From the blognoscenti: 05 January 2011 (4)

(a) Irina Moga, "The Poem in the Mirror" in The Continuous Poem. "This seems pretty straightforward. But what happens when a mirror - or a poem- inserts itself in the equation? How might our vision be altered then?";

(b) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi. "I have waited/for the evil wind".

(c) Geof Huth, "write as you - read as you write" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "It is called the silver book, and it is a book, not more than a chapbook and maybe less than that, by Jen Bervin."

(d) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "David Antin: 11 games for eleanor (previously unpublished)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "It seems to me that for Antin as for others of us, there has been a strong sense that what we do as poets (more simply: as people responsible for keeping language & reality together) is in danger of an inescapable, premature reduction as it’s forced to enter the unique entropy machine of the modern communications nexus."

(e) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press" by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog. "Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work";

(f) Dave Bonta, "Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke" in Moving Poems. "A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice";

(g) Jerome Rothenberg, "John Martone: Presence of All Colors" in Poems and Poetics. "This is the second set of poems by John Martone to appear in Poems and Poetics."

Sentence: If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

From the blognoscenti: 04 January 2011 (3)

(a) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi." I don't think this poem was ever published.It is one of a collection of poems that come from The Room Is My Refuge From Light which was then called SONG BOOK, published 1960"; 

(b) Geof Huth, "1,2,3,ing"in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "I'm still counting (in order to give a recap of my last year in the world of poetry), and I've come to the disturbing realization that I created over 3,000 poems (visual and otherwise) last year";

(c) Irina Moga, "The Annotated Bee & Me" in The Continuous Poem. “The Annotated Bee & Me is carefully architected creation, a series of poems that aggregate around “the large themes of our lives –Birth, Death, Time and Memory” (a quote from the volume’s back cover) and an original poetic topic: beekeeping";

(d) Bob Grumman,  "Entry 334 — One Reason I’m Not a Fan of Emily’s" in POETICKS. "A major problem I have with Emily Dickinson’s pieces is that they seem to me much more rhymed opinions than poems";

(e) William Michaelian, "In the Forum: He comes with words sublimely dull, / In garb superbly silly, / To tell us of the Beautiful, / The sunflower and the lily", in Recently Banned Literature;

(f) Dave Bonta, "Vinyl Poesie by Christoph Bruns" in Moving Poems. "This is a stop motion video i created around summer last year. It is a selfwritten poem created out of my vinyl collection. i looked out for interesting words and formed this little passages";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited  "Clouds Gather and Part: Tanka" by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk (Dennis H. Dutton) in tel let 2004;

(h) William Michaelian, "The Past Recaptured" in Recently Banned Literature. "Some other books I read during that time: Dylan Thomas in America, by John Malcolm Brinnin; Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski; The History of Reading and The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel; Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét; Selected Poems, by Georg Trakl; A Listening Thing, by William Michaelian; parts of three poetry collections by Lawrence Ferlinghetti";

(i) Bob Grumman, "Entry 335 — “Mathemaku in Praise of Taxonomy” in POETICKS. "This is the mathemaku I hoped to finish yesterday evening–and did.   One of my best, it seems to me at the moment (which is around seven, 3 January 2011)";

(j) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "The John Perlman Collection: A Guide and Inventory" by Jeffrey Rudzinski and John M. Bennett in University Libraries: Rare Books and Manuscripts; "Rim: Woodcuts,Stem, Az Two: Words of Travel, Side-Ways and Fist by David Giannini" in amazon.com; "Twelve Poems by John Levy in tel-let 2006.

Sentence: A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.

The blognoscenti: what I've learned today arranged by date, author and source, with brief excerpts (1)

I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.

There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.

Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.

I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).

Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).

The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.

(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";

(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";

(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";

(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";

(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."

Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).

