Idolina



At midday as approaching and finding out her place, now eloquent
  at recollecting husband torn

from our affections & helpless to return the son's knock and sensing a
  space where sons reclined,

once dead in Mary's arms-- she arrives ( pitiable death of children!)
  & as daughter by that name

 longish wisps languidly spreads over vest and pressed kerchief,
  she arrives to sing for her

(if only she can!), the only voice she'd have heard and possibly felt
  once a day, with a lonely rose

by that name that'd been reflected in gaunt cheeks the colour of
 of a delicate cool stem, torn too...


Even at midnight if I'd been there to see returning smile and heart
 as at a silent reunion, stayed

alone to see it, alone with that contrasting night indoors and out,
 even as she's arrived & I wait

 

Caro cardo: Jolene

(Jolene)

There's a moose sprawled on the highway as some spiritual food
  (pierced to its poor minnow heart)

saying no to decay, exemplarily and ordinarily, in its shy way--
  a knee bowed in asphalt, poor heart!--

with a fresh open cut in its side and looking about ready to die,
  looking skyward, 'bout ready to die

   in that white no-good body of hers

Chat vivant



is pure contrarian and whatnot: reared on waters
  & cannot be one among many

The location's between cave and a glossy coverlet
  that takes its moving shape--

sleepy and evocative master of reason and forepaw
  The chat vivant can for all that

who made, but will never go farther than, that
  yes, with sharp dark-eyed energy

and also bread and love of the encircling hand--
  can, for all that, still be one

Caro cardo:Tino







(Tino) 

Luckily the cat feted was found low in a net of weeds
   As half is mine, already,

the other's not, with a little grime on a pink dill lip:
  this cat (of all critters)

I thought, slated for love, was lost in darkening pots--
  Tino, of halts and starts &

of the tonsured neck & the throaty purr who likes to
  tear sheaves off lonely hearts

Paul as poet



"If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body" (St.Paul)
_____________________


Where this poet is certainly most knowing is a word
  that amply welcomes world

                                       to put in other ways,
  exemplarily and ordinarily
                                                             But both?

Well, the globe of the Annabelle's restorative to cats,
  and a world of kyrios it is, too

to a sweet garden-keeper- let us also praise her!-
  as opposed to belly & femur:

a thought-world of the bee, too with god's renewed sting
  and not its one dingy wing

So, to every blinking Tino a day without the poet Paul
 is just more trinket, more turd!
 
 

Caro cardo: Nicky

(Nicky)

The one I passed by like autumn breeze is a mightily white wing
  of a butterfly in its dusty, flashy way that

I passed by and-oh, worshipful-was still moved even if never nearer,
  a ten-thousandth of a degree nearer than I was

And even if the thumps and drone of all the empty heartless were
   a thousand degree smaller--it'd still be something

If we think about it it never lessens and is named mighty, this thing
  this little Nicky of a thing, heartless but as ten-

thousandth of a degree real as me, unfolding, too, if we look at it,a
  poor misunderstood Nicky of a thing, too

Yes, the flashy wing to your own gaddy and stupid "you" is how it is,
  and not a gluttonous squirrel turning a little

green world in its claws, sputtering, ravenous pig that eats & squirts,
  eats and squirts

Can a poem be really all that impregnable?

As Jung very aptly describes, " [the poet] must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision". By vision the great man hadn't meant to align significant poetry with religion. The visional has a much deeper parentage than that. And by image he'd had more in mind than ordinary sense perception, the stuff of which mediocre art is ordinarily made anyways.

I once saw the truth in this when, on reprinting an old poem entitled "Charcoal print", I tried (stupidly enough!) to keep a whole complex of feelings separate from a  charcoal print that had evinced it. As if, ensconced in verses, the subject of the portrait hadn't really been all that "difficult to handle". And, almost a decade later, as if she'd disappeared altogether. I thought I could look with complete equanimity now on the storm that had generated it.

I will say one thing about it, however: the vision's never looked so revelatory to me almost a decade later.
____________________



Charcoal print

I lost the blackish-white, luscious, in a word

  & see now under coal eyes

lips that scowl (if charcoal lips can!), a neck stretch

 She'd try to see me, too— 

  for she's angular, keen & all that, from hairline to chin

but cruel as a crow's underwing; luscious

  & neat down to a blind hem

I lost that, too

There must be something, after the carnage 

  in a brow's spectral ash,

or smudgy nose, at the least, to connect with

  (& save me from the storms)

Can the blackish eyes have ever been right?

