Visual poetry

And then there's Ed Baker,

It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders. (Dr. John M. Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State U.)

                                                                         all

                                                                         is
                                                                         just

                                                                         so

                                                                         let

                                                                         it
                                                                             (Ed Baker, from G oo d night)

Part 1

Ed Baker, Bob Grumman, Jeremy Seligson and all the contemporary practitioners of what I call a more classical visual poetry, have had to share the stage with Vispo for at least two decades now ('Vispo' being shorthand for a computer-generated type of  work that can be easily interchangeable with all (or any) of its other kinetic, aural and  textual hybrids). Though Baker himself resists any labeling, saying to me in an email that "as for me I reside in the I-just-don't-no" school The Nopo school!" I can't help feeling there are significant differences, if only one. And I'm inclined to believe that one lies in a growing discrepancy, fuelled solely by Internet technology, between the way visual art's produced and its genre status. Perhaps I'm a little dismayed also at how unevenly the two are being presented, visual poetry almost becoming synonymous with Vispo (which it certainly isn't).

I choose to speak of genre status as meaning primarily textual production and accompanying visual effects, two essential components of every single artifact. Visual poetry today, both the digital and traditional kinds, combine both in complementary and also more interestingly contrastive ways. With the result that two types of visual poetry seem to occupy the same writing space. While 'Vispo' can be stated in purely technical terms (media poetry and fiction"born to pixels rather than the page", as Robert Kendall says of his work in Word Circuits), traditional visual poetry (in my view) has to restrict itself to a purely verbal (and even pictorial) representation of technique & the classical forms on which it relies. Don Wentworth's Issa's Untidy Hut: The Poetry Blog for Lilliput Review is an example of an online forum for haiku-based poetics.Any discussion, therefore, of the differences between Vispo and classical visual poetry amounts to an understanding of what's always been a technology and culture bifurcation at work in every artistic production.

What's at stake (in my view) is the changing form & content of visual poetics itself as a result of Vispo. And whether, indeed, older models haven't been already relegated to an outmoded "bastarda gothic" in light of a computer-generated language of pure interactivity. Perhaps the same sort of fundamentally transformed notion of  literacy that took place after Gutenberg. Digital technology has only magnified the split between, on the one hand, original haiku-inspired art and accompanying visual representations of the surrounding world (perhaps a form more properly akin to 'Haiga'), with technology comprising of brush- or pen-strokes on a page, calligraphy, experimental typographic designs or even simple spacing. And, on the other, a text wholly derived from multimedia software whose themes & images, produced primarily by poet-technicians intent on exploiting all the possible applications of Web 2.0, say as much about production techniques as the nature of literary form itself.  The former oftentimes grossly overshadowing the latter. Jim Rosenberg's Poetries, a showcase of interactive & hypertextual ingenuity, is a case in point.

Perhaps nothing has better illustrated this growing technique and artistic integrity dissonance ("dissemblance" is a term Jacques Rancière might have used ) than the recent online controversy over the way editors Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier formatted the text of Larry Eigner's poetry in their The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010). Blogger Steven Fama's made the impassioned plea for preserving the integrity of original text at all costs, enjoining editors never to "change the way the poems look on the page, in a way that greatly mars the poetry." He seems to have intuited a great loss to textual integrity in editorial decisions that are not responsive perhaps to the type of visual and typographic settings found on an Eigner page.

I wonder if the same sorts of concerns couldn't be voiced about traditional visual poetry? Fama's perhaps sounded a warning to those who would subordinate artistry to means of production. One we'd be wise to hear. Has there been, in other words, a tendency to conflate techniques of artistic production with art itself, a process abetted by the frenetic deployment of  a "hyper-mediatic type of work" (Rancière)? In short, if there are innovators empowered by their technological tools, then who are the cultural gatekeepers? Who are the real predecessors of Vispo whose textual pristineness has been compromised by interactive art ? A few (oftimes unknown) sources of much of what's empowered contemporary Vispo can perhaps be cited, primary among them Henri Michaux, particularly his influential Darkness Moves,  Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, inspiration for Pound's ideogrammatic style, and even the female avant-gardists Hannah Höch and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven from whom Baker says unequivocally the "Dada Guys...stole lots of 'stuff' "'.

I'm  tempted to separate Baker, Grumman and certainly even Michaux and the above-named sources from the digital work of contemporary Vispo artists like Geof Huth, Jim Andrews, Gary Barwin. But that would be to make things look too neatly compartmentalized, causing us to overlook the necessary overlaps that always do exist between tradition and innovation. Bob Grumman, for example, has recently told me (in email correspondence) that Geof Huth, among the most active practitioners of interactive poetics, could be characterized as both a "pen-master-a calligrapher, in fact" and a "very digital" artist. John Martone, owner of  tel-let, a site for a more traditional minimalist writing, can himself alternate gracefully between almost lyrical "dogwood & honeysuckle" verses and more contemporary "visual texts & essays". A careful (and sympathetic) reading of contemporary visual poetry must obviously resist simplistic categorizations and see it as a confluence of many interesting contrastive elements.

