When the Most We Have is the Least

Geof Huth, "Parenthetical Shack" (for Márton Koppány) (24 September 2011)

"It has been a long hard year."

I wrote that sentence, and similar ones, on postcards I had mailed out to people a few weeks ago, postcards that were numbered 388 in my ongoing qbdp mailart series. The note was more an explanation for silence, since I had not mailed out a single qbdp card until September of this year. I assume that everyone's life, as a matter of course, is somehow difficult, and the last year has been much harder on me than on billions of others. Yet there is something about struggle, at work, at home, with one's art, that slows down a body and retards production even if the mind keeps grinding on.

And grind, it does.

It's not exactly that my productivity has retarded, though it has taken a dip since my 365 ltrs project ended on May 24th, but my productivity has been dispersed and transfigured. So I write fewer postings here and produce more photographs, which go to Tumblr or Facebook. And I'm reading less poetry, for reasons I cannot explain, so I'm writing fewer poem in my Twitter feed, but I create more audio and video poemsongs. I still write a number of poems a month, but I spend more time taking photographs that I can then call poems (and a book of these will be out in a month or so).

We grind on.

The body, it seems, produces until it stops, and even slowing is not stopping.

I was, if I remember correctly, once a photographer, in just the same way I am a visual poet. I had dozens of different cameras from the tiny negatives of a 110 camera up to a Speed Graphic that used 4" X 5" sheet film. And I used all kinds of film and played games in the darkroom. Even after developing and drying a photograph I would still change it. My photographs were simple, often without people in them, and minimalist in feel.

And now I am a photographer again, though my camera is usually my cellphone, or my phone with a little app that serves as my choice of film, camera, and darkroom games.

I am constantly looking at the world, and photographing what I can, looking for poems trapped in their native environment: reality itself.

Yesterday, I found a poem for my friend Márton Koppány, the genius Hungarian visual poet. My poem is a game itself, since it consists of my willful refusal to admit that the sign I found on shack (or, really, which my companion pointed out to me—she reduced to Edward Weston's wife and I inflated into Edward Weston himself) is actually a crescent moon, not a parenthesis, and it signifies "halfmoon," that term coming to mean "outhouse," because the shack, sitting as it does gently next to the Shushan Covered Bridge Museum in the hamlet of Shushan, New York, is really a shack designed for sitting and relief.

(Though, actually, all of that meaning is meant to resonate; I am merely pretending to direct the reader/viewer, via the device of a title, away from that fact.)

So this is a poem for Márton specifically because it is slightly reminiscent of his work, and because the cultural references might trip him up, might make this a more elusive and enigmatic poem than it would otherwise be.

Unless, of course, he reads this.

Geof Huth, "Artless Photograph of the Same Outhouse" (24 September 2011)
ecr. l'inf.