Click to see the list . . .
A few months ago, I wrote a brief essay about Daymares, Robert Zend’s collection of stories, poems, and concrete poetry, one of his few books still in print. Zend (1929-1985) was a Hungarian-Canadian writer who immigrated to Canada in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising. He settled in Toronto and worked for many years for the CBC. He was one of the most versatile Canadian writers, producing poetry, concrete poetry, novels, short fiction, essays, and plays. He was also a composer, a filmmaker, and a creator of mertz-like sculptures made of found objects.
While researching the Toronto Reference Library’s holdings of Zend’s works, I came across a thirty-year old treasure in the Special Art Room Stacks: Arbormundi (Tree of the World), a portfolio of seventeen of Zend’s concrete poems created on a typewriter, for which he coined the word “typescapes.” Although Zend didn’t invent typewriter art, he did seem to have created it without knowledge of any forebears in that genre. Below is the cover page. Following this brief essay are five more samples of typescapes from Arbormundi.
Zend’s typescapes are remarkable for their meticulous execution, which often involves superimposed shapes and figures. At the areas of intersection of these shapes, the effect is far from being muddied or heavy. Instead, they retain the delicacy that is characteristic of the whole.
Part of the beauty of these concrete poems is the ethereal effect produced by the transparency of the overlaid shapes. The result of this diaphonous quality is that it is difficult to determine which object is in front or behind the other: The objects seem to blend into one another, a visual legerdemain made possible by the open spaces of the typed letters and symbols: a superimposed “x” and “p” gives little hint as to which was typed over the other. Therefore the realm in which the ghostly forms interact spatially and symbolically is flattened into a plane of shared patterns and meanings. Zend’s often punning titles also reflect this idea of blending, as for example in “Peapoteacock,” where he brings “teapot” and “peacock” into verbal and visual contiguity so that one is contained within the other.
Another aspect of the beautiful intricacy of the overlaid objects is that the areas of intersection naturally produce darker areas, which form shapes of their own consisting of outlines of both objects (as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram produce a shaded area formed with arcs from both circles). The interplay of the shapes of each object with the shapes produced by their overlay creates an impression of both dialogue and unity between the objects.
The miracle of these concrete poems is that from what must have been a slow and painstaking process of planning and execution using paper inserted into a clunky machine come visions of airy lightness and delicate movement.
All of these effects harmonize with Zend’s recurrent themes of commonality and universality: the Other within the I, and the endless cycle of creation and destruction. They seem to be part of Zend’s spiritual expression of the continuities of life and death; as Zend puts it in Daymares, from the “prenatal . . . to the land of time-spacelessness; to the tiny centre point of our individual self which strangely coincides with the three-billion other human centre-points, with those of the dead ones, with those of our more ancient ancestors: swimming, crawling and flying creatures, rooting-stretching plants and perhaps even with the centre-points of other alien-living-units, of agitatedly swirling atoms and majestically rotating galaxies.”
Below are five typescapes from Arbormundi, which was published by blewointment press in 1982. A note to the portfolio states that “Zend creates them with a manual typewriter; no electronics, computers or glue involved.”
Following this sampling is a tribute to Zend by Istvan Vigh, a portrait using Zend’s own typescape techniques.
Vivarbor (May 16, 1978)
Detail of Vivarbor
Orientopolis (Eastern city) (June 1, 1978)
Uriburus (April 13, 1978)
Rhumballion (May 14, 1978)
Peapoteacock (May 16, 1978)
A “Zendscape” by Istvan Vigh
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Posted in poetry, poetry reading
Tagged Camille Martin, Larry Sawyer, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Mark Goldstein, Myopic Books, Myopic Poetry Series, poetry
click to link to the poem at Angel House Press Thanks to Amanda Earl, poet and publisher of Angel House Press!Another poem from my forthcoming Looms (Shearsman Books) has been selected for a National Poetry Month series:
Camille Martin
Posted in poetry, poetry magazine, poetry press
Tagged Amanda Earl, Angel House Press, Camille Martin, Looms, National Poetry Month, Shearsman Books
Click to see TTQ.A poem from my upcoming collection, Looms, kicks off The Toronto Quarterly’s National Poetry Month parade. Thanks to Darryl Salach!
