, even though few of us will read them.

Yet read them we should.

_____

Neiva, Bruno. averbadraftsone&otherstories (Newton-le-Willows: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). £14 in the United Kingdom, £18 everywhere else.

ecr. l'inf.

Bob, Where Are You?

I've known Bob Grumman, mostly through the mail, but also in person, for almost thirty years. In the early years, we handwrote and typed long letters back and forth to each other. We mostly argued, and Bob loved to argue. We just didn't agree on much, yet we had a great interest in the possibility of poetry. That included any kind of poetry, but especially visual poetry.

We are both intellects, thinkers, figurers, but we came from different intellectual points of view. I found him crazy; he found me crazy. It was a strange life.

But, today, I heard that Bob has died. I can't verify that he is dead, however, so I'll write only a few words tonight, before I write too much about him.

Or I won't write about him at all.

Meaning that the dead are never cried over. The living cry for themselves.

Bob's death, putative or real, hit me hard today. I didn't expect that. I'm, in some ways, emotionally distant, though not entirely, so I didn't expect sadness about a death. But I had it, and for many reasons. The biggest was that I had let the man down. He had died, and I'm his literary executor. Though Bob told me he was too superstitious to write a will until he was ready to die.

Once I asked him if I were his literary executor yet, and he replied,

You have been for ages: it says so on several notes I've taped to various book shelves and filing cabinets. If they don't work, I'm sure my family will pay you to execute everything in the house.

I think I need something more formal. Bob assured me that the two emails he'd sent to me should seal the deal. (I don't think Bob has legal training.) And then he reassured me with this:

But I'll try to remember to tell my sister, whom I'll probably make my executor, to let you archive. Unless you call my archive and archives.

I don't think he has archival training.
But I didn't worry about that today. I worried that Bob was dead (or might be) but that I had failed him, failed to save his papers, to save his legacy, or part of it. Felt grief for it tonight. Fought it by writing much about and for Bob tonight. Realized that I needed to force Bob to allow me contact with his sister so I could make sure she knew my role as literary executor.
Too worn out from the night to write anymore. Just to think, and think about thinking, and sleep. 
I'll dream of Bob tonight, and maybe he'll be alive in the morning. I don't know. And maybe I'll drive to Florida tomorrow to try to save his legacy. I don't know.
The world is too confusing for the living.
But if Bob is gone, I wish him well. If he is living, I wish him better.
And I'll keep trying to solve the problem of his personal papers.

But I keep remembering something he said to me in his last note:

My health is weird. I guess I'm okay. My cardiologist thinks I have a good shot at ninety. All my lab tests keep coming back normal. I still feel more sleepy-tired than I think I should almost all the time. Still reasonably active riding my bike and playing tennis.

How does a guy with "a shot at ninety" die without any known reason coming to us after only 15 days? That's the question I leave with you.
I'm always a skeptic.
ecr. l'inf.

An Essay of Ordinary Thoughts

Teresa Brinati allowed me to have this book. She presented it among others for me and others to take, and she allowed my taking.
It is a small book, published in 1989 and mailed to the Society of American Archivists in Chicago in 1990. The reason the author, Vichien Poonvoralak, sent the book is unknown. Why he sent it to a national association of archivists is unknown. Poonvoralak's process is (or was) to make his books and distribute them to people he didn't know.
The book is more of a pamphlet, but with a glossy cover. Inside, the paper is thin, flimsy. The type upon the book is small, as the clusters of words are small, and the clusters sit in different corners and sides of the book.
It is a book of conceptual writing (I would call it poetry), and it's opening page holds the first of the writings:


Conceptual though it is, it is also real. The question about the publication of the book is unnecessary since the poet has already published it.

Except that it's not. Some people may consider the book not worth publishing.

They are wrong.

This book is autobiographical, opening with a short chronology of Poonvoralak's work. The workrs are autobiographical, since they came out of a person's life:

I am a table, I am a robot, I am a pig etc. I can be all of them and find out that is is very ordinary to be them. but there is a thing that I can not be, that is to be myself.

this is a law of physics
nothing can be istelf
but everything can be something else

I read the poems, which go on in this manner, slowly, carefully. It is important for me to determine what is true. I feel a warmth of thinking about these poems as they think thoughts outside of themselves.

Sometimes, I think I can write a poem about this book. It would be a poem about writing a book about a poem about writing a book. I am writing it now, except that I'm not, because I am still asleep, except insofar as I have yet to fall asleep.

I have never slept anytime before in my life.

I am dead.

ecr. l'inf.

its only elf

A word of Rae Armantrout's, more than most words, more than mine, whether a usual word or suspiciously camouflaged as intellect, has a power to it, the effect of attention making, an unrandomness.