They weren't;

  I felt the collapse

Sweetish-grey is the near absent nose, her upper lip

  that didn't crush entirely,

sparing viewer but didn't let go of me, either

  No wonder the many potential poets, 

me among them, see her go, too, sweetish one

  with black rose in each eye,

crude pasty brow

 Problem is she's written in it, in blackish-white,

  already a role (that of 'loved' or 'not') 

you get the minute you look

Which I did & then lost

  And stout skies, outside my window,

flat-bottomed & heading steadily for shore, whenever I looked,

  let me know it!

  Rigid, adored in charcoal, & she let me know it



Some experiential stuff...

I'll leave the title ambiguous as to referent: in fact, I'd say both types of nymph share properties that make 'reference' seem altogether uninteresting. If, as Bergson maintains, it's the same 'creative impetus' that sent everything on the same evolutionary trajectory, mammal, insect & less visible organisms alike, it's always going to be the more interesting liminal boundaries of the real that form the stuff (always exactly experiential) of life and poetry. Plenty of interesting intersections to see.

Here's a try...
___________________________

"Nymph"

Ah bent close to the snout, again
  just a twitch loosens, wings
    & enough of pale white—

strangely arced, too, to spring mayfair:
  a jittery blossom, a blade
    short, sharp bursts

of the shadow of your old self gone,
  loose pelf at yr hip (go!),
    new leggers

collapsing into tune (& let it go!)
  with nerve to lighten
    flicker, & grin

Ah, the world on two trick wings,
  again

What I wouldn't give for one Russell today ...

 

"There has been a lot of freedom of thought over the past few years, but no thought" (Simone Weil)

Time was when thinkers (like Bertrand Russell, Bernard Williams, A.J.Ayer) brought a entire arsenal of sound analytical reasoning (given in the form of clearly outlined propositions and  inferences) to their views on things like the nature of reality and the existence of God. It was both good and instructive to listen to them, whatever your own views happened to be. How things have changed!

The contemporary debate on God's existence, for example, has changed that analytical discourse into a form of garish social media in which participants gain points not by logic but by the outward show of 'cleverness' only: voice, body language and an outlandish sort of 'showmanship' that is oftentimes indistinguishable from 'bullying'. We are in need of better intellectual role models. I think media have quite intentionally undercut the possibility of real intellectual 'dialogue'.

Jacques Rancière is somebody who understands media and the potentially pernicious image of itself and its users it likes to unleash. It's, in his view, in the service of the new image of the real tied indissolubly to media that media users quite literally dictate the terms of discourse everywhere. It's pure 'image' dissociated from reality  : "The visible can be arranged", Rancière says " in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding." And as a result what purveyors of the new 'discourse' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens) do is offer skim rather than real depth, the simulacra of intelligence only. They, and their YouTube followers, have no time for patient and respectful exchange of ideas.

They can, in other words, tell their audiences what they need to see since audiences do seem incapable of separating the proverbial tares from wheat. There's always something menacingly anti-intellectual and anti-social at work here. In the absence of real sustained theorizing the 'new atheists' (as Chomsky has correctly said) actually look like propogandists for their own brand of state religion. It's not conversion to a different viewpoint they seek so much as state-sponsored suppression of religious ideas in general. And how well they exploit media spectacle to do this.Things like an affecting accent, credentials and aggressive delivery--amounting at times to character assassination-- always carry the day. Their audiences (except for the attentive few) can't see (as if quite invisible) what is there in front of them. Indeed, a contemporary audience wouldn't be able to see a logician's well-formed proposition as anything but a poorly 'trending' event.

I offer the following as just one good example of the 'dumbing down' of much contemporary discourse. Jacques Derrida-- perhaps this century's greatest intellectual--  has gotten so far only four YouTube responses for his comments on atheism and belief! I take responses rather than views to be a more meaningful gauge of audience engagement and interest. It certainly isn't fashionable (and nor do I think most people today have the ability) to patiently follow through a rather complex train of thought based on faithful reading and study . Argumentative strength has taken a backseat to 'image' understood  in this peculiarly contemporary sense . In a typical YouTube debate forum Derrida would necessarily look like a stammering amateur.

