*
To conjugate a gaze
The pronouns of stare
Nosotros are seeing this
The environment is something you bump into
*
How to proceed...these explorations and
explanations are ancillary and redundant to a singular encounter with visual
poetry. A definition that undulates in water fluctuates in its own
meaning. Our optical landmarks continue to
form and disintegrate. It's easy to understand how someone might be
simultaneously lost and found. These accounts attest to failure that never
concludes.
There's a word for just about everything, but there ain't a word for this.
*
How letters release from words and what
they find themselves doing before and after forming into words.
Letters are free to arrange themselves any
way they want.
For a moment they're autonomous and
independent with no restrictions, so they navigate or are drawn toward one
another in order to form new and unrealized results.
My vispo tends to mimic this reflex, it
strives to capture and promote this moment.
Hello letters! - you will leave your words, will be unattached, able to drift into all new visible features of experience.
A sequence of energy constants:
a) The discharge of a word is finally
equal to the energy found in its letters
b) Now make those same letters askew,
reposition them on a page, have the letters touch other letters in unaccustomed
ways - the energy is the same
c) Then cut the letters in half and use
their visual elements as the available material to construct or compose the new
vispoem - the energy remains
Letters seek liberty from word supremacy. Will detach from word and roam the page. Will find new designs to thwart their word captor. Will unhinge entirely and emerge alongside natural formations.
Only then.
Will the letters offer to return, to
reconvene. Will reassemble. Will re enter the word template. Will be poured
into WORD meaning, the slots of which letters attend.
*
There is no pleasure if if. Capital A and
capitol Ism. The moment a reader dislocates their eyes to see language, its
material, happening. An untwisted poetics that both captures and documents the
letter in its pre and post word condition. It's a snake that reconvenes or a
strategy to not get entirely subsumed by the image. The visual machinations
transgress or reads seeing or writes vispo or some such hubristic yammer. I've
got scarring.
The uncanny nature of the eye to misjudge
then right itself. That instant an eye cannot locate information. A revisiting
of early development and the brain in a frenzy to categorize its external
environment. The eye becomes complacent and sensory transduction freaks out
when the unprecedented comes in contact with our body. That one wonky second
when the brain doesn't know how to process incoming information. It's that that
I love, it's what drew me from writing to seeing writing to reading seeing. I
seek that occurrence.
Children develop in a particular way. They
draw letters then they comply to writing letters. Hand drawing vs handwriting
alphabet. The keyboard is now eliminating this difference.
That time between, to draw and to write a
letter.
Drawing is a primitive expression of
marking space with time. Writing, or alphabet, is a forced societal construct.
Which letter or portion of that letter
will quell this desire of yours.
I've arranged these letters. Put them
together - next to one another. Yes, I have.
There is no one word to satisfy what it is
you want of me. No collection of words. No sentence affirming or destructive
enough to keep you fully engaged.
*
Dear Poetry, the thing about you seeming important
is that you think you're everywhere. The pleats are naturally hammered back
into place. The rock is shaped by water. A sentence, a weft, passes over and
below its warp. Hands running under blankets. A magnification of parts of
letters, the parts that no longer resemble and cannot be traced back to the
original and so have determined to make a go of it on their own. It will be
interesting to see where all the threads arrive. Ready for that something new,
pressured by what's new. An image lingers.
*
Vispo is writing that exploded and
reconvened into another form of seeing. Reading this result is openness,
writing this new seeing is one way to transmogrify language. Language is
development, is as Piaget or Chomsky say - at odds, fighting to know how it
first bloomed.
I see no reason to destroy word, I simply
want to undo word so the letters become revealed. Letters gather in a pre word
formation, free to move about and explore before they are forced to line up and
take their place in a word sequence.
I see the letters as ingredients without
which words would not exist. Words are a form of convenience. They take the
place of an object in language. Letters are the math that allows this equation
to result in words. We wipe our memory clean of letters and allow words to fill
the air. The information letters house has become lost to us.
*
A visual poem is successful when it makes
alternative use of writing and devalues the sequence of alphabet, that which is
typically reserved for word communication, and offers a visual logic to how
letters can be presented. I am particularly interested in letters, but more so,
I am involved in the pieces of letters that just barely hang on to recognizable
form before being jettisoned into new terrain. This terrain is part of the
development of language or pre/post language. How children are first asked to
draw and then to write letters. It moves from free expression in drawing to
rigid grid-like writing that makes everything the same. Children are forced to
comply to group communication before they are ever encouraged to create their
own alphabet.
Coincidence occurs within the making of a
piece only after I have a generalized idea of what the outcome will be.
Beginning a piece may be a product of happenstance, but it proceeds with a
clarity of design and composition. I work in layers and over time to ensure
that multiple viewings of the poem can reflect several angles of entry. For the
viewer, their experience might be wildly different. My work could look like a
document or field recording of my unconscious, but more than anything, I think
it is a capture shot of letters before or after they formulate into word.
Letters have a life unto themselves. "...letters have a destination other
than words." Isidore Isou
My overall concept about this is that we
are on the planet to find a way to leave the planet. We are exhausting the
planet's resources and so technology or the language of technology must take
its necessary path, must reach a conclusion. Human beings, in their current condition,
will consume the very means that sustains them. We will have no choice but to
explore off-planet solutions.
Technology is a problem we live with, a
problem we absorb and adjust to as we go along. Nature is the great equalizer.
Nature is an alphabet we have forgotten, because convenience has made us soft
and helpless. Also, the idea of generating constant profit has degraded our
integrity. Being a poet, a real poet, is become near impossible in this world.
Too many other concerns have made us into hybrid poets, living as poets in
tangential situations. How are we able to maintain focus in this accelerated
environment. Fewer and fewer real poets exist anymore.
