Of Some Concern

Will we see the demise/shutting down of the postal systems in our lifetimes ?
Who are the major clients keeping these operations afloat? Utility companies?
With an introduction of mandatory ID cards (issued primarily to homed citizens)
paper coming to the door will be rendered obsolete. For who will these networks
be kept around ? Postcarders? Holiday well-wishers? Mail-artists? Penpals?
I fear the doing away of this amazing resource in the name of
electronic efficiency not to mention populace control via separation.
(Keeping people out of touch with their counterparts where mail is still vital and digital access still rare)

Oops. First paranoid post.

Lest We Forget

for old times sake

critter

“People have not really explored how the postcard,
and the telegram before it,
helped to initiate a silent revolution in everyday linguistic practices and did so in a very popular and democratic way.”
Dr. Bradley Clissold
Memorial University Of Newfoundland

Imagine every name spoken,
one after the other, in order.
I've thought of this regarding faces.
Some are so similar, there must be gradations...
I've often fantasized about every face flashed before my eyes...also in order.
But at what age ? At what point in time ? Birth ? The only age we've all been.
What an infinite catalogue!

This occurred to me after reading
PKD's account of being hit with countless works of art
flashing at breakneck speed before his eyes,
a trial that lasted for days.

for gail, four times over.

Back On Track

Poetry : Forever Cool Drunk

folks looking for poetry
are looking for more i think
than words strung together...
what makes them know they found it ?
one of those things that ain't got time for an audience, poetry is.
Why read what you can make with language.. failing you ?
Only p[oets care and they ain't worth a trust.
sing song sounds in a row ain't it. you know.
not that i hate you, but close. human with words tied to a stick.
sick making, the stack of books.

a drunk peom. to say what.?.this then:
you now this day and age waste ink and pages sick make me
look around the world still grows.only poems 'bout poetry
hold. the rest takes care of itself.slow it down and
look.

I wrote this drunk to say above...most waste words on sunsets
and subtle heartbreaks.
lord burn the books so we might know.

another thing of great beauty

ↂↀ⑆
ꁁ ꁊ ꁜ ∀
࿂ ⿵

Hail Something Or Other !!

Though I am not generally a fan of Black/Death Metal...
Boy O Boy, do I love their logos !!!
This is a tiny smidgen of what exists!
And it all couldn't have been possible without Tolkiens' Mordor.

Thanks To You, Dead Sara

Back in 1988-90, I was on staff at Scrivener, the lit mag of McGill University.
I was one of three poetry editors my first year there and had to
endure not only the vast and incomprehensible slush pile of submissions
but also the attitudes towards poetry revealed by my peers.
One would throw out a submission because it rhymed, another because it didn't.
If only I had the foresight to not take seriously the pompous posturings of my fellow 19 year old fuckwads.
I stopped writing after the experience. Stopped self-identifying as a 'writer'. Oh Well. Here I am...

One poet who was routinely rejected and whom I tried to champion...but to no avail...signed their work Dead Sara.
The poems were handwritten (what a point of contention for the rest of the staff!)
often employing crude drawings and letters made up into math formulas.
I corresponded with this poet who thanked me...
perhaps the only sympathetic voice he encountered.
Luckily I keep every letter ever sent to me...and perhaps I'll share some of those poems one day.
I credit Dead Sara AKA Cameron Conklin of Amarillo, Texas for keeping my mind about poetry open.

BONEFLOWER

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies

I think this is sad and funny.
If I understood more about everything I would find it sadder and funnier.

Thing Makers

Once again I was in a space crowded with beauty.
Expozine, a large small press fair that I help put together, teemed with life.
There is no shortage of objects made and unique.
I still fool myself thinking that 15 years ago...
there was no such thing as a glut of indy product.
Of course there was...I was never in the same room with all of it.
Now I help invoke the glut.
Come! Bring your beautiful books!

Let us say that I wish to collect all things of this or that nature...
and I choose as my focus some obscure corner of cultural creation.
Impossible task! Too much in every direction!
One makes Two makes Four makes Eight Forever.
The poets aren't dead.

What I once held to be a rare artifact is more like 30 bucks a dozen...
Imagine the archive of every city, vast stacks of creation.

I told someone yesterday that I remember the city unstreaked with ink,
Walls empty of graf and stickers and zines...is there any going back ?
Does one rise above the din ? Listen to my album.
Come to my show. Read my book. Buy my print.
Link to my site. Have a sticker, a flyer, a tape, a button.
Do it before time stops the line we made of it and loops the loop into seasons again.

The intersection between abstract/experimental comics
and the various branches of concrete/asemic/visual poetics
has, via the recommendations of my colleagues, brought me to the work of :

Alvaro de Sa

Andrew Topel

Reed Altemus


Fun!