There is a fulcrum to it. These so few words so many'd by the use of them. Their effortless struggle, their surprise. See here:

I take these
white streaks

of truck

glimpsed 

between branches
to be blossoms.

Some people see these words and think Emily Dickinson. They are both women, I grant you, and their words are brief and potent. But the style is all off. Armantrout sounds more like a doctor living in a town without enough t's. William calls her Williams, I would say. The image (this is pure imagism excepting the anti-poetickness of the whole image) is Williams, the simple words, the breaking and scattering of the lines.

But she does more than this. She's not just a repeater. She's an inspirer herself, and this section of a poem taken out of context shows only one facet of her, and not even the most important.

There is the surprise of attention in her poems, the way the poem twists our point of view (and point of syntax, of semiotics, of symbol). She comes upon us with a pun:

About can mean near
or nearly. 

A book can be about something 

or I can be about
to do a thing
and then refrain. 

To refrain is to stop yourself. 

A refrain
is a repeated phrase

It reads like a phrasebook written after a gallon of vodka enters a genius who thinks she's drinking water. The focus of the words, the focus of meaning, changes constantly. She is writing in language, she is making in language, she seems to know the old saying: "The pun is the highest form of literature." Because, in punning, we are trapped and aided by the limits and possibilities of a language; we make something that cannot be somehowever made.

Look at the third "about," the one at the end of the fourth line. Listen through those four starting lines to the fifth, and hear how she's tricked your ear, forced you to think what doesn't come: how "about" becomes "just" or "now" or "almost immediately."

The surprise of language comes upon you, and it's shadow feels like sunlight, the heat and illumination of our great sky's bulb of life.

She moves through language that's mundane and nuanced, oracular, descriptive and discriminating, surprising, pushed and punned:

To be human is to count 

the present 

among one's possessions.

I'm tossing clumps of her words on the page (the screen), words pulled from context, words trapped in the zoo's cage of language, removed from veldt and selva, in alien territory and forced to pretend to still be real.

But you can hear it still (and moving). The language of it. The simplicity. The way she is completely accessible and totally inscrutable. How she leaves us teetering on the edge.

How she makes us want to feel the fall.

ecr. l'inf.

A Poetics #102: Ossature

Geof Huth, "everyway" (16 January 2015)

Everything is a poem. Everything is some ossature of information. The breathing may be gone from some, but the breathing once was there. The webbing of structural bone remains. The outline of meaning endures.

ecr. l'inf.

Unfathomableness

Buy it at Xerolage for US$6.(Or Amazon, but don't tell mIEKAL if you buy it there, where it's more expensive.)

If you imagine, for a moment, that there is a world so solid and firm that you can understand every part of it, you are thinking of anything except these poems, which twist perception, textual meaning, and expectation into the shapes of balloon animals controlled by the optical illusion that is the gift of sight itself: We see only when that part of us that perceives the visual, that produces sight, is drowned by darkness. Only from within a pure darkness, can we accept the lift of sight. In this sequence of poems--part visual play, part letteral display, part meaning subsumed by vision--we see the contours of our understanding of the world without seeing the world itself, ever. We move into a parallel universe, where everything is recognizable but so recognizable that we recognize not a bit of it. This is language made dreamlike; we drink the wordlessnesses oh so pregnant with words.
—Geof Huth

Subfractionalism

A photograph is a fraction of a vision. At times, a fraction of a fraction. A photograph is an angle without a plane. A slice of sight. A subtraction from wide-eyedness. A memory recalled but depthless. The edited viewscape. What is left when the ignored is left out.


A word is sometimes a part of a word, a fraction of a thought's thought. It changes in the editing of it. We see by slicing away, hear by listening to the narrow corner, read by not seeing it all.

A sight begins before we see it. We come from outside of sight into it. We move through it as part of it. Within it is the site itself, where we are, where it is, where seeing stays.


The fractograph may not have depths of focus, and we see it not as we see the sure sight. We see its sharpness and its blur. A photograph doesn't move, but its focus does. 

The angle presents the thought, for seeing is a purified thought, thought without ideas, the sculptured light that is all we really see.

We walk somewords without ideas of whereto or wherefore. We see a sound in the word, even if cut, even if misspelled. We escape from word by seeing only part of it, the only part of it, the only part of it we can see. 

We have nowhere to go, nosite to be. We look forward into photowords. We look forward. We look.
ecr. l'inf.

#101: Perforated

The performance is not the poetry; the poetry is the performance. 
ecr. l’inf. 

Allah Akbar