 Logic, in short. just doesn't enjoy that crucial 30 second time-lag in which to get its message out: for that the new media intellectuals rely on all the available 'video manager' tips and tricks available. Rather than following in the philosophical tradition of Russell and Derrida  the 'men of ideas' today have become little more than virulently self-satisfied "fools and fanatics" of a bread and circus world always happy to receive & applaud them.

A birthday reminder (thanks to ginamarie)

Frida the Obstinate

(for ginamarie lobianco)

The last time Frida spoke to God, thinking she'd painted the best Madonna ever...
_______________________________

Lady steps over clover one day, from her home, granted her prayer— Ave Matuta!—to turn into Frida from cold Mary of Ephesus: and to dignify it, saying,

"Release me, God, from all yr gabfest, & if not, sensing the threat of dust that turns wet, then word the real sex of me straight to Olympia, with my one bare breast, cypress rouge, gaunt chin

No more the swelling angel seed for me!

No more that hovel instead of alabaster, the virgin's coarse sage  while I see there real marshy heat rise up round her ankles, by the harbour walls— a temple in place of huts!

Leave me my bare head, half-chignon that's been clawed back hatefully by you, hoping to kill this need to compete in games

It's better than not letting the sun fill shadowy gaps, between lips & nose, and as I'm still young, between my two real thighs!"

Arresting spite of a father's now sounds in her ear, tight sutured ear: God to Frida now,

"¿Dónde está mi duende?

Mother of Lesbos!

Now I find you facing temples, wide- browed, obstinate, trading good stone for my salty bogs

My skin-and-bones girl with plum-coloured nip, lest we part at Venus, eyes locking, take the path of a femur road to love's shining vacuity; & bleed for it, with one sorrowing eye, and arrive there the blue-ringed girl, after some trial, as if you got tired of my Hebron skies

Faithless, so-so girl, staring staring at her lips, hold your side awhile, gnashed by yr own finny hand Lumpy, self-evolving, purpling girl: hold both bloody sides & keep yr hand away from me!

Goat-like chins always crush into salt"

New Ephesian groves scarf her anew but as a madonna's falling chiton manages only a little dampness, it does
stop some bleeding

A sea-urchin grows at her neck, with a half-formed nimbus shell to tell the old Mary  from Frida

On Andreas' retirement...

                                         "Don't lament or don't lament only: construct"

     (Charles Bernstein)

Andreas Gripp has recently announced retirement from writing and speaking, citing as causes age and a general uneasiness with the state of affairs in Canadian poetry. Fortunately, the great People's Poet has talked this way before (and who wouldn't faced as he he's been with continual rejection from the Can. Lit and academic crowds). I'd like to think, however, a poet's sensitive heart will get reprieve from the pain and hurt long enough to pen the next poem. It's what Andreas does best: record in exquisitely approachable verses the unjust slights always directed at the artist true to his craft.

I will reprint an article I wrote a few years back on his collection of verses entitled Anathema. It's my tribute (if indeed Andreas has finally stopped writing) to a friend of almost ten years and brother in verse. The poet speaks so eloquently of the disprized and underappreciated in his poems because he has always been one.
______________________

                                 

Even when poems aren't named after people ,and perceptions not too narrowly confined to place and circumstance (though these are the attributes I admire most in Gripp's poetry), the effect of reading "Anathema" can be to find some rather surprising twists to stock literary themes of nature, death  (considered in this blog post) and the act of writing itself (the subject of the next). Gripp is a poet who can disclose all those curious windings of the imagination at work because they've been layered expertly into his work. I've identified so far two types of writing in "Anathema": poems like "A Week in the Life of Morgan", "Hildegaard's Tomb", with its attention to the individual, and the more stylized work considered below, distinguished primarily by artistic daring and design.

     And about the wind, the branches will bend

     from its affection

     Though the sun and the rain

     take the credit or the blame,

     it's the wind that roars

     like a neglected middle child

     receiving little thunder

     for its contribution to our lives

     (for it's the water, dear,

     that nourishes;

     the rays of our star

     that causes things to grow).

