Category Archives: digital art

Visual poetry exhibit opens April 1

Posted on March 28, 2014 | Leave a comment

Vispo Exhibit in Cobourg, Ontario:
TEXTual ARTivity

Location: The Human Bean Coffee Shop
Duration: April 2014
Opening reception: April 1, 7:30 pm, with special guest Bill Bissett

          I continue to be amazed at what a dedicated group of poets can do to put their town — Cobourg, Ontario, about an hour east of Toronto — on the poetry map in a big way. The Poetry in Cobourg Spaces committee (Ted Amsden, Wally Keeler, Katriona Dean, and James Pickersgill) came up with the brilliant idea to host TEXTual ARTivity, a visual poetry exhibition during National Poetry Month at The Human Bean, a coffeehouse in downtown Cobourg. The list of participants includes Canadian and American visual poets, some active since the 1960s.
          The exibition will feature one of my ransom note collages (shown in the image below) as well as work by many others:

Angela Rawlings, Derek Beaulieu, Robert Zend, Bill Bissett, Helen Hajnoczky, Lindsay Cahill, Mark Laliberte, Jenny Sampirisi, Eric Schmaltz, Angela Szczepaniak, Gregory Betts & Neil Hennessy, Pearl Pirie, Eric Winter, Jessica Smith, Ted Amsden, Sharon Harris, Cliff Bell-Smith, Mary McKenzie, Wally Keeler, Katriona Dean, Gary Barwin, Judith Copithorne, michael j. casteels, Alixandra Bamford, Em Lawrence and Dan Waber

Click the image below for a generous article about the exhibit by Cecilia Nasmith in Northumberland Today:
COBOURG VISPO SHOW          Zendophiles will be interested to know that Robert Zend’s typescape Peapoteacock will be on exhibit:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

Robert Zend, who is legendary in the field, will be represented by a playful piece his widow supplied, in which his words form intertwining pictures of a peacock and a teapot.

 
 

Camille Martin

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Robert Zend – Afterword: Citizen of the Macrocosm

Posted on March 20, 2014 | 1 comment

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Afterword: Citizen of the Macrocosm

COSMIC HAND

          Robert Zend admired Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy for his unwillingness “to accept any label, either for himself or for others”:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

He didn’t identify with any group; he belonged nowhere, but this non-belonging meant for him an extremely strong belonging to Man, to Mankind, to Humanity.1

          Zend similarly disregarded boundaries in seeking out like-minded writers and artists around the world, in shaping themes exploring the connectedness of all humanity and a cosmic sense of place, and in creating art using the most humble and mundane objects.
          National culture is a fuzzy proposition, and this is true for the countries where Zend found kindred artists and writers. At a certain point, the idea of nation becomes merely a convenient rubric to demonstrate his cosmopolitanism. For example, within Canadian culture are the cultures of many nations. In turn, the cultures of those nations cannot be thought of as pure but are often congeries of contributions from many peoples across history. As Zend resisted the notion of labels and boundaries, my use of them here might seem to contradict his convictions.
          But nations, perhaps especially one such as Hungary, whose language and culture evoke in many Hungarians fierce sentiments of belonging, are of course not totally artificial cultural constructs. And although Canada’s historical quest for a cohesive national culture has been eroded over the decades by the crosscurrent trend toward a national policy of multiculturalism, Canadian cultural protectionism has cast an enduring shadow on any debate on national identity.
          Zend had Hungarian cultural roots, and part of his cosmopolitan Budapest heritage was also the thirst to look beyond borders to find literary and artistic kin worldwide. This desire was integral to the freedom that he so valued. In Canada, he had close ties to immigrant as well as Canadian-born artists and writers. Thus his Canadian heritage and legacy are based not so much on national identity as on multicultural affinities.
          In the afterword to Oāb, he lists his “spiritual fathers and mothers” as well as “chosen brothers and sisters.” They include poets, artists, sculptors, short story writers, novelists, philosophers, literary theorists, actors, and filmmakers from Argentina, Canada, the United States, France, Austria, Germany, Ancient Greece and Rome, Romania, Flanders, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Hungary, Great Britain, and Belgium. In short, his tally of creative family is a model of interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan openness.
          Zend was a Canadian original: born in Hungary and adopted by Canada, he wrote about both places. He was also a citizen of a broader community of writers and artists and wrote about realms of cosmic dimension. His cosmopolitan outlook is a part of Canadian cultural history. It is a remarkable achievement and an homage to what he most admired in other writers, artists, and cultures without regard to borders.
          Thank you for reading my series on the life and work of Robert Zend — I hope you enjoyed it. It has been a great pleasure to work on this project.

