Nick Piombino and Visual Poetry

via Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S

Of course, I was greatly influenced by the cut-up techniques used by Ted Berrigan and William Burroughs in their work, whose writing workshops I had attended in the middle and late 60’s. At Brooklyn Technical High School, in the late 50’s, I had to learn how to do technical drawing and drafting, and though visual work did not come easily to me, I enjoyed the process of making things. One course involved drafting layouts of objects and then cutting out the layouts to create pasted up three dimensional shapes. I remember seeing a TV interview with Duchamp who said the original meaning of art was “to do”.