*
Sutured, sewn, becomes the one with
qualities of two. As a child succumbs to its parental information only to
emerge a singular new byproduct. To force an image onto text or text onto image
is a weakness. The composition should arise from the shared balance and
sensibility of the two. A blend of data and vision. Not simply seeing, but
knowing - a haiku of sight. The drawn is a reproduction of it, the written is a
recreation of it, the said is a facsimile of thought. They are the filters to
activity behind the eyes.
My fascination with how letters sit beside
each other and patiently wait to be freed of their word logic scrum hasn’t
subsided. So, I capture that alphabetic dalliance as document of some future
language event. Vispo is a byproduct of ones experience with literature, with
writing, reading and seeing. It’s about how you look and read your way passed
words and re familiarize yourself with the intentional drawing of letters.
*
We called those involved The Starists
*
The first tendency of Letters, when newly
released from their word bondage, is to become decorative. This is usually
followed by design logic and visual pun, as well as other compositional
templates. Next, Letters either proceed into new visual poetics or return to
the word. We are taught to return, but are seldom given an option. Yes, they
said, let us go, free us.
Vispo is a response to reading and writing
language. There is a connection between seeing writing and writing reading and
reading seeing. Vispoets transmogrify, they undo the word, they reveal the
potential locked in the word by visually deconstructing it. They replace
language with other visual language.
*
The Word Eater is a verbal-visual totem.
The Word Eater enunciates staring inside monkey bars where oxygen attracts
twice the hydrogen. To look upon minus alliteration. Staring as a buffer -
staring into nothing. Then leap. The invisible reunion of electricity. Greek
totems lead to a phalanx. A nugatory battle between what you are see and what
you are say. Asemic to the foreign totem. This in the end is what makes the
person.
*
Minor sources of sugar. Button-shaped
trees. Air pricked with negative light. Invisible chairs crossing the sea.
Literature derived from art manifestoes. “Logically, the universe is absurd”
Thought Veranda busy in motion.
*
W is encircled but not dead yet. B
addresses one vacant intersection. it is considered a surrounded text. W eludes
capture. W is elsewhere. the two are separate. B chooses not to expend energy.
to waste time. B moves internally. forever. the table’s comprised of many
texts. W connects the points. in a moment. the moment W both removes and
occupies the seat. the enclosed structure creates a new design. the eyes. the
text by which all is captured. B forbids suicide. B allows himself to be
logically unoccupied. the fashion of the prisoner. W replies. endlessly the
life and death of larger texts and their disputed intersections. W’s repetition
of the original. B dares not ignore. B implies the threat of being elsewhere. W
responds. the out of context sequence shows weakness. a small text is used for
convenience to illustrate the method. the southern half of the table acquires
four prisoners. B and W encompass each other. it’s unsure if they own anything.
W has two eyes and surveys his territory. W lives in an enclave. B deduces that
he too must have at least two eyes. B must kill and expose W’s false eye. the
primary enclosure is in place. an influence upon southern threats. the edges of
the text are natural borders. B will diminish the area himself. the essential
walls no longer encroach. W leaves the center for later. a meal. B’s futility
goes unobserved. the invasion is defined by advantage. a subtle decrease in
vacancy. W invests in more material. W favors the difference in convenient
patterns. in permitted groupings. the table is governed by strategy and
accuracy. the seats are additional territories. B resigns himself to local
occurrences. B is foolish in this example. on the other hand. the text is outside
and rife with discrepancies. a rare consolation. the text filled with errors.
it begins dull and ends scattered. B arbitrarily cuts himself off from more
funding. B requires three rocks. inconsolable.
*
A SYMPOSIUM ON LOVELINESS invisible
notations. the nearest distance. a prediction. intends the practical drift of
color, verging on something gigantic. inside the small. a frantic dampening
stick. one hundred bells, one hundred bricks, one hundred remembers whatever
will surface. little alphabet parts. the genius of the thumb. delightful
electric shaft. the mayhem turns on you. as change finds you. frolic is sewn
into a hat. you wonder where gravity is. the forms of communicating. a foray. a
foyer. aforementioned.
*
Open. Opent. Oh, pent up. Immersed in
language, pearls loosened from the branches. Captured in a sphere. One eye
accepts light for the other more demur pupil. A three-sided funnel that spells
a tongue, that sees an image of hovering on the heels of dolphins cavorting.
Tonight in the company of cellular division. Tonight in the company of cellular
division. Roots grow out from the soil of two worlds. Between two shoulders is
a head in the middle.
*
The specialist comes and dreams a way
through your problem. I’ve never met them before. A postcard. A modernist
quintet in the rain. Index cards full with scribble. That kind of writing makes
my eyes blur. Pointing to the top most shelves in the display cabinet. The
shortness of breath. Overhearing instructions on how to fix the problem with
your portable device. Printing billboards, tagging billboards. You will know
him by the looped affectation of his letter ‘f’. Thinking a scenario before it
happens.
The scarf was strewn on the floor in the
shape of the letter S.
*
a full of b
abc full of d abcd full of e abcdef full
of g abcdefg full of h & i & you
*
“My work constitutes an attempt to
immortalize fleeting moments... I must seize the very instant in which the
living experience seeps on to the symbol, which in this case is the letter.”
Mira Schendel, 1975
As if it’s a graphic poet out of reasons
situated in an inability to convey a sustained truth (written) there’s magic to
alphabet gazing -
*
You take lines and shapes and given
possibilities and make alphabet. You use it to make sounds and you map out
trajectories of thought. You make names and call your children by them. This is
done everywhere. And it’s been done for thousands of years until you became
bored with this method — until you have surrounded and suffocated yourself with
these products of your creation.
You go through ubiquitous, unrelenting
text — you are altered by text, by its message. You’ve had to alter how you
see. You are forced to alter text itself. You stare your way through words and
into middles of words. You resolve the noise of your eyes. The information you
see, you seek, to find another nature therein.
