The Art of Irving Weiss

via Dan Waber's minimalist concrete poetry:

But many are tantalizingly close, and all of them resonate with the mindset I find myself in when I am composing concrete poetry. The tinkerer holds things in their hands and fiddles with the moving parts and futzes with the places where hidden moving parts might be. Fiddling with the conceptual knobs on bits of language is what helps me see opportunities for making concrete poetry. Visual Voices is nothing short of a tour de force in fiddling with the knobs of the poem as a print object. It is so good at what it does that reading it has the effect of gently reminding a habituated brain how to see the knobs and hooks and buttons again.

Three Examples of Linguistic Accretion

via Jeremy P. Bushnell's raccoon: notes and scavengings:

Been thinking about more examples of linguistic accretion:

The Poetry of Subtraction versus the Poetry of Accretion

via Jeremy P. Bushnell's raccoon: notes and scavengings:

I can think of a few literary works that use the aesthetic strategy of subtraction (Radi Os, Ronald Johnson's erased Paradise Lost; Srikanth Reddy's work-in-progress, which allegedly erases Kurt Waldheim's biography) but I'm having trouble thinking of ones that work consciously with the strategy of accretion in a way comparable to the Washburn assemblages I talked about last time.

A Brief History of Maurice Lemaître, Lettrist

via hands_tied:

Maunce Lemaître, born in Paris. Reads for I'Ecole des Arts et Métiers and I'Ecole des Travaux Publics. After taking part in the Liberation of Paris, he starts studying philosophy in the Sorbonne.

Comics and Visual Poetry

via Austin Kleon:

Neil Gaiman was on Studio 360 a couple weeks ago, talking about reading poetry in relation to comics: “I learned so much using words and pictures and captions from some of the most concrete poets, because poetry is all about economy, and it’s about reducing things down, and you’re seeing how much freight you can actually give words....”

Kenneth Koch was a poet who loved comics.

Poetry in Fusion

via The Art of Books & Small Press Publications:

Okay, this surreal joke to announce you that this book by Paul De Vree is one of these historical publications you can only regret it is not republished. The title is "Poetry in Fusion; on visual, concrete and phonetic poetry" and was published by "Pages for Poetry" in Lier Belgium in 1968.

Pages from the Chaosmos

via The Art of Books & Small Press Publications:

Amongst the mail of today I found this limited edition (10 copies, number 4/10) with Vispo by Pete Spence, edited by IMP Press, publishing vehicle of Ross Priddle.

Links to Digital Writing

via blogotacito (initially via Jim Andrews):

Here are five links to the sites of individuals who are currently producing
work relevant to digital writing or poetics. Some you may have encountered,
some not. And a link to a piece I did last year.

Visual Poet as Sound Poet

via rob mclennan's blog:

On Saturday, September 24th, a group of nearly two dozen of us were treated to a rare and important reading by Ottawa poet and publisher jwcurry, the first in his Hit'N'Run Lecture Series, called "MESSAGIO GALORE take II," framed as "a performance by jwcurry of sound & related textu(r)al materials with additional vocal aid by Max Middle," and held in the vacated bookstore space underneath his Chinatown apartment on Somerset Street West (see also post-reading reactions by John MacDonald, Wanda O'Connor and jealousies by Daniel f. Bradley, who couldn't make it).

Nico Vassilakis Interviewed

via Nick Piombino's fait accompli:

Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. Words, right. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text you're reading.

The Art of Vassilakis

via Crag Hill's poetry scorecard:

You can't tell me the work hasn't changed your way of seeing language at the letter level, at the subconscious layer before letter, the phoneme, the phrase, the psycho-utterance, the space, the spice, the species of language.

The Subtle Visual Poetry of Sharon Harris

via Dan Waber's minimalist concrete poetry:

When I started this site I was genuinely pleased when I started getting contacted by, and receiving submissions from, many of the artists I was already familiar with. That's a beautiful thing, and goes a long way towards affirming the validity of an undertaking. The work of Sharon Harris represents, for me, another beautiful thing. It's a whole new kind of pleasure when, in the course of doing some extended research (which is really the reason I started down this particular road, as a way to document and keep track of some specific areas of search and research), you're lucky enough to have lovely examples of the very thing you're researching brought to your door and slipped in over the transom.

Bob Grenier and the Poetry of the Hand

via Ron Silliman's Blog, tho Tony Trehy's words:

Chiming with the theoretical position of the Text Festival, while rooted in the Poetry Context and often surprisingly lyrical, Bob [Grenier] sees his recent work as moving into the interstices between poetry and visual art. The reader can step over the fine line to simplistic ‘solving the puzzle’ and miss the thrill of the deeper experience of, for instance, AFTER/NOON/SUN/SHINE or the absolute approximation of birdsong in words.

Meeting Robert Grenier at the Airport

via Tony Trehy's Tony Trehy blog

Earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Grenier off the plane from San Francisco at Manchester Airport. Although having exchanged photos so we would recognise each other I thought to be on the safe side I would print out one of his recent drawn poems and stand with it opposite the arrival gate like people do with notices such as “TAXI – MR SMITH”. And something quite unexpected happened: virtually everyone who came through the gate paused to read the poem (without realising that it was a poem of course).

Bob Cobbing via Bill Keith via Reed Altemus via Me

via The Art of Books & Small Press Publications

A catalogue sent to me by the late Bill Keith published by Ceolfrith Press on the occasion of the Bob Cobbing & Writers Forum Retrospective at the Sunderland Arts Center in November 1974.

Bob Cobbing with a Handful of Words

via The Art of Books & Small Press Publications

Bob Cobbing, from "Suesequence" 1970