Baker's Things Just Come Through (Red Ochre Press, 2005) throws into relief the artistry of the classical style as against its more current digital formats: here technique and artifact result in poetry that's attributable directly to calligraphy, collage art and minimalist writing style. Carl Rakosi, looking at Baker's 1974 work The City, remarked on its "ability to express both vast and complex meanings in a few words" (from Baker-Rakosi mail correspondence reprinted with permission), a literary ideal to which Baker has remained faithful all his life. Dedicated to Cid Corman and offering "special thanks" to HaChungJeanne, Baker's 2005 work is one that homages tradition, friendship & visual artistry.The Korean Spring Orchid is its subtitle and centerpiece: it is also his friend Sophie Song , with whom Ed wrote the poem's English and Korean versions. A splendid work of artisinal craft and inspiration that issues out of  literary & linguistic disciplines.

                                                     Dedication to Cid Corman

Things Just Come Through could have been a handmade product: a delicate artifact, wispy & light, to be prized for its aesthetic and textural features. I own another edition that has the feel of a Japanese sewn wrap. Means of production and work (in limited editions) are barely distinguishable. Here's work not made to be retrieved like a Web 2.0 hypertext poem (even when it appears online) but offered as a model for imitation. And it assumes (as all cultural traditions do) a certain physical initiation into the practice and theory of finely illustrated poetry, making it both hand-crafted and visual work.

As for methodology, Baker's told me the translating and pen-work always followed the drawings and poems in English: the whole never to be seen as a work of translation only. Baker's book is visual literacy par excellence that can't, despite its accessibility, rely on any romanticized  "empathetic" qualities of pre-literate eras (as Ong likes to characterize them). The work is classical and spontaneous, each poem elusive and mysterious as a breath; and the poet, a craftsman indebted to contemporary masters Soetsu Yanagi (potter and art collector), Kazuaki Tanahashi (calligrapher)  and Hidetaka Ohno (artist).

                                                  "Korean Flower" poem & calligraphy

Baker has recently celebrated  Jeremy Seligson's new book Cherry Blossoms, his art & verse on the cover page, calling it "simple, clean, precise", & visible proof that "less is more". The praise is significant. Baker's used the "less is more" language in discussions with me about the work of colleagues & mentors like John Martone,John Perlman and Cid Corman, saying (in his impish way), "I do think that [they] have come to the same "less is more" attitude that Cid embraced INDEPENDENT of Cid maybe parallel to (?) [for] nobody writes/does as/what John M or Cid or me does-did-doing". And what they do is collegial, eclectic and disciplined. And what binds this community of visual artists together is adherence to a principle of exact, finely-crafted verbal economy that's maybe due (at least in the case of Grumman and Baker) to the restrictions of early xerox and mimeo technology as well as an interest in mathematics and electronic technology.

The traditional visual poet means something uniquely different. But what?  A question that, of course, can't make sense as long as there's the problem of just what to call it when it appears. Let's say it's art that's indistinguishable from work (or its own productive means), almost hostilely averse to names. Baker's Hexapoems, for example, is an I-Ching inspired work in which a hexapoem (a term Baker coined) refers to a  "six-line-poem using chance operationings", but it's a technique which he dropped in 1973. Though Grumman and Huth have referred to Ed's work as visual haiku ("visku") or even calligrams (after Apollinaire), Ed's also refused to call even his haiku-like work haiku at all, preferring to use a term like "shorties" instead.

He's quipped already about his own allegiances to the "Nopo" school, clearly showing his antipathy towards literary movements and the credentialed set in general: "just remember... nothing much ever happens in a crowd... nothing!"Beginning his career at the "same mimeo xerox typewriter place" as Grumman, (& familiar already with "oscilloscope images and working Sinusoidal Wave stuff" of his electronic technology training), he's acutely aware of production techniques and yet he also derides the fondness of contemporary avants for all things digital . When he works he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, maker not just of poems but of pottery,calligraphy, water colors and sculpture.Geof Huth has given a wonderfully detailed description of the art studio that is Ed Baker's entire home, from yard to front porch.

What is the effect on us of a Baker visual poem (or water color, sculpture, artifact)? Are there any points of intersection with Vispo at all? In his blog article about Baker, Huth makes the following important observation about the man's poetics, & perhaps about all significant artistic expression:

Early on in our conversation, Ed said something I had to write down: “Everything comes out of silence and goes back into silence.” The two nothingnesses: the time before life, the time after death. And we live between them, so, as we do, we try to make something of that time, we try to make. And that is what Ed does. He makes.

It is perhaps for this reason that Baker can't belong to any noisy literary crowds: the essence of creativity residing in the interregnum between  "two nothingnesses" . There can't be for him any sign-systems (such as reviewers like me have to use) to get in the way. If we replace language of the image by that of the visual, we might say, with  Jacques Rancière, Baker's creations reveal a "double poetics of the image as a cipher of a history written in visible forms and as obtuse reality, impeding meaning and history" (The Future of the Image, 11-12). Meaning a Baker poem, though easily placed within a certain literary American tradition (one that, in my view, follows in a line of descent from Oppen, Corman and Creeley), to be catalogued & explained, is primarily and unmistakably an artifact to be made and seen: primarily a "naked, non-signifying presence"(Rancière, 14) that beggars analytic description.

And seen and felt and even heard it certainly must be. Reviewer Joey Madia talks of the "house-building/carpentry" metaphors in Baker's Restoration Poems: "The sound of hammer on nail, of plane on plank and the smell of the wood and the land dress the words, which are sparse and carefully chosen." The bare bones bonze at work in a house of art. All the "cut-price mis-mixed paints" of Baker's art, the "found materials, with pieces of wood in intriguing shapes, with rocks, with pieces of material culture left behind as if trash" (as Huth says) are both the media and very tropes of his language.