It’s you viewing textual oddities askance.
. It’s the words, their origins, words within words, the seeds of language.
It’s the symbols, signs, and icons seared into your brain. It’s you being
attracted by perfect letter structures. It’s the revisiting of early alphabet
education. It’s the timeframe between learning how to draw letters and how to
write them. It’s you seeking to express the phenomenon of seeing language. It’s
you transforming and appreciating the design and construction of alphabet.
“Upon it draws a handwritten gnarl if
thoughts untie let loose to move that twice subsumed both time and space
through ink refined these letters hold and release the tiny marks remain.”
* SeeingSeeing
Detached. Dissociative. I don’t know. How
to explain this condition. I let my brain do the thinking. I watch it think for
me. There’s an enjoyment I get seeing where it goes. From one visual idea to
another it makes the associations. I follow them as an observer. I look on it
as an observer of my own brain’s momentum. I’m not in charge of this activity.
I’m not willfully in charge. I’m not directing the seeing. My brain looks up,
acquires information, and it sees for me. It goes from one enticement; lets say
a capital B, then to another peripheral small case k. It makes the connection
and I am simply viewing. When this happens I am aware of feeling detached. As a
spectator I sense another consciousness at work. The brain itself is receiving
stimuli and translating that information into patterns that I would normally
seek. The exception here is that I’m not knowingly seeking them out. I witness
my brain working. This is another consciousness. I thought of what to compare
this to and it came back to staring. When you stare at one fixed point you are
incorporating surrounding information and having an experience that includes
that fixed point plus everything else around it. Though you might feel locked
in one position your brain is doing some amazing things. So I thought, maybe my
brain thinks I’m staring and is piecing the puzzle together for me. I am not
actively looking. I am not engaged in staring either. My brain connects the
dots before I even see what I am seeing. It is like a form of entertainment, I
see my brain seeing and it expresses itself by my following its lead. I watch
where it leads me. What I watch is mostly bits of language: half-words, part
phrases, single letters, shapes within a given letter, fonts, size, etc. And
these, of course, are everywhere. Anywhere the printed word is displayed.
And so I wonder, what is this moment, this
moment I recognize my brain is creating associations for me. What is happening
to me that I feel detached from my own brain’s activity? That I feel separated
from my very machine, the one that works solely for me. When bringing it up, I
think about deterioration and disease of the brain. I was startled at first by
this minutia of time separation between seeing and seeing my brain see.
So barring any medical trouble, I am
basically responding to my brain seeing. It is a reality that I’ve been
attending to increasingly. Noticing where and when I am in authority and where
I am subservient to my brain’s dominion. The subtleties of control are vague,
of course, but during the act of staring hierarchy of who’s seeing what is even
foggier. The who is my brain, the who is me. This brings a mental, body, and
now, a third awareness, a separate me axis into play. Three aspects of info
retrieval interact with the world. Separations of power separated and facing
each other.
*
from starEduction
Drawing a blank – seeing a blank undone
Staring at letters reminds you that their
visual substance is there to encompass entire human histories
Each letter contains a history that is
both personal and communal
If you dissect a letter and stare at it
further you come upon nature’s world – the bits, the parts, the shapes are a
product of nature
Talking is an acceleration of letters
A letter has no beginning and no end
You stare for combinations that are
pleasing.
Letters are atoms and words molecules, but
the letter is the essence of your staring
The keyboard is a house of letters
Stare your way into a word till the
meaning of the word is gone then allow each letter to achieve its visual
potential
Burn the cohesive bonds between letters
Words make a prison for letters
VisPo exists because it encapsulates the
area of thought based on the alphabet that requires attention – the letter
VisPo is a byproduct of staring. Staring
penetrates natural design
A moment to be blank, to be in synch, to
be entranced, to be attentive, to be in tune with planetary and atomic
realities simultaneously
A sleepers stare awakens eyelids open for
half a minute, half the hour what moves in through the eyes and out from the
mind are the same, half of a day of peripheral viewing honed into half a week
of serious focal points
Deconstructs alphabet and so alters the
message
Concrete is ancient vispo
It’s not that unusual to find someone in
the midst of doing absolutely nothing
*
Words are patterns imbued with designated
meaning. Alphabets are the periodic table of talk. To discorporate further,
letters are visual entities that hold memory and experience in place. Whatever
pattern we devise, letters are rotationally ours.
*
“I’m looking through you, you're not the
same.”
The initial act of reading is staring.
When you add saccades you initiate movement. Text itself is an amalgam of units
of meaning. Words, right. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of
letters. As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words
discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space
relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further. Alphabetic bits or
parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the
very text you’re reading. Atomic incursions. Noodling among the utterances.
Like scuba diving in( )between letters to liberate the bonds that keep them in
place. Pre meaning is the moment before the letters arrange. More than anything
im stuck on parts of letters floating. The pre meaning or their meaning
askance-coalescing etc.
Writing as field recording device.
Stenographer’s translation. How uncomfortable is it to say, I document what
thinking arranges for me. It’s a situation I observe. Where my thinking goes.
Watching my thinking think. Documenting my staring. Evidence against the
collapsing scaffold of convenience. Getting ready to write for writing. For
documenting.
You wait for time and it reveals.
Composition comes in view. Again staring, the procedure is to get. Then get
lost. Then stare your way back into focus.
Saccades for cadence. The fixed point
renders a viewer’s seeing immobile for several seconds or more. A momentary
paralysis imbued with hyper focus. Not in charge of what to think. Immersed in
the designs and possibilities of visual momentum honed to Euclidian ends. Time
slips or stops or the ability to control time ceases. Free for unattended
thought to seep in. Then translating this process by capturing it. As how the
psychology of seeing, of reading might alter the writer. And now that we stare
into any number of screens a day we, ourselves, are caught.