     And scribes of old and new

     romance the heavens,

     the seas that tickle feet

     upon the beach,

     whispering now and then

     of the wind's surging power

     to make the surf

     that pummels sand

     and draws our shores,

     strength reserved

     for the usual suspects,

     ignorant of the fact

     that the wind has had its fill

     of flapping flags,

     hoisting balloons,

     raising bubbles blown by children,

     keeping kites

     from knotting in trees;

     wishing to be something more,

     paradoxically less -

     gentler, yes,

     than even the breeze

     that guides our sails

     and bounces hair,

     nudging tiny

     seeds

     when farmers

     miss their mark;

     saving a moth

     by lifting it

     out of an awaiting spider's

     reach;

     taking sides, perhaps, heroically,

     but never tearing

     wing or web

     in the effort.

The poem presents wind as a misprized force ("a neglected middle child/receiving little thunder") that is reduced to softer, more poetically treatable qualities. How is this done? Dropping in importance from roar to a gently nudging influence on sands, seeds and webs isn't something wind does by accident; the change in character is a product of the power of expression itself to release a symbol's latent powers (something Gripp also manages to do remarkably well in "The Language of Sparrows").

Both tenor and tempo change just when the presentation of wind as a noisome presence "that pummels the sand/and draws our shores", and brief commentary by ignorant scribes end. The wind, by "wishing to be something more", actually becomes something less in the sense that letting go of cumbersome strength is the way to unleash its truer protective, nurturing side. Biblical or Taoist in inspiration, with its strength on display or "gentler,yes,/than even the breeze/that guides our sail", the wind symbolism used here is among the most effective I've seen in his writings.

Not afraid to use this type of thematic play (and ask for real attention from the reader), Gripp, of course, alienates himself even more from a CanLit verse culture that demands easier, more consumable popular writings. Without trying to make him into something he's not, it's still easy to detect in his work a tension between commercialism and a need for genuine artistic expression: between what  avant-garde theorists like Peter Bürger refer to as the  "ideological reproduction of society"  (what Gripp and I call CanLit) and more self-satisfying expression. A hip hop-inspired 'raving poet' style , lying on the extreme side of poetic popularity, seems to be an offshoot of this growing trend to merge art with immediate commercial success. For Andreas Gripp it's lyrical expression, balanced phrasing and the infusion of an engaging authorial presence that matter and these, paradoxically enough,  are what alienate him from the norm.

To be appreciated, whether in analysis or in the act of reading, the poems have to be clearly 'intuited' as unique expressions of a single living voice engaged with a variety of significant life-experiences. One of Gripp's recent poems, "Chatting with Death over Chai",another work of skillful technique, gives the poem the same sort of textual uniqueness 'wind' enjoys in the above discussion, a stable identifiable design that even among some wildly erratic turns won't ever threaten to break apart. It's what it is and will always appear to be: interestingly arranged typographical and literary composition never leading to anything too abstract or too wildly experimentalist. It's poetry that never fails to make an impression. And the impression here is that of a poem that tries to make dialogue with Death look eerily (but not too ridiculously) plausible. Given the poem's length I will consider sections of it.

     Chatting with Death over Chai

     I met Death

     for tea today,

     surprised by its

     invitation,

     sent

     nonchalantly

     like a post

     from a Facebook friend.

     It asked

     how I was doing,

     why I hadn't

     cared to call,

     or write,

     or even think

     of its existence

     in the days and weeks

     gone past.

     I said

     I'd been

     too busy,

     that Life

     snatched all my time

     (being the

     possessive sort

     that it is),

     telling me to hurry,

     to walk a little faster,

     put my heart

     out on the line.

In a macabre "My Dinner with Andre" setting Death is personified but also trivialized, the interlocutor treated casually and conversation with 'it' reduced to monotonous bits of  "Facebook" talk. Content is dry and  a little ragged; even a potentially momentous (allegorical) drawing up of Life-Death battle lines is comically passed over, as if the thought of treating 'Death' as anything but an amusing topic of conversation over chai is out of the question. This setting and style of talk, potentially comical if we forget what the discussion is about, frame the entire text.

     I confessed to Death

     that it nagged me,

     Life that is,

     like a spouse

     that cracks a whip,

     grinds me to the stone,

     imploring me to reach

     for unseen heights,

     failing to configure

     that from there

     I tend to fall,

     bruise and break

     on the ground,

     that it seems

     to disappear

     in the aftermath

     of plunging,

     returning to rasp

     sweet nothings

     in the time

     I start to heal.