The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"

A pwoermd poem: or thoughts on the syntax of Geof Huth's letter

The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion—in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people (Deleuze and Guattari cited in Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator)

Recently received, 5 July 2010, by air mail from Schenectady, NY a pwoermd-poem (perhaps the first ever at this address!)by minimalist poet Geof Huth (dbqp qbdp pdqb bqpd), that enjoins me, first of all, to "silentlisten". Formalities forsworn, he writes:

Conrad,

silentlisten

hardest
(most studiously)
at the lack of

As if he knew me! I open and read, & the poem comes closing in, unrelenting in the way it enforces a "silentlisten" solemnity: to the overstudious (like me) who like to write and read aloud, it's quite a wake-up call. I think Huth's also got me wondering if it's a full suite he's given me here or a collection of doors. Thought rhythms that break against anything as porous as the human ear are bound to seem uneventful at times, but if they derive from the smallest intelligible one-word poems out there: the pwoermd, they can have a quite remarkable effect on both ear & the artistic sensibility. The pwoermd, and anything arising out of it (like a complete poem) revels in a syntax coked with constant "fusions", "fissions" (Grumman's principles of minimalist formation) of letters, words, and visuals. Every verse a crashing sense and I'm being asked in his letter to catch a wave, for once.

Silent stresses of the artist's rickety easel.

Or the true 'elided' disaster in every news article I've ever read.

The abruptness of a line like "at the lack of" that's still lyric-friendly, still alliterative & graceful can be instructive as well, introducing a dissonance still capable of language. The pwoermd-poem honors a speaking voice of sorts (contrary to one Language misconception):

yet a voice
is more
than
ruined words
or less

trill treble trillium
in a wooded shade

I find, instead of  narrative bedrock, a series of micro-rhythms scattered throughout Huth's pwoermd-poem. The voice, freed from granitic intentions, suddenly feels lighter and surer of its materials, since there's no compelled adoration of the usual form & function rule. Lines and stanzas cannot be parsed, coupled or yoked to a soldering narrative merely (as per a formalist reading): here the poem as a whole (the only sense in which it coheres) seems to comprise of an exploitable source of future pwoermd-formations. That is its primary syntactical mandate. A pwoermd poetry (and poetics) is based on "ruined words or less"but by "ruined" Huth means to restore them, at the same time, to what words have always been designed to do: viz. splice, dice and recoil from the familiar as often as possible. Here's a poetry inseparable from the one-word 'things' (words, letters, typographical shorthands) they essentially are.

 As if the pwoermd bandit's stolen standard lineation and left us with a  radically compressed, "infra-verbal" (Grumman) network. A poem of isolable filaments as delicate as the spaces they shape. Could not "trill treble" become "tritreble' by pulling free one filament, collapsing space to make room for letter fusion? A collapsing not a switching per se since language seems to work by a "holey space" (Deleuze) matrix. A foamy order of pwoermd formation comprising of easily elided (or "fused", "fissured", etc.) parts by whose openings alone any pwoermd-grid can be known. In the same way as the rickety easel is a segue to van Gogh's boots and flowers. A list of traditional poetics things, to be recharged and refitted for pwoermd work, is now made possible, Huth giving us "treeroot" as if to show the way (& there'll be more):

treeroot rising
(wave, muscle)
from the earth
motionless but moving
still

the muteness of stones

gravel spread
for traction among
grass and plantain

rock in place
(of loonsong
and moonless
that it might be

no rose
but rose before

me a rose
before me
and then
me

A list made possible by the initial impetus of the lyricist's recoverable voice: almost a "treeroot" rising like a wave or muscle, the silent and inexorable pressure, and not the real "tree root", behind every real organic growth. Perhaps the "no rose/but rose before" verse is inclining towards (but really eclipsing) a traditional poetics with standard "rose" symbolism at its service. Perhaps the place for talking about things that grow lies somewhere between language and a full-blown poem. Between "earth" and "the muteness of stones". Who knows?

But a verse integrity is possible in which "me arose" or "mea rose" ( by Grumman's "fissional" principle of minimalist creation) can be offered as easily interchangeable lines, in case you're tempted to try interpreting the whole "me a rose/before me" verse that follows as a principle of the priority of poetic perceiver over perceived. Senses are prioritized on the basis of a more fluid spatial "laxonomy". Words, letters and even the more intractable infra-verbal spaces where pwoermd life doesn't seem possible (if there are any) are all "poetential" areas of growth. The possibility of line (and sense) mutation does, though, seem as wispy as a filament & soluble as "holey space" but a  list of the "poetential" keeps growing, now envisaged not so much as "muscle" as "wave" action.

wave from wave
each wave carries or
moves through multiple
smaller waves water
finding what shape
it must and the loon
'svoice a wavering
two-tone in
black and white

a motor can grumble but not groan
passionless fruit

the
flag
wave
but not tire
trackless

The wave that changes into "the loon/'svoice", the "passionless fruit" of a groaning motor and the wave's (like the flag's) "trackless" identity—what are these, really? I am not the dispossessed reader we're expected to be so I'll propose some pwoermd commentary, happy to engage in a collective practice of seeing the quintessential pwoermd in the poem Huth has sent, "finding what shape it must" (Similar perhaps to the way Plato encouraged audiences not to be passive viewers of the play but its choros, vigorous participants in the dance (Jacques Rancière)).

