Geof Huth: a gift of "Simply words, alone" sent to me on 20 November 2009

I've received a gift lately: a poem and words: wordpoems: "pwoermds" from Geof Huth: dbqp qbdp pdqb bqpd. And as I gingerly remove each piece from the bubble mailer in which it came I literally unpack a means and materials of literary production: first a light, delicate "birchth" poem (one of 29 copies), then an &² an/thology of pwoermds, the heaviest and most canonical item, to be followed by a Karri H Kokko dbqp leaflet, and the various other postcard & small chapbook "dbqp" publications by J. Ryan, Jonathan Brannen and Huth and his family.

A remarkable conflation of "genre" and artifact in one package if I ever saw one: maybe even of poet and materials between which it's at places impossible to distinguish. I've said in an earlier post about Huth's blog that his signature dbqp is a matrix for every conceivable poem-type, one of many "transcendental" properties of his "visualizing poetics". Huth remarks in his "Why One Word is Enough" introduction to his an/thology of pwoermds, "The reader must think through the possible meaning and image of the poem; the reader must take an active role in creating the poem in the mind." And perhaps among the single-word offerings contained in that package from Schenectady, NY, an active inversion of poet and his work itself can be wrought, even authorial possession to be seen as radically manipulable as type, font and page lay-out. No author but in one-word things.

And the effect (on me) has been primarily to tease, or disorient a little or just help me appreciate a complete immersion of text in all its configurable ("DNA") parts. Or perhaps, finally, to drop the foolish bias I've had against the "otherstream" poetics of Saroyan, Finlay, and Huth, as if I hadn't already intuited their affiliations to haiku, & earlier (more established) minimal poetry of Corman, Grumman, and Baker. Among the pwoermds authors in Huth's an/thology I even recognize some of my own favourite Eastern/minimalist authors: Marlene Mountain, Jim Kacian, Richard Kostelanetz. And, of course, Canada's own irrepressible bpNichol.

But Huth sent more than an anthology of verse: there's a multipage book marker by G. Huth entitled

bo,ok

   of

unLloʎdb

in which each page competes playfully with the others for the privilege of book-insertion. My personal favourite being Lloy d'Ll , after its eponymous author. And the Derrida in me can't help noticing the clever binary of wordbqprocessing/meanign, set one above the other on the same divided vertical strip. So I won't fall for "[p]arody of the translator, naïveté of the metaphysician or of the pitiful peripatetic who does not recognize his own figure and does not know where it has marched him to"(Derrida, "White Mythology"): no, instead I identify in each Huth offering the artifact itself of "simply words, alone", configured as one of many possible variations of the dbqp matrix, & handled delicately by the appreciative reader.

And a glossy "drawn photopoem" postcard by J. Ryan (dbqprescard Nr. 5 / ed. 120 / 10 IV 91) entitled "no moon" in neon-like lettering I can't exactly interpret much less reproduce here except as a combination of two words of almost visually contrasting luminosity, easily reproducible through text color alone. A bit of a tease this: a virtually unreadable side of the "moon" recognized only by a kind of penumbral haze enveloping the double "o" of the more garish "moon" poem itself. If I "take a more active role in creating" (as Huth enjoins us to do), I'd say it's a case of the poem's dark-matter (barely seen in outline only as an artistic courtesy) holding the visible text together.

And, again, a slip of "birchth", a little frayed at the edges, fragile but authentic (as far as I can tell), with the single poem caught in the birch's grainy stream. A one-word poem in a forest (after Ian Hamilton Finlay). I wonder what's become of metaphor here. And what counts as the putative Index may actually be a serial poem on its flip side—

g. huth
29 copies
& #b
objecta 9
11 oct 2002
db
qp   209,

a record in delible ink of the poem's origin and materiality.


And journals of "raw coinage" printed on a 3"X5" card, a more normal-sized card unevenly folded at the front and a mini-chapbook, each differently scripted & with variously differing text: in fact, if spread out in front of you the parts can form a sort of tangram mystery (again, my creative role as reader). The smallest acts as a kind of depository (I'm tempted to say syllabary) of possible one-word combinations,

any- gain
sandboat
daynights
gomogwa
bemember

then to be inscribed into a quad of ordering pwoermds that can be read vertically, horizontally and diagonally, such as is found in the larger "journal" card,

droubt           flaud



Chruch         cant'

with the largest mini-chapbook piece saved for the more traditional 'vertical' reading of text, the same type of one-word poems but now arranged to suggest a sequencing of thought (that's open, of course, to many interpretive readings):

li've/laugnage/whomb/groww/eyeye/jellymoonfish

I've received a gift of word-poems from American poet Geof Huth: a delightful illustration of what bpNichols once called a "gift economy" in which poets and artists are privileged to live. Works as "potlatch" are not meant to accumulate into grand oeuvres, at least not without distortion and compromise, and nor do they aspire to the elusive status of mainstream productions.

I've received a gift of  an "otherstream" way to see the world & its language: of "Simply words, alone". And for that I am very grateful.