Typewrought

Geof Huth, "EIN POEME" (27 April 2011)

John F Kennedy International Airport, Terminal 8, Gate 4

Today, Phil Davenport, an almost twin of mine (bald men are considered identical) confirmed that he'd like me to send him a typewriter poem for an exhibition at the Transport Museum in Bury, England, this week, so, before I left this morning on a drive to JFK for a flight to England, I looked through my files and picked out three typewriter poems to send him, but before I scanned them I decided to create a typewriterly poem from scratch, went to the basement, kneeled in front of the ancient manual typewriter we still have, which rests on a tiny pupitre, and I typed out a little poem that I should have called "EINE POEME," but which I called "EIN POEME," a poem that was basically a standard syntactic textual poem but which included many typewriterly effects, enough so that its original typewritten form is necessary for the appreciation of it, assuming that is possible, and I scanned all four of these poems and emailed them to Phil in Manchester.

I am always making, always writing, I am a man of text and words, burdened by meaning and the meaninglessness of human codes, and I am flying to England in a couple of hours, not for the royal wedding of two people whose names I don't know and whose significance is nil in my world, but to attend the Text Festival, in its third incarnation in the small municipality of Bury, and I thank Tony Trehy for this opportunity and for the opportunities he creates for visual poets across the globe, because we are textual people, people of the word written and declaimed, people of the written character, whether it carries semantic meaning or not, and we relish this opportunity to be together to verify people like us exist.

ecr. l'inf.