To begin with, the essence of flag wave is its "flagth"', a figure reducible to sound and image. A figure of breath and breadth. And to find the sense in which flag or wave can be trackless (perhaps the poem's most ambiguous figure), I'll offer a Grumman-type arithmetical poem, made of clearly defined parts, in which "the/flag/wave/but not tire/trackless" line is converted into a "not tire>trackless=flag or wave" replacement rule, where "wave" or "flag" means any arbitrarily selected poetical object. Say what you like about foamy universes, there are always ways to keep the things inside them held in playful tensions til other sound, lexical & logical coordinates replace them. Suspensions without resolution. Adding "th" to the end of "flag", for instance, is a way to show that it's neither a hidden poem (intended to be written)  nor a language in which to discuss & write the poem. "Flagth" is its own irreducible thing: one product of an endlessly reconfigurable grid of freely given and shared letters, sounds & visuals.

less than perception

the eyelist
and (skewed) sees
anew

the streambed
the lawnbank
the bushsheath
the hemlocksun
the floweflowers

Yes, poetry as"less than perception". It is, as Rancière's said in regards to theatre, "the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect." (The Emancipated Spectator 15). Here's an "eyelist" of poetically interesting "skewed" vision, where a simple negation of space draws together normally separable materials (like "stream" & "bed", "flower" & "flowers") but without seeming random, wilful: where the "list" is inseparable from the "eye". Not an uncoupling, of course, but a poetic practice or energy dedicated to the acquisition of "these indelible foods/before me...gathered into salad".

th'eating
brea'thing
unth'reat'ning

sky
blue skies
her blue skies
her two blue skies

looking down on me

silistently

she moves
thoroughly you

The "communitarian" impulse of Huth is now becoming evident, poet wanting nothing more than to eliminate contaminants of a too interested 'academic' reading that's already commoditized much of contemporary poetry, and restore to it something of its essential "th'eating", "brea'thing" nature. The letter I received was a call for literary filiation & an invitation to join in the choros of artistic life.  Celebrate a wonderfully porous world mirrored in language (and vice-versa) where "blue skies" can look down on us both, "silistently" and "thoroughly".

* I'd like to acknowledge my indebtedness (if it isn't already obvious) to the writings of French philosopher, critic and theorist Jacques Rancière, the discovery of whose writings has lately amounted to a re-discovery of self.

A pwoermd a day

                                                                 taminate (posted Wednesday, July 07,2010)

The poet sometimes resorts to radical half-measures (like the removal of the prefix 'con-') to make things consistent. Scission is not murder but a sort of simple division (like Grumman's 'Mathemaku No. 10'), language always divided by  a user-reader & resulting in a significant poetical remainder. After all, what do you call the heart quotient in a Grumman poem?  Churchill's famous "end of the beginning" phrase (at war's end) is another case in point. I guess it operates by the same principle of slotting surprises into the commonplace and seeing what you get: a case of wilful insertion (or, as in this case, scission) that language always opts for, if given a chance. I think Grumman's heart or Huth's taminate are both unforeseen products that couldn't have been expressed better.

Maybe the pwoermd taminate (produced by scission), the mathemaku (produced by division) are dangerous nomads (after Deleuze). Significant literary forms that happen when you're not looking, an attack by night. Since traditional "page-based" ways of describing them seem outmoded already, we could even call them hyperlexical items. Is there a hidden 'code' at work that makes the mathemaku, pwoermd "interface texts"?The pwoermd is now (after Grummnan & Churchill) an uncontaminated product of superartful division:  Grumman's mathemaku being no more reducible to a simple 'visual heart' times 'poetry' rule than, say, the pwoermd to simple act of cutting. And yet they obviously are remainders of a sort, vital and active products of poetical imaginations not afraid to transgress material boundaries, both enjoying (in Grumman's words) "a widening/existence".

A "dissolution and resolution".

Used in a sentence: Taminate the springs before you drink deep.

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.