In order to say the word language you are
forced to use language. The impossible nature of getting there. Finding your
aleatoric self among the pencils. Here. An alerted poise of tumult. When
staring bores an opening it defines the border where breathable atmosphere and
relentless space meet. The curve of the earth. Accumulation of lived
experiencing. Filling the satchel. With thought, with movement, with decisions
over both. Mostly it is documenting. The relation between chemical interface
and its effect on thinking. Where mind clarifies chaos. Hones in on the
attention it requires. Hallucinating the possibilities that generate a reason
to speak/write outside of self. And the catalyst.
*
Staring formulates a holding pattern
writing prepares for.
A kind of Staring Poetics.
Staring at textpo creates the potential
for vispo.
*
There are things happening we don’t talk
about. A dictionary haphazardly opened is a trick for letters to flee. Rising
off the page into your eyes or into your nostrils or into your ears. These
letters don’t sustain meaning. They are in flux and are better considered
particulates of the larger WORD world. In this place though we are specifically
concerned with these singular units that comprise what we know as alphabet. In
this world letters are vulnerable and cant always stand on their own. Letters
alone are typically unwanted things. They are in danger of being individual, of
lacking community, of not forming into a word. Isolated. And the bits that
flake off, that are shaved off, that simply give way - these letters collapse,
they morph, they concoct a new purpose. The visual potential of each letter.
Here is that poetry. You can leave these images if you want, but know that the
letters remain afloat even after you’ve gone. Nothing for a change or
everything changes. The quantum of alphabet. Its elements seeking adhesion,
making their way to some certain molecule. Poised for destination. The pre
word. The periodic table of letters. Held in their miasmic solution, their
amniotic fluid. Before birthing into word. They are here waiting, suspended,
considering their possibilities. Poetry is comprised of charged units of
language. Before sound, before meaning, before even the impulse to write – the
letters are preparing to congeal. To see it at this level is to see the visual
aspect of poetry forming. The pre cohesion of language. The poetry of infinite
turns. And so the material changes, time changes, seeing changes. Staring your
way through to another approach we seldom heed. A mushroomed mentality constant
and without obstacle. Again, letters float, like the dust spots in your eye,
before they land and become words. Over and over again this continues.
*
as verb
To vispo; the process of applying letters
to the world in a way that alters or creates meaning specific to the use of
alphabet as visual material and not hinged to semantic, syntactic word logic.
Though words can be used to draw the reader toward the action of vispo, as a
descriptive, words are not part, the basis, of a result of vispoing. The
letters, and every permutation therein, are the principle ingredients to a
vispo creation.
To vispo; the act of looking at alphabet
and seeing only its visual material.
To vispo; the imagined or real interaction
with letters and their visual presence. While vispoing, the poet can create a
field of renewed understanding with their over saturated
word surroundings.
To vispo; a form of looking. The process
by which one deconstructs a word through the release of adhered letters. The
breaking of letter bonds that capture and keep letters inside words.
To vispo; a way of liberating the letter,
to read past the word toward the design elements of its component parts.
He vispoed his way through a landscape of
billboards.
Her vispoing transformed advertising in
the subway.
As evening went on, the book he was
reading was visited by a vispoing specter and the letters began to float off
the page.
The architect was thinking of how to use
her vispoed text as a blueprint for new building ideas.
To vispo; to discorporate text. The
vispoed word, being a unit of letters, discorporates by discharging its letters
and relieving word of its meaning.
To vispo; involves being witness to the
trajectory of the making and breaking of words. The pre accumulation of
letters, the wrangling for position, to acquire word definition and meaning.
This applies to the departure or post word exhaustion, the renewed liberation
of letters just before they're asked to reassemble into word again.
To vispo; the act of staring at language.
The uncovering of design material used to fashion alphabet.
At night, the lower angled support
scaffold of the letter K would vibrate.
While watching the newly christened name
of the boat reflect in the water, its letter E kept extending and disappearing.
My compass was the sharp angled pointing A
and beneath it cool safe shelter.
Once, you pressed the lower, larger bulbed
support of capital B and the upper part grew in size. Over and over again, you
pressed.
*
My Vispo
I think of vispo as preparation for a
future language event. We are inundated by our word-text surroundings, it
suffocates our thoughts. Vispo may be a repurposing, a pared down version of
our verbal-visual offering to show reverence for our interconnectedness with
the planet we're on. I doubt people look at vispo that way though. So, what is
it that vispo's doing?
Vispo takes from the blurred periphery of
language, and language material, and brings it front and center. This helps
people refocus their attention toward what's missed, what's missing, what needs
further investigation. It's the same as a “poem” only the interaction can be
more fleeting.
You can read anything as language is
everything. Someone asked me if i could read a shag rug, so i got down and
began articulating the width, length, direction, color, etc of each tuft/thread
in sound units.
The thing you don't want to do is explain
everything. You don't want to verbally replicate what is obviously visual. Some
reviewers of vispo do this and suck the life force out of a piece. Many
vispoets accompany their work by deciphering it with sound. A slideshowing
disconnect, a visualized lecture as well.
I think vispo is a kinetic mirror. It
shows origins, where written language came from and it shows potential, where
it might be going. Words are a limited system that convey only some aspects of
our experience. To visually enhance written language by getting in there among
the letters and exposing the ingredients of words is useful. It keeps our
communication exchange agile and fresh, it enables you to (re)explore new
terrain. What makes language language?
Graffiti expands visual alphabet too. It
constantly tries new combinations, designs, to convey the idea of I AM HERE.
Vispo seeks to unlock or continue our experience with alphabet.
There are 2 schools of thinking here. One
is that visual poetry is the pinnacle, the top of the categorization pyramid,
with everything below it (concrete, lettrism, hieroglyphics, pattern, etc) and
two, that vispo is the come lately sub-genre of concrete poetry.
