I received a
small stack of publications from Los Angeles, California chapbook publisher
Mindmade Books, including Norma Cole’s a
little a & a (2002), H.N. Werkman’s
Tiksels (2007), Raymond Queneau’s FOR
AN ARS POETICA (trans. Guy Bennett, 2009) and Emily Kendal Frey’s The New Planet (2010).
American poet Norma Cole, originally from Toronto [see my review of her selected poems here],
is a bit of a moving target, rarely working the same forms twice. Her a little a & a is a polyphonic
sequence of commentaries upon commentaries, a fragmented essay talking about
poetry and art, storytelling, translation, myth and commodity. Composed as a
fragmented piece, stretched out and sketched, it writes and translates an
essay/conversation and an argument, collaged.
Become the
object, love it and live it. When you look for a long time like that, do you
see into or beyond? In those days we worked so hard to take the figure out.*
–
But the scenario, would it identify and speak for it, something,
the
present something relevant to the exhibition even at a tangent?
–
You mean explain the show. Can’t it speak for itself?
–
Not the point. Not explanation. Parallel play. Translation
–
Libidinous.
–
Rather than strictly superego, the translation as explanation ap-
proach
ho hum.
–
Carrousel.
–
See what I mean?
*“It will have to be
something I’ll miss.”
de Kooning
The most
fascinating work in the stack is Werkman’s Tiksels,
subtitled “1923-1929,” produced with an afterword by editor/publisher Guy
Bennett. I admit to not knowing much of the history of concrete and visual
poetry outside of Canada, but for some brief knowledge of Apollinaire’s work,
Werkman appears to be one of the early modern producers of concrete and visual
poetry, and much of this work is reminiscent of some of the works later
produced in the 1960s by such as bpNichol, bill bissett and Steve McCaffery,
among others. As Bennett writes to open his “Afterword”:
Hendrik Nikolaas
Werkman (1882-1945) was a commercial printer by profession, but by all accounts
not a very successful one. He was generally indifferent to money matters and
apparently unskilled in running a business. When he suddenly needed to repay a
substantial loan in the early 1920s his printing company foundered. In spite of
the financial difficulties he faced, Werkman opted to look on this crisis as an
opportunity for positive change: without abandoning commercial work he decided
to pursue a lifelong interest in the visual arts, and he duly put the tools of
his trade to artistic use. In 1923 he founded a magazine – The Next Call – that he would edit, write virtually single-handedly
and print himself, and simultaneously embarked on a series of large-format
abstract monographs that he called druksels
(from the Dutch drukken – “to
print”) which would eventually number more than 600. Both of these projects
featured the innovative typographic design and printing techniques for which he
has subsequently become known.
It was in 1923 that Werkman also
began experimenting with the typewriter, creating a small body of predominantly
abstract visual texts that he dubbed tiksels
(from tikken, meaning “to type”).
Whereas the pages of The Next Call
and the druksel are alive with large
colorful shapes and letter forms, the tiksels
are graphically minimalist works whose basic visual unit is the tiny, monowidth
typewriter character and whose color is that of the typewriter ribbon. Compositionally
the tiksels are informed and limited
by the machine used to produce them: horizontal and vertical lines and columns
feature prominently, and rows of identical, repeated characters appear in
nearly every piece. Far from creating monotony, these elements constitute a
unifying formal grammar that gives coherence to the tiksels as an ensemble. Adding to their unique character is Werkman’s
frequent use of analaphabetic which effectively removes them from the world of
sound and situates them squarely in the visual realm. They were clearly
intended to be seen and not heard, and this puzzles – how are we to read them,
as poems or as pictures?
Raymond Queneau’s FOR AN ARS POETICA, translated
from the French by Guy Bennett, is an eleven-part poetry sequence on the
composition of poetry. An “ars poetica,” writing out writing out writing. He makes
the composition of poetry sound like a kind of deliberate accident that somehow
manages to incorporate everything.
1.
A poem’s
indeed a trifling thing
little more
than a cyclone in the Antilles
than a
typhoon in the South China Sea
an earthquake
in Anping
When there’s
a flood on the Tang-Tse-Kiang
it’ll drown you
100,000 Chinese
bang
that’s not
even a fitting subject for a poem
Indeed a
trifling thing
We’re having
some fun in our little village
we’re going
to build a new school
we’re going
to elect a new mayor and change the market days
we were at
the center of the world now we’re near the river
ocean gnawing at the horizon
A poem’s
indeed a trifling thing
Emily Kendal Frey is also the author of The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) [see my reviewof such here], and her chapbook, The New
Planet, is constructed almost entirely of tiny poems with enormous punches.
SMART
Am I smart
enough to be androgynous?
Constantly shitting
myself in your name.
Nothing is as
beautiful as what is not beautiful.
Except sheet
rock.
Frey’s poems
feel a blend of Sarah Manguso-esque short fiction and the short poem, managing
both without being tied to either. Constructed out of sentences, her prose
poems strike at the very heart of whatever question she approaches. In some
thirty pages, Frey is quickly becoming one of my favourite American emerging poets,
for her sharp wit, and her use of the poetic sentence to not only make, but
accumulate, sense; and from those accumulations, the smartest of poems.
GODS
I make a new
planet out of rice.
No one wants
to live on it.
No one even
seems interested.
After a
while, I sit down on my planet and eat what I’ve made.
Then I go
across the road and hang out with the gods for a while.
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