Dani Spinosa: Hello. I stole four of your "lines." How does that make you feel?
Hart Broudy: OK, I want to define stole as "having liberated from con/textual confinement in order to reassemble into new form/s"… and how does it feel? I was very pleased. First, that the poem still carried enough energy to be re-purposed... second that you took its components and re-animated them into an outstanding piece.
D: Do you know which poem I stole from? Is the choice of poem I made relevant to your reaction at all?
H: Assuming it was one of the c pomes... I'd never written a lovepome series before. It was my first — for a doomed romance in Paris that thankgod ended. Your new work is multi-layered and shifting… a dimensional yang form created solely by yin components... that was an super touch.
D: From whom (or from what) have you stolen most in your poetry?
H: Many 'influences', but from whom have I actually stolen? In no order... Frank Stella & the New York guys, the Bauhaus, bp, any number of people in Mary Ellen Solt's book, Dedora, bill, dfb, Soviet blocky design, noir movies...
D: What is a "line" in the visual poem? Or, what does lineation have to do with visual poetry?
H: I hope this doesn't come across as too weird: Lineation in visual poetry is a false concept. It implies travel on a flat plane, usually in one direction. In visual poetry, the page is 3D space and a 'line' is an energy packet moving along any plane in any direction. We have to free ourselves from linearity and invent new terms to deal with these dimensional activities.
D: My poem to/about/from you is very much about the tension between analogue and digital. How does that tension play into your work, if at all?
H: All the work I do requires tension. It's one of the forces that make the piece live. Without it, a piece is lifeless—my wastebasket is constantly being emptied. Early work was analogue—typewriter, early IBM ballchangers and Letraset... I remember bleaching the back of film negs to soften the emulsion to shape before printing... smelly and awful, but really hands-on... I jumped on digital with the first Macs. Sometimes I create in analogue and digitize it and experiment in Photoshop and sometimes the other way around... it's fun to move from one to the other. I love the back & forth.
D: My poem to/about/from you is very much about mess and overlap and disrupting meaning making. Do you think about that in your work? Do you prefer a messy poem or a clean poem?
H: disrupting
meaning-making, mess and overlap are exceptional techniques. In skilled hands,
the new creation is vibrant and exciting and thought-provoking.
Does this
stuff play in my work? yes. yes. These terms mean rearrangements/changes and
thus new meanings. Messily or cleanly or overlappingly, I continue until I
either ultimately like or toss. I'm a total Libra. Sometimes I get off on
messy, sometimes on clean, sometimes both in the same piece.
D: Why is O such a lovely letter? What is it about O that we are drawn to?
H: O intimates perfection.
He regards the ‘page’ as an infinite spacial field in which linearity is a false concept. Language elements are vibrant atoms and molecular sculptures moving in all dimensions. This is language in space.