Calling art abstract is subjective.
Abstract to who(m)? Vispo is, i think, more determined to convey a reaction to
language, a response that furthers the conversation. Further to who)m(? So, I
do not say vispo is art.
One current trend is to try and understand
what vispo is? What it is to engage alphabet and language from this vantage?
How are the tools that create the charged language of a “poem” not equally
present in a vispoem? There is lots to read about but few writers to capture
it.
I think asemic writing/poetry is the
ratcheted up magnification of parts of letters, the parts that no longer
resemble and cannot be traced back to the original and so have determined to
make a go of it on their own. It will be interesting to see where all the
threads arrive.
If language ingredients can be fashioned
to make a charged utterance, what is the difference in using those same
ingredients for vispoems?
I'm very interested in drawn letters. I'm
not so interested in written letters. There was a time when the brain danced
while drawing letters, moving passed the perforated lines, going off the page,
drawing on walls, etc, then came the time you were forced to write, to write
within the designated lines, to be accurate, exacting, precise, to use right
angles. That time frame between drawing letters and writing letters is more
fetching to me.
I point directly to my childhood memories
about the difference. Hand drawing vs handwriting alphabet was a dramatic segue
for me. The letter O, for instance, was first drawn by me as a surrealistic
potato encapsulating space wherever it moved. Very soon after that the letter O
became uniform, compliant and precise. It was forced to fit obediently between
the perforated lines. The line itself became rigid and no longer stole time
with unwatched abandon. Perhaps something in my life never quite recovered from
that.
*
FOLD #1 – The skin undergoes underground.
A turnstile. A machine exudes content. How smart can I write so it makes a lick
of difference. Depends on the new. Ahoy, an entrance to death.
FOLD #2 – The trouble with rubbing is it’s
a ghost. The plunge. A placemat. Reconnoiters. Door handles. Double handles. A
dream helmet. A landscape of construction paper and scissors.
FOLD #3 – I am more confused than ever. No
hat I know fits what’s happening in my head. Before 6 yrs old, before 5 yrs
old. Tricked by the photos. Something very important being neglected. The
kitchen table. The drapes.
FOLD #4 – A broken shuttle to the future.
The Luddite future. Please hold this close. Closer. A wall map pulled down to
protect the shade. Even closer. The fence, an anathema.
FOLD #5 – Bubbles aloft in the swamp. Two
fingers pinch the corner of a page. Light shoots through it. I’m not ready for
another problem. This tiny bastard wont leave me alone.
FOLD #6 – Smog makes the day irrevocable.
A voluptuous chaos runs through the chest. How to plumb. A car loaded down with
pain staking details. The shaky handwritten confession.
FOLD #7 – The swivel of being awake in a
cactus. The demur of follicles. Her soft part is notation. Sweet, sweetly, a
conifer grows upright in a pluck. One generates echo into the next. As it
mystifies. As it protrudes. Conducts conversation in written form.
FOLD #8 – Music to maneuver in. The screen
compels me. Lining up the ingredients. Business done at the edge. Nothing seems
good enough. I’m at work figuring out incentives. The intensions of a measuring
cup. Mostly alone. Tiny little bastard. A spot to write on.
FOLD #9 – No one wants to be lonely. Makes
noise to stop the silence. The magnet. He feeds on eyes. It’s horrible. A
palsied runt. A smidgen of disbelief. That locale you know will bring relief.
*
You wait for time and it reveals.
Composition comes in view. Again staring, the procedure is to get. Then get
lost. Then stare your way back into focus. And click. You catch the shit in a
jpeg cage.
*
To fuss and cause a fracas in the eye.
*
An elongated gaze. Consonants against the
screen. Vowels in the kitchen.
*
A building of letters. The letters
themselves, drawn, or otherwise printed, are illustrating or reproducing our
thought.
Staring your way into and through the
letter as object.
Is a letter real? Does it qualify as a
real world, real time object? Is a letter a totally hypothetical entity?
Things, letters, come together for a short
while.
For the letters that choose not to return
it is a kind of suffocation.
The letters defy word. They detach and
leave word unstable. The letters, tired of adjusting to word, are free to roam
and construe.
These alphabet parts seek a vision to
upend everything that came before.
Seeing is believing that alphabets are in
motion and in a moment come together to form a word. Otherwise, letters are
everywhere at once, hovering in consideration. Visual poetry documents this
occurrence, the individual letters that precede the making of a word.
NOTES
It's always been a catch-as-catch-can
operation of work. There are crossover possibilities in hybrid poetries. Visual
poetry portals have been useful. I'm not sure how to answer this. I think
engaged fun is the overriding theme to collaborating, also it acts as a buffer
to working alone. There are a few that include sound, but yes, for the most
part, I think sound does interfere with focus and in this day and age of
everything happening at once silence becomes a point of respite. I think it's
the pulse that animates and gives the illusion of movement. What I intended by
that was that the word, after being stared at, will lose its meaning by having
the Letters become loosened from their position. The Letters acquire a new
sense of visual logic and associative meaning, thus knocking the word off its
throne. This was achieved through a sequence of filters that enabled that
multi-colored pulse to come through and attract the eye. Of course, the mind's
eye is much more agile than any machine or program.
Any lack of sophistication is deliberate.
I should say, approach video recording as blank white pages with all the
decisions and chaos you encounter during that exchange. Preparation is about
collecting and selecting the materials. It is about envisioning what text could
do.
You can't look at anything without it
having an emotional aspect.
Where do Letters go. After watching them
discorporate. Liberated from confinements of the word. Simple accumulations
that become decorative elements in visual poetry. Fascinations with
representative sound units. After attempts at altering. After value's been
reassigned and ciphers adjusted. What next for the emancipated Letter. Digitize
and spiff up, done. Letter as fingerprint. More Letters, Letters that exceed,
asemic Letters, done. For the Letters that choose not to return to the word. It
is a kind of suffocation.