Camille Martin
Posted in Uncategorized
zebra mussel, surgeon’s golf ball,
a connect-the-dots dot with the image
filled in. Death on a rusty tricycle.
. . . .
& echo out less
serious remarks; a language
made of snarks & sneers
;what matters?
what’s the (even) point?
sky turns black; the dishes
come to forefront,
broke,
His boots are unlaced and he says, “You have to write this in fragments. Fuck a beginning. There’s no beginning. Fuck their middle—because there’s no middle, we’re in the middle; you can’t catch it while it’s happening. And fuck, fuck the ending because there won’t be an ending either. These are scenes. We come here to eat, to bullshit with you and a few other people. These are scenes. And you writing about Eddie and how he shot the moon out of the sky at five in the morning—that’s a scene that won’t mean shit to anyone but the person who saw it fall out of the sky, you know what I mean?”
Joshua Ware, “cities, / thought becomes”
Noetic cities
empty into assembly
line after
noons.
Swirl
sing sounds
index im
possibility.
A
symmetrical
words fade in
two hysterics
____________
The above poem attempts to undermine rational thought through a series of clever interactions between form and content. Such tactics are problematic, in that “cleverness is becoming stupidity,” and moreover, “clever people have always made it easy for barbarians, because they are so stupid*.”
Given this fact of cleverness, it may be of more interest to discuss an aesthetic concern unrelated to the above poem**. The EXPLANATORY NOTE for “Moonrise Paints a Lady’s Portrait” states that “poetry is the act of metamorphosing disparate images.” While certainly correct, this is but one aspect of poetry***. Poetry can also be thought of as sensation, or that which has “one fact turned toward the subject, and one fact turned toward the object. Or rather, it has no face at all, it is both things indissolubly . . . at one and the same time I becomes sensation and something happens through sensation, one through the other, one in the other (Deleuze, Francis Bacon 25).” Sensation, in other words, is the process of becoming faceless****; to this extent, sensation is not the subject nor the object, but the movement that takes place between the subject and the object: a transitive state: a verb that creates ephemeral and conditional nouns as effects of its action in highly specific contexts. Poetry, stated differently, is the movement of the subject (i.e. the poets as writers or readers) through and within the object (i.e. the text, whether materially, linguistically, or conceptually) that perpetually alters them both. As such, one may claim that “sensation is realized in the material,” while the material, concomitantly, “passes into sensation (Deleuze and Gauttari, What is Philosophy? 193).” If and when the movement ceases, both the subject and the object territorialize into rigid loci of the State; there is no longer poetry, but something else (e.g. stagnated nouns, information, communication, order words, commodities, exchangeable goods, etc.).
“While the poets agree that there is a certain amount of cleverness in the above poem, they do not necessarily agree with the EXPLANATORY NOTE’s assessment of cleverness, nor do they believe that it is the poem’s overriding concern.
**The poets do not believe that the aforementioned “aesthetic concern” is unrelated to the above poem. In fact, they are of the impression that it is very much related.
***Poetry, indeed, should be considered a multiplicity if one has any chance of understanding it, or better stated, moving comfortably through and within it.
****Foucault once wrote: “I am . . . not the only one who writes to have no face (Archaeology of Knowledge,19).”
Bunny Mazhari, Francis Bacon
Posted in concrete poetry, digital art, poetry, poetry magazine, Vispo, visual art
Tagged And/Or Magazine, Bunny Mazhari, Christophe Casamassima, Damian Ward Hey, Danielle Tunstall, Dawn Pendergast, Donna Kuhn, Joshua Ware, Kelley Irmen, Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife
Rogue Embryo