The effect on reader of this absurdist staging is to cause some disorientation since what is perhaps the one topic that deserves to be treated definitively is made the object of endless description. Meanings seem to  have the flightiest regard for the language of conversation itself; the discussion format of the poem (in which Death itself is visibly 'absent') serves up speech as a series of mute half-expressions, a dialogue reduced to a virtual monologue, and generally bored expressionless exchanges instead of real engaging talk. Instead of meaningful literary energeia there is confusion bred of this intentional mocking of dialogue convention by the very participants who try to keep it going. The linguistic center that cannot hold can't but help turn communication into a free-fall that reduces everything to "sweet nothings".

     Life

     was once its friend,

     I hear from this jaded

     soul,

     extra cream and sugar

     in its ever-steaming cup,

     stinging

     from a throbbing hurt

     I didn't know

     it had,

     treated oh so frosty -

     like a neighbour

     that we see

     but never wave

     or smile at,

     one

     we've heard

     bad things about,

     lamenting

     its ostracism,

     our blatant hatred

     of its name,

     our avoidance

     at every cost,

     our refusal

     to look it in the eye,

     to hear its side

     of the story,

     it's claim it isn't

     so bad,

     it's been

     misunderstood,

     that's it's here to shield

     and shroud us

     from the wounds

     that Life

     inflicts,

Borrowing terminology from Charles Bernstein we might say Death's revealed not as ominipresent but as "omniverbal": not symbolic but "heterosymbolic" (My Way: Speeches and Poems). And that ghostly parti-coloured ("scarlet-lettered", Gripp says later) entity that Death's become, present everywhere but nowhere, is subject of an almost endless list of epithets the poet is eager to give, one following the next down the entire page (the typographical arrangement noted above). A portrait of Death that's as quirky as this, one moment the erstwhile friend of Life who's turned "jaded/soul", the next some self-pitying sot who says he's been misunderstood, may seem senseless, and poetically counter intuitive, until we remember that that's what strong unconventional poetry has always been about.

      that breath

     is the ultimate villain,

     a hero of sham and spell,

     Life's night of sleep

     a lie,

     our pillows but a tease,

     that only it,

     our scarlet-lettered

     Death,

     cold-shouldered to the bone,

     gives rest

     that won't be ruptured,

     time without a tick,

     that its bond with Life

     was severed

     by assumptions

     that weren't true,

     that Death

     was the cause of sorrow,

     we should flee it

     whenever we can...

And the list of second-hand reports about what Death is purported to have said or thought, continue on, seeming almost to spiral out of control. Dizzying in scope but essentially unfinished, poem strikes us as lapsing into verbal frenzy that is the result, ultimately, of collapsed subject matter and a misguided urge (every poet falls prey to sometimes) to have the last 'canonical' word: but, of course, it's what Gripp had in mind anyways.

Kygo



(for Andreas Gripp)


Ask a Cornelius a Ruth, say, if sea breezes forbid a god,
                                                                              or not
   to dance or be still!

The song, remixed often, is ancient and can enlarge on
                                                                             the heart
  (listen!)  Every delectable

lip, eye, of even the gangster can perfume to the heavens
                                                                             with it
  A saint named the Cat

or Felicissimus can't have been a more delightful tribute
                                                                             to sound,
  or pockmarked virgin of snow

(whom I can't help feeling or enlarging on when I hear Kygo),
  arms outstretched, near blind

or the catfish down in the deep end that sleep with martyrs
  Deserts won't be still either
 

Composite catholic

"Life is short, eternity is long" (John Henry Newman) 

It was face, and it was eyes, at first

The asphyxiating power of chins-- now every strutting cleric in
  cane and top hat stupidly mimics it

It is now hugs, and it lacks eyes: trained in the sands & winds,
  simulacrum to the wise

To dress and get fat are its rule, & to invite doctors to its table
  rather than to be one

It was principium but now goes after neat retreats and rainbows:
   the unalterableness of  parades

Psychic or animal: to choose then meant to be face and eyes,
  & eating felt like it

It was okay to be heretical so long as it felt like it, and it hurt
  & and now it doesn't
 
 
 

Something ought to be said

about these naysayers of divinity: so much anal sputum,
so much smear of all the creepy two-spirits!

Ha! as if they'd sent their goon she-bishops to shut me
 down, "Away with Conradus; tear him in two!"

Consider the case, with care: sticks and holes alone do
 not a being make, rearrange 'em all you like

& see for yourself if a Tree springs from seed that's
  ontically fingered in deep & dirty

    Ha!