let's lighten things up a tad

a manipulation of page 2 of A HISTORY OF OUTSIDER ART By John Maizels

I got into concrete/visual poetry via
band logos, psychedelic lettering, calligraphy, fantasy scripts in LOTR,
books on talismans in the school library and actually finding an old collection
(Once Again, Jean-Francois Bory) or two second hand and being amazed.
And looking at the alphabets of foreign tongues. And The Mystery.
I got into comics via comics and monsters. The undergrounds did what the heroes didn't when I was 15.
Oror 70 was an early hit to the brain.
I've always been into books in general..so when a book looks a little different, I'll pick it up...
My definition of comics exploded way wide open in my early 20s and I wanted to pull everything onto the page.
I experimented muchly. This is all open territory nowadays. The really 'weird' comics are not hard to find.
The cognoscenti drool over them publicly. The makers are quirky and real people. And sometimes quite successful artists.
Comics nowadays are enjoying wide networks of exposure and expansive styles and ways of being read.
There are many places where experimental comics edge up to concrete poetry and would be loved by
the mail-artists, collage queens and typography fetishists if they were but discovered.
The 'new' graphic design manifestos edge up pretty close to the outthere strips, as well.
The newness can only be that all these old things have always been related.
We all specialize and the generalists like me
are too word and reference dumb to write essays about what I really mean and what I really love.
Yesway is an attempt to pull together my loves, reveal how closely linked they are,
turn the letterheads onto comics and the idea of comics and the other way round.
Spur on the creation of books. Create dialogue between all the book people.
I feel that there are way too many secrets in the art camps.

the parents of literature
look and sound oral and drawn
true bards and carvers spawned the deal
comics (what are called comics)
got an early start and yes
subsume an array of forms
and goals...

machine based legible documents

the previous eight texts
(with the exception of the one recent map - origin forgotten)
are manipulations of what i believe to be derek beaulieu's
an afterword after words: notes towards a concrete poetic.

mo
em
do

Open Letter to the Taxonomists Of Visual Literature

In establishing/revising
a taxonomy of visual literature,
one that exhaustively details every habit within
visual/concrete/asemic/noise/cutup...
where are comics ?
silent/formalist/experimental ?
strip/novel/gag ?

I find it cute that xerox static and letraset funtimes,
rubberstamps and mail-art cut ups
find place in the discussions
of visual poetry
more often than comics.

Old. What we call comics...is very, very old.

My most recent poster.

geezer needlemaking unrandom

Spottle elbower panmelodion
Cretacic sternofacialis dharna
thoracoscopy paraglobulin autologist,
tropal pseudoism Riss expedientist
existentially dicyemid scrubbery, attack, Dodonian, menarche.
Overexposure Tracheophonae mafic.
Crossbolt chronogenetic karyopyknosis.
Cupellation. Entomostracan, laspring univalence religioner urogenic subcaudate.
Uncomplaining flagstaff.
Welkin gainstrive succinctorium,
monarchal hydrolatry, biaxially begaze.
jurist gaff tubeform
Pleurocapsaceae tink evangelist
furunculous seamanship Orycteropodidae semicolon,
Jim necrobiosis verdict swaraj, doge shapingly.
Mimeographic, preconcerted bronteum belavendered hassocky
unkneaded sisterlike pukeweed diblastula nebbuk.
Subvaginal solarize,
hexine erewhiles caffetannic soumansite alveololabial.

Thanks to Jamie Salomon.

Intelligent Design

Perhaps two years ago this image sprang to mind, fully formed.
I saw a great king, something of a Giant, decked out in major royal headgear, jewelry and robes, more Aztec than Egyptian.
He was standing in his open air throne room which was a huge slab of stone floating above lush jungle.
With his staff he was controlling what he saw in the jungle below him. Magnificent dinosaurs, plumed like the most extravagant parrots and birds of paradise, fought for his pleasure. They were his toys. He had built them.

Maiden Mother Crone

Map of the Moon.
Beautifully rendered by Jean-Dominique Cassini. (1679)

Don't Try This At Home

A friend of mine took the chance and opened one of THOSE emails.
He shared his findings with me. I share them with you:

Billy,
Once or twice I clicked on these junk emails and they have these weird
texts that have nothing to do with anything.  This one has even less than
that.  The subject heading was "Locate your Ymate online in your area!"
Dig it:

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice,
improvisation then going away shovelbill doing the exact opposbonzie.

att/int? not settingsconfirmshelldleifniw if not 77- socialable else not
optech moritzrusu but else 1 +  10. concurritur nor may monodactylous.
Iaroslav praxix if not & eunomian some, when time on726- if not cmhanis
deadborn

it- or maybe steins murschel comes, its fun 85& masterfd nor try
autographometer

Iaroslav! or maybe taylorite mesogaster may, not, or maybe inopinate
assorts heh nor' some babagges paramind philosophizing and then,

 so fun 504057? observants or in calculations/displays or tecnologyguarro
4 a or maybe ,  in, or arums thalamotomy not' nor obriend polythionic.
Iaroslav. or fandangle zimbaloon !"

I pity the poets of today. Dare they compete with spam?

The look and feel of this SF landscape still haunts many Montrealers.
Vague memories if not of the Expo year itself, then of Man & His World come and go.
So little is left standing.
1, 2, 3 sites of mandatory viewing.

This pattern tends to come up.
I've often thanked the Noble Cauliflower for the reminder.
Found here.

mathpuzzle

Ok. Ever since I came across a stack of old Recreational Mathematics magazines AND became reacquainted with the workbooks of yore...I've been in thrall to the visuals of these puzzles. This one posted is the tame teaser.
Anyone interested in visual poetics will gladly spend hours at mathpuzzle.
Of course, with the ubiquity of the home computer and its corollary design tools, the older aesthetic is being lost, replaced by full-colour, gaudy versions of the b&w on newsprint or mimeographed 'originals'.

A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible

As grateful as I am that this exists, I would love for it to remain in print.

Goes Without Saying

thanks

Various Reasons

Beauty being one.
I also like this kind of thing because I can fantasize about knowing what it means.

It's from here.