My interest is in watching Letters
discorporate from the words that contain or confine them.
The first tendency of Letters, when newly
released from their word bondage, is to become decorative. This is usually
followed by design logic and visual pun, as well as other compositional
templates. Next, Letters either proceed into new visual poetics or return to
the word. We are taught to return, but are seldom given an option. Yes, they
said, let us go, free us.
Seattle, 2012
NOTES for Crag Hill
Portmanteau of alphabeta
Is askance and peripheral adventure When
language doesn't do
what it's accustomed to Where eye meets
page and alters both
History minimizes word to bare essentials
Liberates letter to its multiple applications Alphabet’s visual meat leaves
word behind It's not an image placed alongside writing,
but where the two merge
We are one of many imagetext waves to come
Leaves a mark that Infects and widens
How to know what is and what is good How
to know bad and what it’s not
Why does it take so long, he meandered, to
handle the hybrid nature
The mixed ingredients,
both fruitful and handicap
futures of our technology This is where everything
Ж
:
NOTES for Martín Gubbins
Pleasure in viewing is a pleasure to think
freely, visually, without destroying it with
interior chatter.
Ж
If words convey the image of a thought and
letters are part of words, then parts of letters are...what's the most suitable
response here.
In the past forty years, we have gone
further into the nucleus finding more and more material. We're looking for that
last unit of information to associate it to all other living material. Without
the tiniest bit of the letter how can we have the word. A molecule is not
possible without a sequence of atoms. The blind vispoets move about in the dark
of their homes making and breaking code according to instinct. Science is the
perfect unresolved pest.
To fold paper enough. To make it sing at
the crease. The pulse of the place derived by how the ink and fibers commingle.
There's disturbance there too. How birds write their way through sky. The poets
make us sick. They continue to make askew what asks to be left alone.
Ж
Where letters are conterminous Where a
letter neighbors another Where letters detach from the word they're caught in
Where letters only huddle and flank each other Where letters verge into
themselves Where letters are visually contiguous Where parts of their bodies
touch Where letters are flush against the other Where letters fringe and skirt
other letters Where letters abut nearby letters Where a letter attracts its
fellow letter and makes actual contact. This is where my eyes move toward This
is what they seek Where a letter is its own magnet Not only to other letters
but to my eyes' attention You find this in
the streets Walking among our communal visual texts Out of the corner of our
eyes.
Ж
When you say a word the same time you hear
it on the radio.
When you read a word the same time you
hear it spoken.
When you turn your head the same time
someone looks at you.
Ж
The chilean national military orchestra
played jaws, brazil, adele, and sousa in the gazebo at the Plaza de Armas.
Ж
The black damp.
Ж
Plaza de Armas in Santiago - I walked into
a protest during and about an economic summit between South America, Europe and
the Caribbean. Speeches, music, pro Chavez, communists, socialists, queer,
Mapuche, colorful dancers, marching bands, giant flags, the black block, Che
t-shirts, and of course the cops. They battled over one street, back and forth,
big trucks spraying water into the crowd. The crowd throwing rocks, sticks,
bottles. Several thousand people, young and old, smiling, sweating, angry,
soaked, giddy, and just there to stand alongside other people with slogans on
sticks.
Ж
Thing
Spicer's LANGUAGE (foreshortened)
No/One listens to poetry.
The poet is a/counterpunching radio. Buzz,
buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz. Dancers shrieking one by one. Prayer/is exactly
that
Zooms.
Death is not final.
Death/is a tooth among/Strangers. The
in-/Visible world.
Almost too big to get used to
Love
The baseball season finished. Shit/Enters
into it only as an image It is not for the ears.
Blind guesses.
I gave you my imaginary hand.
Intermissions
the celestial movement of spheres in a
long,/ boring procession
We found a champion. The poem Who carries
his dreams on his back
Transformations
We is an intimate/pronoun Those swans
and/I Everything out of place We/Hated them.
It is not that the name of the town
changes Troy was a baby
having no recorded/language/Never knew
what hit them
Across from the house that Jack built.
This is the end of it,
Morphemics
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth How/Motherfucker can I sing
Moon,
If it were spelled "mune" it
would not
cause madness an image of syllables
They would only listen. Nor could Alice
Phonemics
Over that land
There
Is more of it.
Empty fragments.
Found but not put together.
The/unstable/Universe telesexual route to the brain Your voice
Would not have been possible
Believe me. Linguistics is divided
two phonemes/that never paired before
Vowels somehow get between
to produce/children.
A ground-/rules double. You recognize them
by pattern. Try
Graphemics
I can hear the little sound of it The
sun-dial makes a grapheme I
cannot understand.
The hour-glass is a computer.
Orange
Doesn't last long.
You flicker.
The space between it
We made tapes. They were probably erased
like
we were.
both script i and cursive i
between/The spaces on a paper the letters
grow within I within i
time leaves us
Words
Ж
after ISOU (lifted from David Seaman's
Concrete Poetry in France)
First "amplified" then
"chiseled"
ISOU came to the conclusion that words had
to be broken down into what he considered to be their components - letters - in
order to reconstruct the world of poetry.
Tzara's efforts at the destruction of
language are praised by ISOU, but he feels they stopped just short of the final
step, reduction of word
to letter.
"Mission of the new poetry: reduce
everyone's outpourings and impulses to letters; rebuild the perceptions in
themselves in a meaningful and sensitive matrix of letters."
"Poetry will be Lettrist, or it will
cease to be. But poetry will be Lettrist!"
After the emotive power of letters in
painting is recognized, the purely visual element becomes of prime importance.