Wittgenstein's lion (8)

prophesying, says

a fallen ox, in itself bovine, and understood as such could be
  eaten, ignored, or argued against all you like;

satiety, misapprehension, clumsiness of it and like others can
   serve as accredited causes of death; &

the weak will die as really & thrash in the sand, under me,
  as sink under the weight of a sort of carnality

hmmm, that cannot be paralleled either by anything watery
  or any silly simum breeze you've got.

       Teeth, breath & breezes, again


 

Wittgenstein's lion (7)

says, parenthetically

further, at the troughs are half a tribe of ankles and
  chins, lanky irregular hips

who've easily passed by without bites and scratches
  I won't blacken the women

It's not their time yet; & it is slow going for a 1% heart
  Telling the greater from the less

like lips from the threatening groin, ear from grass
  is sufficient for now

 I kill & cop with credentials!
 

Wittgenstein's lion (6)

says of the corporeity of love,


if we see each other as two imperishable wholes
  and hide our twin thirsts,

& it seems we do; and if it seems we're not our-
  selves but reeking rabbit flesh,

pushing to possess more of what is very irreal,
   &more of you inside myself,

and if never becoming simply aroused  affects,
   possesses and arouses,

and if I'm barely 1% heart, stupendous as it seems,
    and am barely flesh:--

if  all this is true and it seems it is and you must die,
  a bocca aperta!

              
 

Wittgenstein's lion (5)

says, in a troubled mood,

if I pass into flesh, as if, or for as long as you do
  run & stupidly look

like two elands locked in fear, quietly kneeled:
  if, if...

such a flesh, and not  just yours bowed in fear
  makes me real,

if, if...
 

Wittgenstein's lion (4)

in loving, says

for as long as you're dear you're still something to die for. How?
  Always available, always there

you veer into sinewy culpable jaw with a sprinkle of dirt to keep
  me dry: to give yourself like the ewe!

My spring's erotic, full-fledged & it shoots like a bolt to the very
  nape. I kill by both feeling and feet,

sucking dirt with or without you-- untouchable, unassimilable you!
  Swear always to be you!

Bob Grumman

1941-2015

I've just received news from Ed Baker of Bob Grumman's passing. I knew Bob mostly through email correspondences spanning almost a decade. I've always found him a congenial but uncompromising master of his mathemaku craft. Below is the text of a blog article I wrote on Bob's contribution to Vispo poetics.
____________________________

Vispo 



Dogma#1: a visual poem must consist of a significant graphic element significantly interacting with a significant verbal element. Dogma #2: a reader of the poem must experience the poem’s graphic and verbal elements simultaneously. There will come a day when neurophysiologists will be able to detect this simultaneous experience. Thereupon we will have an objective way of determining whether a not a given work is a visual poem–for a given person. (Bob Grumman, from Poeticks)

As to my method, it will be that of children's guessing games, where the question is how two things resemble or differ from one another.(Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image )

Part 2

Again, intersections with Vispo? Yes, of course. And more. I'll even go so far as to call it a prefigurement since Baker (with Cage, Corman, Grumman, & Perlman) were in a very real way there from the beginning & continue to be there now: silent partners in a developing form that the digital revolution really only helped to bring to everyone's notice. A fact particularly true in regard to Bob Grumman. For all its strong pro-tech format, his SPIDERTANGLE: the_book, for example, is a particularly curious intermixing of  both Vispo and traditional pre-Internet visual poetics (a distinction which he denies): his superlative "Mathemakus" series, in particular, attest markedly to eclecticism and innovation both. But I'm inclined to believe Grumman's work, while displaying impressive digital virtuosity, the only feature that makes it decidedly Vispo (in my view), is essentially a celebration of older styles. I believe he can be appreciated not just as innovator but as a member of an artistic and intellectual tradition attuned to changing cultural landscapes. Interesting critique always accompanies creativity.

But first a word on the nature of origins and literary appropriations in general. Is Vispo a verbo-pictorial (with primary ties to concrete poetry) or purely technical creation? Lines between them have been blurred almost to the point of non- recognition. I've said before that means of literary production may have meshed so completely with artistic form after the Internet revolution that Web 2.0  has made it necessary— in regards to literary work— to speak of 'image' (after Rancière) rather than the purely visual: in fact, literariness these days seems to have suffered the same fate as commoditized Art, or is well on its way. Or, more interestingly, that product may be virtually indistinguishable from product-line: artistry from the directives of not just a commercial but an academic market place where writing curricula & the publishers (and academics) who propagandize acceptable styles through them are part of the same sales pitch. The recent AWP (Associatiation of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, for all its claims to being a literary love-in, reveals writing for the trade show and clearing house it's recently become and attests (like nothing else can) to the way literary works cater for a growing bourgeois mainstream appeal. Seeing Vispo as both the putative form of a new Web art or Webism and the successor to all the preceding visual arts (as its post-avant practitioners seem to do) perhaps calls into question artistic integrity itself .

