I met Peter on the wryting-l listserv. People familiar
with wryting will already know about the samizdat aspect it includes. Of course
people familiar with the arts in general will already know how such gatherings,
online or off, provide considerable feedback,
encouragement, ribbing, guarded critiques, and other conversational thrusts and
parries.
In any case Peter was among the first people on
wryting that I had direct exchanges with. The texts and commentaries we posted
were of course open for everyone to read and comment on. But occasionally Peter
and I also exchanged more direct comments on some piece, getting into how it
struck us and why, how we thought it might be improved—the usual thing.
I at first assumed Peter was working only in text, but
after seeing a few of his posts I saw he was also a musician and visual artist.
At some point, in some comments to the list in general, he talked about his
admiration for the music of John Coltrane. He had, he said, taken up Coltrane’s
way of creating a “wall of sound” and converted it into writing poetry as a
wall of text. He may have said block of text—I think he used both terms.
People familiar with Peter’s writing will already know
what he was talking about. I can’t speak very knowledgeably about everything he
was doing with his “block” texts. What I do know is that one example of those
texts is available as his book An Archaeology of Theory, a free pdf available from Argotist online.
And while I am not a musician, I also admire John
Coltrane, and I would like to suggest that reading Archaeology listening to Trane’s album Giant Steps or some part of
it will give people less familiar with Peter’s art the chance to get closer.
I’m honored to have known Peter and think this is part of what he was sharing
on wryting and of course elsewhere.
William Bain was born in the United States (Indianapolis,
1944). He has lived and worked in
Barcelona, Spain since the 1970s. Some of his small format visual artwork and
written texts have been published online or on paper in Abstract|Ext, Barcelona
Ink, On-Barcelona, Ferbero, larealidadnoexiste.com, Red
River Review, and Zone, among others.