ISOU soon ended his period of Latin notation, and began to introduce other
embellishments, alphabets, and signs of
all origins.
This new form of Lettrism was at first
called metagraphics.
Hypergraphics (formerly metagraphics):
Ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality seized by the
consciousness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and
partial practices.
Maurice Lemaître says, for the first time
with poetic Lettrism and hypergraphic Lettrism, PAINTER AND POET are one and
the same (because the genre has become the same).
The question is really how far one can go
in reducing and limiting the elements of a genre and still be considered part
of that genre.
"The author said to himself one day,
that by drawing the word "sun" instead of writing it, he blows up the
sentence where there is the idea of sun depicting the "sun" itself:
instead of recalling the sun by the series of letters in which it had been seen
written a thousand times, he would for the first time brilliantly break into
the sentence. A new, immediate, captivating representation would enter
contemporary writing."
Ж
THE CLOUD APPRECIATION SOCIETY
My dear thumbnail,
Hello my friend, how are you? How are
clouds where you are? It has been some time since we have spoken to one
another. I wanted to update you on what's been happening. As you know, the
letters, our annual records from The Cloud Appreciation Society of 2008, were
seized and frozen several months after publication. Legal action was
threatened, because another Cloud Appreciation Society exists that owns the
rights to the name. Also, the two young members of our Seattle chapter
unknowingly used cloud material from their public archive to create those
stickers The unfortunate result is that our annual cloud exchange is stuck in
limbo, which is a mother cloud of a problem. We don't see clouds as being able
to be copy-written. To resolve this issue I propose we republish our letters in
a second edition using a different title, The Cloud
Letters. This will avoid legal action and
thusly make available what would otherwise not be. I look forward to your
response. Keep the strength, my friend, and may the sky reward you daily.
As ever,
Mr. Behoover Vice President
"Writing, in its physical, graphic
form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the
"imagetext" incarnate." - WJT Mitchell
Ж
Sutured, sewn, becomes the one with
qualities of two. As a child succumbs to its parental information only to emerge
a singular new byproduct. To force an image onto text or text onto image is a
weakness. The composition should arise from the shared balance and sensibility
of the two. A blend of data and vision. Not simply seeing, but knowing - a
haiku of sight. The drawn is a reproduction of it, the written is a recreation
of it, the said is a facsimile of thought. They are the filters to activity
behind the eyes.
The research is mixed. A bag of saddened
murk. A dullard bumps into a word not seeing letters.
Tears her pearls off, she can't be honest
about signage. Maybe three electric eyeballs in a cart full of academic
padding. No brilliant volume to go to, to see seeing, to write seeing. The time
period, usually kindergarten, between learning to draw a letter and learning to
write a letter.
Ж
Would it be a better approach? Is it
better?
How we group our letters into syllabic
word sounds.
To write out in full or enumerate the
letters of which a word is composed.
The inconvenience of spelling out the
letters in words during normal speech exchange would be enormous.
A verbal formula considered as having
magical force.
Spell out your words, put a spell on your
words. Make the letters stand individually, not only as the ingredients of a
word, but as sounded signage. Each letter given its due, both verbal and
visual.
To write or name in correct order the
letters that comprise the conventionally accepted form of (a word or part of a
word).
Spell a word and everything starts to slow
down.
Ж
The surface where text, visible language,
joins image, the representation of visual meaning, to create the byproduct -
visual poetry (vispo).
The predilection for fidgeters of text to
have letters be unmoored from their word source, so as to consider even the
singular letter or portions of that letter as material for composition.
Alphabetic is used loosely to connote a
series of visual markings with or without
semantic purpose.
Ж
Which letter or portion of that letter
will quell this desire of yours.
I've arranged these letters. Put them
together - next to one another. Yes, I have.
There is no one word to satisfy what it is
you want of me. No collection of words. No sentence affirming or destructive
enough to keep you
fully engaged.
Paragraphs, as you know, are too loud, so
those we relinquish.
Ж
The one sentence painting.
TOM TOM'S GOTTA GUN
ssS So So O So o S s au Ss o os Os so Ssss
Ж
from Klaus Peter Dencker:
"If concrete poetry has been made to
serve against the wearing out of language and for the discovery of a new
literalness, a new material and language awareness, then the chief service of
visual poetry lies in the discovery of a new context awareness and new language
reference systems, whereby language no longer means only alphabetic
language."
Ж"
Mallermé once evoked "the book, total
expansion of the letter," the letter, then, would seem to be the germ of
the book.
Ж
from Ilse & Pierre Garnier:
"Letters, here they are galaxies.
Appearance of currents, whirlwind, gusts. Jazz for the eyes...This poetry is
not aimed at the mind but at the senses. Because each letter is both a line and
a sound on the page. Visual and acoustic vibration: we hear these
letters...through our eyes - and the music is heard in the subconscious. With
the result that the page sings."
The term Garnier prefers is the German
Schreibaktionen ("action writing"), which he defines as "unique
and total union ofconception, production, and process. Instantaneous.
Spontaneous."
"Drawn out, deformed by the other
words nearby, the word sometimes gets quite noticeably out of adjustment with
itself"
"the word or its components taken as
objects and centers of visual energy."
"The new reader" / "The new
poet-reader" (Gomringer/Solt)
Ж
The letter "h" may be the
easiest of all the Spanish letters to pronounce: It is always silent.
Ж
So, what is Linguistic Sensual Concrete
Poetry? So, what is Linguistically Sensual Concrete?
So, what is Linguistic Sensuality?
So, what is Lingual?
from Claus Clüver:
"The minimal material of some
Concrete ideograms or constellations, to use the terms employed by the
Brazilians and Gomringer, respectively, lend these texts the quality of
"signs" in the sense of traffic signs - which was indeed a part of
Gomringer's program: instant recognizability. Does that diminish the poem's
worth? Marjorie Perloff wonders "whether the conflation of Concrete poetry
and advertising isn't a kind of dead end for the former" and she further
asks whether a text like Gomringer's "silencio" can continue to hold
our attention."