 

Tough talk, to be sure. But it's hard not to notice the Logo-brand style & presentation of most interactive art: for example, the Electronic Literature Corporation at Robert Kendall's "Word Circuits" site, Jim Rosenberg's  Frame Stack interface technologies and the generic Type is Art software from which Vispo artists everywhere freely draw. I could probably locate at least one dominant techno-brand in every Vispo site out there. It's beginning to look as if journalist-activist Naomi Klein was right. In an insightful 2000 work entitled No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies she makes a direct correlation (or certainly always the possibility of one exists) between corporate branding and the global and social injustices that underlie them. Logo oftentimes hiding a pushy brand name politics that dehistoricizes its opponents. Rancière makes a similar point about the appropriation of the neo-Gothic rural aesthetics of English theorists Ruskin and Morris by AEG design engineer Peter Behrens and German Bauhaus (Future of the Image, Chapter 4), saying of this mixture of pure and 'instrumental art'

that the one ideology is a convenient cover for the other. The reveries of artisans reconciled with the fine craftsmanship and collective faith of times past is a spiritualist mystification concealing a quite different reality: submission to the principles of capitalist rationality. When Peter Behrens becomes artistic advisor to AEG and uses Ruskin's principles to design the firm's logos and adverts, the neo-Gothic idyll reveals its prosaic truth: the production line. (101)

I'm not saying Vispo has unconscionably usurped traditional visual aesthetics, and through digitization, given it a new look. The evolution of visual art is a natural one, bound to make many shifts and salubrious adaptations. Nor am I claiming the critic's job is to demystify things that look suspiciously like corporate cover-ups in Internet poetry. Some (like Bob Grumman himself) have already wondered if it's even legitimate to make a Vispo/visual poetry distinction at all, saying it's a nick-name for a body of work that mixes graphics with language. But it does seem to me as if some people are profiting by a similar sort of "pure and instrumental" visual poetry amalgamation. And the preoccupation these days with 'naming' also interests (and worries) me for names (after Klein) oftentimes reveal hidden categorizations and the technologies that empower them. Geof Huth, perhaps conscious of the growing impurities in even traditional forms, has recently drawn an interesting distinction between "light verse visual poetry"  (example of clean visual poetry) and PowerPoint visual poetry of the US Army(example of dirty visual poetry). If Huth rejects my reason for the distinction, passing it off as a literary curio, he must admit that it's a very telling way for visual poets to speak about their own work.

 It's the mixtures of Vispo practice (clean, dirty or otherwise) I'm interested in—all the slippages, shifts and creative dissonances evident in practice and the two distinguishable ways now of doing visual poetry online to which the one name Vispo supposedly refers. Vispo is where Art (and its theories) and a growing Webism co-exist; where the old forms seem otiose to the wildly diverse visual poetries and the growing number of software specialists-poets who now write them into being. Web 2.0, software-proficient and all too eager to erase any traces of old-school language identity theory, seems to have made an even greater parody of traditional mimetic poetry, of Art as chronicle of significant human experience. 

 I have  rejected the idea that Vispo is at best a so-called generic term for visual art: reasonably certain also that the gap beginning to widen between visual poetry rooted in Dada and Fluxus (among others) & a burgeoning Web version of it I've identified with Vispo (& said to be "digital to the core") threatens to make visual poetry of any description essentially "unpresentable". Art that cannot even stand to imitate itself. Just a wavering image, dissolving perhaps in the " original gap" (132) between genre purity and the "dirty" realities of artistic production Rancière says (in a different context) it's the fate of avant-gardists to witness to in their work. And if not unpresentable, then perhaps digital art's become bland to the point of having lost its own creative impulses: a cultural obscenity."It is the obscenity, " Baudrillard says in his essay 'The Ecstasy of Communication', "of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication." The obscenity of art reduced to a name (Vispo) or Webism.

