Four books from mIEKAL aND's Xexoxial Editions/Xerox Sutra

The other day I received in the mail four books published by Xexoxial Editions, a state-run imprint of the Autonomous Republic of Qazingulaza. Four books: of fracture, a collaboration by Buffalonian Robin F. Brox and mIEKAL aND (prefect of Qazingulaza); Xerolage 51: graphemachine by SFer Lily Robert-Foley; Xerolage 50: Three Sequences by the late Bob Cobbing; and The Elimination Considerati by mIEKAL aND.

I feel that these are four distinct modes I will try to describe succinctly. A hypothetical translation, from the unreadable to the more familiar. A translation of another kind, from the familiar to the sculptural, diagrammatic, concrete, visual. Unfamiliar plays of shape and light and darkness, presented as (perhaps) language sequences. And language blown and distorted to examine the qualities of the edges of words.

As such, they all seem to have different, but related, pivots. Changes. And different kinds.

Of Fracture. This collaboration between Brox and aND takes an older book length poetic sequence called factura by Langpo fungimentalist and conservative radio antennae Bruce Andrews, and twists it, visually, from things resembling words, transforming it into a poetic sequence more intelligible than the original, while maintaining its original, concrete, shape.

To explain Andrews' factura a bit more, it's written in "Near English" as I would put it. Words and word parts suggestive of language you might know, but never with an obvious word it "should" be, and as such without any concrete meaning. So then of fracture is something akin to a homophonic translation, taking words we know (for the most part) and putting them in the places of Andrews' Near English. There may be more to the constraint used by aND and Brox but this is how it appears to me. I attempted a similar project some years ago. I made a poem of book-length by taking Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez, which is also composed of words and word parts, and "staring" another text out of it. It makes little sense perhaps but I was attempting something I have been calling "translation by Rorschach." I would suspect similar projects have been undertaken by other poets (and I would like to see them. Commentators suggest there is nothing new under the sun. In my poem, Dawn's Erasure, the language seemed to be a blend of the recent/familiar and the repressed, with a fair amount of "other" thrown in. In this sense the language "of translation" is coming from the "back of the head" and the "bottom of the guts." What's interesting to me is this kind of translation being done as a collaboration-where are the guts? Are they shared, manufactured, both?

In graphemachine, the 51st installment of Xerolage (a serial devoted to xerography, collage, concrete & visual poetry) we have another kind of translation. Interpretation might be a better word. This time there is a personal language, of self description (i.e. "Lily needs a boyfriend of any kind") used as the source material. In graphemachine, the author takes the source and breaks up the language into diagrams, often reminiscent of Jackson Mac Low's "vocabulary gathas," resemblant of ancient (1960s) vispo.
These are then transformed, in series, into things like architectural diagrams, board games, paper jewelry, cubist bookshelves. All of these executed in a graceful and soft dark pencil and/or pen. I hope she sends me something for the newsletter (if anyone reading this knows her, tell her how, or give me her address).

I probably don't need to say too much about Bob Cobbing or mIEKAL aND. I'll say this: Three Sequences is the best reproduction of his visual poetry, and maybe the most interesting work of his, period, I have seen. But I haven't gotten to see that much. And I'm told there is a lot a lot out there. What I gather from the introduction (which, in Xerolage, always appear at the back) is that the format of Three Sequences is closer to the format he generally worked in. These are the furthest in this package of books from any convention of language. The other book of mIEKAL's, The Elimination Considerati is similar to the Cobbing in that its interest is the plays of disintegration and light, etc, but here with language as a still-apparent source material. Both of these books (email me if I'm wrong) are vispo of a time and style of which a fair amount exists: xerox, or ditto-based. However, I'm not sure an anthology of Xerox (or ditto)-based vispo does, or any otherwise collection. It seems to be underrepresented in the Last Vispo, though the scope of that anthology falls on a later time period. Are there collections of vispoetry from the photocopier? Doesn't mIEKAL live in a museum of just this?

13 Hats in 12 x 16

The Next Big Thing

My partner in rooming and doffing, Jen Coleman, has tagged me in a series of cryptic chainletters. It involves answering a series of questions revolving around a hypothetical, but unnamed "book," which I will pretend is referring to my forthcoming chapbook "10th Spectral Cannon," published by Hank's Original Loose Gravel (hanksoriginal.com).  