"The tendency of equating Concrete
with visual poetry, pernicious when it occurs in widely used literary
glossaries and dictionaries, needs to be redirected..."
from Lars Elleström:
"Printed poetry has a solid,
two-dimensional material interface, or a sequential combination of such
interfaces (if realized in the technical medium of a book). It is perceived by
the eyes, but also when read silently it becomes apparent that it also has
latent auditory qualities in the conventional system of signification called
language. Most poetry gains its meaning through these conventional signs, but
there may also be substantial portions of iconicity in both the visual form of
the text and the silent, inner sound experiences produced by the mind. In terms
of spatiotemporality, printed poetry is essentially spatial. Very rarely,
virtual space is perceived as a result of illusive depth in the two-dimensional
visual appearance of the poem, whereas virtual space in the sense of
illusionary worlds is often created. Printed poems that are dominated by
readable words, rather than, for instance,
clusters of letters, are indirectly (partly) sequential since the conventional
signs (partly) determine the temporal realization of the written
language."
Ж
Populated islands in the back throat. Ж
from Philadelpho Menezes:
"In my practice as a poet, I have
been trying to investigate especially the new forms that technological media
suggest for organizing visual and sound signs in space and time. But I try to
escape from the specific problems of form to head for a semantic field where
the complex
relation between reality and thought for
aesthetic signs is imposed. In 1985 in Sao Paulo I organized a polemical
exhibition, called "Intersign Poetry," in which I proposed that after
decades of experiments with sound and image effects, experimental poetry must
address itself also to the new meanings that new forms can produce. Such poetry
must begin with the opened possibilities of organization of the form in new
syntaxes required by technology, if one works with technical media, or
suggested by technology, if one works on paper or with traditional means.
Linguistic and semiotic theories agree
with the idea that our thought is conditioned by the form and the organization
of the signs in a discourse. And these theories argue that language is fascist,
as Roland Barthes said, because it imposes a procedure of thinking and guides
us to a certain
concept of reality which reinforces the
system of language. We can escape from this vicious circle only if we are able
to perceive the fragility of the links between signs and thought, language and
reality. Poetry is the chief guide for this practice because it exposes the
sign as a touchable event that makes signs as real as the material world, in
spite of the fact that signs are a creation of thought."
Ж
This bird has particularly good posture Ж
My Dear Behoover,
How nice to hear from you after so long a
break! Clouds have gotten darker in Budapest (or it is my weakening eyesight),
but we're still in business. My young colleague has gotten fed up with clouds
and moved to the Mediterranean where he can concentrate on his "old
passion", the sky. (I was not surprised.) The Cloud Letters would be a
perfect title and if we get in trouble again for any reason, please bear in
mind that our Budapest Office is now specializing in cloud insurance. (I've
attached a pair ofstamps for your convenience.)
Hope you're doing well, and I wish you all
best,
m. R. koppp'
Vice- & V.-President
The Cloud Appreciation Society Budapest
Exploding seed pods Lunar hemorrhage
La escritura, en su forma física, gráfica,
es una sutura inseparable de lo visual y lo verbal, la encarnación del
"ImageText".
So, what's the most suitable response.
...bit, fraction, piece, scrap, cantle,
shred, tatter; end, leftover, oddment, remainder, remnant, stub; portion,
section, segment; chip, flake, shard, shatter, shiver, sliver, splinter;
clipping, paring, shaving; atom, crumb, dribble, fleck, flyspeck, grain, granule,
molecule, morsel, mote, nubbin, nugget, particle, patch, scruple, snip,
snippet, speck, tittle of a letter.
Vitacura, Chile 2013
NOTES
Vispo is clearly a response to language.
It tends to enhance the quantum aspects of language by focusing on the elemental
design parts of language material. What’s that mean? People like fidgeting with
alphabet.
Vispo is a response to reading and writing
language. There is a connection between seeing writing and writing reading and
reading seeing. Vispoets transmogrify, they undo the word, they reveal the
potential locked in the word by visually deconstructing it. They replace
language with other visual language. Vispo is Poetry’s bastard child, a figment
of language’s imagination.
My fascination with how letters sit beside
each other and patiently wait to be freed of their word logic scrum hasn’t
subsided. So, I capture that alphabetic dalliance as document of some future
language event. Vispo is a byproduct of ones experience with literature, with writing,
reading and seeing. It’s about how you look and read your way passed words and
refamiliarize yourself with the intentional drawing of letters.
New York, 2014
Text sources:
Interview with Nick Piombino, Fait
Accompli 2005
Askew,
bbc press 2006
TEXT LOSES TIME,
ManyPenny Press 2007
Interview with Tom Beckett, Otoliths
2008
StarEduction,
Book Thug 2008
Disparate Magnets,
BlazeVOX 2009 Protracted Type, Blue Lion Books 2009
Staring@Poetics,
Xexoxial Editions 2011
Last Vispo Anthology,
Fantagraphics 2012
Alphabet Noir,
c_L Books 2016
In the Breast Pocket of a Fine Overcast
Day, Subrosa 2017
Voir Dire,
Dusie Books 2020
.jpg)
Nico Vassilakis is one name, a poet, a visual poet, using letters or fragments of letters to propose another possible environment for literature to thrive in. This hybrid future will be engulfed by a more primitive planetary silence. You either evolve or stay there n wait in line. That’s how pompous became pom poms became ping pong in pitch black. His recent books include VOIR DIRE (Dusie Press 2020) and LETTERS of INTENT (CyberWit 2022) along with other pamphlets and booklets. Nico is a contributing editor for UTSANGA and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Illinois with his wife and animals.