If the original graphics-with-language ideal goes by the wayside, what's left? Anti-art may soon turn into anti-artist at the rate we're going, poetry surviving in name only, left in the end as some unsalvageable (irrecoverable) trace of a discarded hope. To be permanently erased from literary consciousness. There's a lot at stake in the tendency to reduce things to a name or look (Logo). And it's why if I choose to read contemporary Vispo, it must be work of the very best kind, associated not with techno-brands and Web 2.0 ideologies (which are legion) but authors who are too strong for any of that current radical decentering that's still in vogue. Forms do not crumble in Grumman's hands (as they do elsewhere). I believe a forcefulness of  personality will outshine the work itself so that if the latter ever falters, it may continue as an abiding authorial presence at least. Faithfulness to a non-Western sensibility and Baker himself will never make his work Vispo in any sense.  And nor does a penchant for mathematical notation & neologisms, what amounts to a complete  "Lexicon Grummaniacal" , ever keep Bob Grumman far from his own ties to tradition and intelligent design.

As I've said, if visual poetry continues along its present path it will suffer the fate of the "image". But Grumman's work is not purely Vispo, to be interpreted along the lines of, say, Jim Rosenberg's depersonalized "interface technologies" or Dan Waber's wildly multimedia Vispoets.com site; it's a lot of things that make it interestingly complex (Examples are from Grumman's Poeticks blog). Conceptual, by which I mean poetry in the service of a distinctively mathematical and neurophysiological vision (not visual); minimalist- and haiku-based, every letter and syllable skilfully set into place; a little traditional, as in the case of his "linguexpressive" Keatsian-style lyrics, sonnets and haiku pieces; and perhaps even polemical, experimenting as it does with new attitudes towards language & reality, even daring enough to write its own dictionary of artistic production or explore uncharted regions of brain topography. Grumman's succeeded, I think, in keeping a writing project free from the noisy & cluttered dissonance of wildly untrained styles. He never strikes me as self-reflective or self-aggrandizing as many Vispo practitioners do. The axis of established (minimalist & visual) form is always nicely balanced (never upset) by that of a pure and reasoned integration of poetics, theoretical psychology and digital technology.

Grumman is among the poets who attribute the effectiveness of poetry to the potential of language for radical rearrangement, with the result that work can look creatively rococo and, under the right digital conditions, even engagingly superartful. Attributes I give only to artists with feet planted firmly on solid artistic ground and imaginative heads suited to changing means of literary production. In his case, the "dissemblance" between genre purity and actual work never draws too much attention to each other, the elements of his craft always expertly combined and presented. To begin with, his typology (from what I've seen) is fairly simple, breaking poetry down into infraverbal (such as Geof Huth's pwoermds), linguexpressive (the latter including haiku, minimalist & sonnet forms) and the mathematical poetry (mathemaku) for which he's best known. Not afraid to speak of the nature of human creativity in purely psychological terms ( see his "Knowlecular Poetics" and "The Nature of Visual Poetry" pieces), hypothesizing that "neurophysiology will be the basis of all theories of poetics", Grumman is speculative as well as artistic. Transposing brain physiology into discourse on the nature of visual poetry can be seen as the attempt to give a materialist basis to art: making even the bare bones lettering & software imagery of digital writing (what I've called the first principle of digital poetics) reducible to an even more basic grammar of poetry perceptions in the brain.

A positive (not the usual reductive hypertext) poetics is what you get in Grumman: traditional, intellectual and dynamically experimental. As I've said, emblematic of Grumman's style is the mathemaku, a genre and mathematical notational mix that's also interestingly haiga in presentation (though it looks as though in the "Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco's 1436 Map of the World" the Basho haiku's been slightly inverted for effect).

                               “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World.”

The complex feeling, made up of image and a direct reference to haiku origins, of having to solve a problem and admire a visual artifact at the same time, makes Grumman's mathemakus artistic delights: the materials never drawing too much attention to themselves, giving them both experimental and aesthetical charm. The medieval lute "quotient" in the "Andrea Bianco" piece is particularly striking. A medieval age of Christian lutes, ecclesiasticism and an unenlightened world view as represented by Bianco's crumpled pond-shaped map, underscored by classical haiku, are all food for the "thinking eye" (Silliman). Reflection, mental alertness and simple pleasures of viewing are essential prerequisites of a Grumman visual.