The Crystal Text

Saturday, December 19
Beginning at noon; ending 5:00ish

The Waypost
3120 N. Williams
503-367-3182

Free admission
(Audience welcome to come and go)

The work of heaven or hell: to somehow
become aware of a howling in the motors.
Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text (54)

As the solstice approaches, come in out of the wind and join us to listen to Clark Coolidge's compelling booklength poem The Crystal Text, read aloud by a dozen local writers.

Readers will include James Yeary, Jesse Morse, Sam Lohmann, Maryrose Larkin, Rodney Koeneke, Patrick Hartigan, Jen Coleman, Allison Cobb, Joseph Bradshaw, Meredith Blankinship, & David Abel.

A colorless quartz crystal sits upon the writer's desk, still and irreducible as a death's head in St. Jerome's study or Cezanne's studio. But what would the crystal reveal, if it could speak? How might the issue of its presence be brought into language? The poet of The Crystal Text, by means of a rare stamina of attention and listening vulnerability, seeks to become the medium of the crystal's transmissions.
(unattributed blurb, 1986 edition, The Figures)

like experience is

idiom-free, an vocabulary not to use

but to purge, (the large glass?) rubs

"against"
its traces ,dreamcatcher keychain

th bazaar itself, heavy metal lyrics

sunburnt retina or, Mekas' Walden vs.

experience, ("walking acetate")

OuVisPoPo

Is it gone? It is gone.

FAMILY SHOW AT LAUNCHPAD GALLERY

Nate Orton has roused my long docile participation in the plastic arts, by convincing me, at an early hour of the day, to sign up for launch pad gallery's upcoming showcase: "Family."

So, I (and you) were "enthusuastically and apprehensively invited to explore what family means" at Launch Pad gallery, as part of their 8th annual open-call non-juried group show. I'm excited to participate in this, to which I am bringing both an installation sculpture & hybrid performance, which will be performed, physically, between 6pm & midnight Friday October 2nd, and displayed from the 2nd until November 1st.

This will be the first gallery show I have participated in since the pair of gallery shows that marked my exit from the University of Idaho in Spring, 2006. Fear not- my low-fidelity, low-resolution aesthetic & crypto-linguistic-projection appears to have held its icy constancy during this dormant period, as the liquid nickel of conception sloshed 'round the objective pit.

Launch Pad Gallery
534 SE Oak St
Portland, OR 97214

Concrete is only avant garde to the extent it is not subsumed by the hypothetical set we call "poetry." & then or thus or moreso the "hypothetical set" we call visual poetry -even tho its definitions may be broader- is restricted in the sense that it is another pleasure of the idiom. The avant garde (as opposed (literally) to the postavant (which DOES exist), to poets, painters, etc) defines itself (from without) by being an oppositional force. The Situationist anthology wrapped in sandpaper.

And to that extent the avant garde is bad. Mac Low's chance/deterministic pieces are bad to the extent they are poems (ask conventional poets!) but good if not incredible to the extent they are not. -while remaining w/in the definitions of the set-
An avant garde work wld not have borders w/in or around it The avant garde artist wld have to be in loathe of his subject
If the avant garde artist was a lover of poetry
he wld stay away from it

A binary alphabet wld halve to reflect that. Or the diastic selection wld dance to it, as the translation incl. color, it incl. setting, as it incl. character it also incl. movement.

And it isn't that the definitions aren't broad enough for a room-size poetry environment against poetry. Is not the room, or space, the catchall/counterpart to voice?

OuVispoPo

Reporting from the vispo conference in Finland, Geof Huth has relayed that Finnish vispoet Marko Niemi has started a new blog.

To me this is very exciting. Of course it at the moment just means the unveiling of a blog that hasn't any posts yet. But, from the Phaidos disc to Chinese & Islamic caligraphy, Apollinaire to the concretists, there is something new under the sun.

Or, at least, there is an attempt to recognize and begin real discussion of a new form, in (under the banner OuVispoPo) the tradition the Movement for Potential Literature, a movement for potential visual poetry.

This will be different from much of the visual poetry's history in that this 'wing' of vispo will be a conceptual side (tho I think Nico V's work is a different conceptual side), based on deterministic form & constraint. Those of us who choose to get to work on this will need to get to work on lists of instructions, diagrams & frameworks, & other devices.

The parent movement, oulipo, or OuLiPo, or Ouvrement pour Literature Potentiale, led to such works as Perec's A Void (a novel that lacked the letter "e," and in translation the letter "y," I believe), Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, and also paralleled Jackson Mac Low's constraints & procedures.

A precurser to visual poetry's "Movement" might be bpNichol's "Translating Translating Apollinaire," which began as an OuLiPoean series of "translations" and developed into a multimedia, and very visual series.

But TTA isn't the vispo of our canon. It's still heavy on the textual side. I've been scratching my head trying to think of constraint-based visual poetry pieces. And I -I'm sure they exist- I don't know if I've seen them. Or enough. Get to work. Give Marko something to blog about.

After June 4th reading, w/ Jim & Crag @ the tugboat

Jim: "Fucking New York School! Ted Berrigan drank beer and took speed and wrote about it. We all did that. He died. We've got to write about something else."

"All we can do is have a conversation, to go any higher is impossible."

"What we need to do is, next time we all get together, go out into my yard or your yard or his yard, and get sticks and spend an entire afternoon, four hours at least, and just scratch a single syllable into the dirt."