What is the working title of the book? 10th Spectral Cannon

 Where did the idea come from for the book? It's a section of a larger book, which is technically untitled but always gets called Spectral Cannon. 

 What genre does your book fall under? Colorful poetry.

 What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie
 rendition? Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers as an ampersand. Leo Daedalus as Ron Silliman. Richard Froude as all of the orange sentences. Homer Simpson's voice as the person talking about the dragonfly. Jen Coleman as the tongue-in-cheek sentences. That guy from Tron as Jeff Diteman.

 What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? Supercritical bottleneck.

 How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? As a formalist, that is hopelessly complicated.

 Who or what inspired you to write this book? I had a dream where I thought I could write all these sentences in different colors, and then if I wrote them again in yet different colors they would say something different entirely. I thought it was a Ron Silliman thing. It was. He needs to acknowledge this.

 What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? It's designed by Morgan Ritter. She is a famous artist. 

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Jim McCrary is no ordinary agency.

 My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:  Crag Hill, Morgan Ritter, Paul Maziar, Chris Ashby, Sam Lohmann.

My Day Workshop at Portland Art Museum

James Yeary and Nate Orton will be teaching a drawing and writing workshop at the Portland Art Museum on Sunday, January 6th. Contact multnomahartscenter.org or 503.823.2787 to sign up...

Join fellow writers and artists inside the Portland Art Museum. Enjoy a day of writing, drawing, and exploring the museum’s riches. Find inspiration in the surroundings and the sculptures, vessels, and jewelry that make up the Body Beautiful exhibit along with the permanent collection. We’ll plan to meet again to create a self-published book from work produced this day. 
Museum admission of $20 is not included. 
385142 Sun. 11:00 am - 4:00 pm Jan. 6 $37 [1 class] 
Nate Orton & James Yeary

Meet in the museum café.

David Abel and James Yeary present an Evening Made of Words (for John Cage)

VISPO

(image by antic-ham)

Fantagraphics has just released the advance copies of Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis' anthology: The Last Vispo: 1998-2008 (it's called something like that). Nothing of its kind has been published, neither in size, nor quality. It is a huge volume, in something like five sections, amounting to sub-categories (or categorical possibilities) of visual poetry, alongside over two-dozen essays by different practitioners of visual poetry and viewer-readers alike.

It is a strange volume. It includes sculpture, drawing, typewriter art, digital art, photography (found and otherwise), and various kinds of collage. Presumably, the artists within all believe that their work fits into the "movement" known as visual poetry, but it is not a simple question: what is it that unites these works? Certainly there is a tendency to the celebration, perhaps, or the exploration, of letter-forms, and I think of this tendency as something inherited from the practice of Bob Cobbing as well as the Canadian concrete poetry movement (not to say such practice was non-existent prior), and this practice of the letter-form may be the main, though not the only thrust of visual poetry at this moment. But there is much work in the anthology that falls outside of this rickety convention. So much can be found in the section labeled "collage," as well as scattered other work, that, to me, resembles abstract expressionism, and may lack letter-forms entirely. Much of editor Crag Hill's own work as a visual poet (though not included in this anthology) takes textual sources and visually manipulates them into what would improperly be called abstractions, as they are really developments, akin to Bob Cobbing's stretching, twisting, and warping of letter-forms. Then there are those like Bob Grumman, who use the visual structure of mathematics to suggest a new syntax.

Without any intention to insult I would suggest that many of these visual poets are coming from beneath established art conventions. As Geof Huth has said (I'm paraphrasing): "visual poets are artists who can't really draw, and poets who can't really write." though I'm not sure I agree with that.

Of the many centers of visual poetry, the one that is most interesting to me is the letter-figure that splits off from language, invoking the primal act of scrawled symbolism that somewhere and how inspired written language. But there are many other possibilities, and many other actualities. New possibilities for syntax, abstract expressionism in new media, post-literacy sign-painting, post-literature nature worship, vocal choreography, neo-Patchenism, and of course, zaum, which never gets old. All of these in some sense can be found in The Last Vispo, and it may be as well worth noting that most if not all of these ideas are working in between or across different media, sticking to the etymological fore of modern poetry that is: "MAKE IT NEW." The program os visual poetry has put everything in the fire, the heating of the heart at art's center.

LET THEM READ CAKE