A Special Announcement —
The Robert Zend Website


          One important matter remains: in a few days, I’ll announce the completion of a significant project recently undertaken by Zend’s daughter Natalie Zend: The Robert Zend Website. This valuable resource provides information on acquiring his books and art and offers information to anyone interested in learning more about his remarkable life and work. Stay tuned . . .

Acknowledgements and Bibliography

          Below is a list of heartfelt acknowledgements to the many people who have kindly assisted my research. Particular gratitude goes to Janine Zend, Natalie Zend, and Ibi Gabori, who so generously contributed to this project. Please do not hesitate to let me know if I have overlooked any person or institution.
          And for anyone interested in the sources I used during my research, I include a Bibliography at the end of this post.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the kind assistance and generosity of the following:

The family of Robert Zend: Janine Zend, Natalie Zend, and Ibi Gabori

Rachel Beattie and Brock Silverside, curators of the Zend fonds at Media Commons, University of Toronto Library

Edric Mesmer, librarian at the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection and curator of The Center for Marginalia, and the other wonderful librarians of The Poetry Collection for their research assistance

Brent Cehan and other librarians of the Language and Literature division of the Toronto Reference Library

The librarians in the Special Arts Room Stacks at the Toronto Reference Library

The librarians at Reference and Research Services and at the Petro Jacyk Central and East European Resource Centre, Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries

Susanne Marshall (former Literary Editor for The Canadian Encyclopedia)

Irving Brown

Robert Sward

bill bissett

Jiří Novák

Bibliography

“Administrative history / biographical sketch.” Robert Zend fonds. Media Commons, University of Toronto Libraries, Toronto, Canada. http://mediacommons.library.utoronto.ca/sites/mediacommons.library.utoronto.ca/files/finding-aids/zend.pdf

Bangarth, Stephanie, and Andrew S. Thompson. “Transnational Christian Charity: the Canadian Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the Hungarian Refugee Crisis, 1956–1957.” American Review of Canadian Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 295–316. General OneFile. Web.

The Book of Canadian Poetry. Edited by A. J. M. Smith. Toronto: Gage, 1943.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Comments on back cover of Daymares: Selected Fiction on Dreams and Time by Robert Zend. Vancouver: CACANADADADA Press, 1991.

———. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Botar, Oliver, to Janine Zend. Email. 9 April 2001.

Buzinkay, Géza. “The Budapest Joke and Comic Weeklies as Mirrors of Cultural Assimilation.” In Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930, edited by Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, 224–247. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994.

Catalogue. Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library) in Budapest, Hungary.

Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Clarity, James F., and Eric Pace. “Marcel Marceau, Renowned Mime, Dies at 84.” New York Times. 24 September 2007.

Colombo, John Robert. Ottawa Journal. 11 May 1974. 40.

Day, Lawrence. “Re: Handbook 386(b) – Ken Field.” Chess Talk. 27 August 2008. http://www.chesstalk.info/forum/printthread.php?s=bea6d4e5851d02610f6670258010f473&t=375

———. IMlday. 23 September 2004. http://www.chessgames.com.

Donaghy, Greg. “An Unselfish Interest? Canada and the Hungarian Revolution, 1954-1957.” In The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives, edited by Christopher Adam, Tibor Egervari, Leslie Laczko, and Judy Young, 256—74. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.

Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. “Hungary: The Great Depression.” Library of Congress Country Studies. 1989. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.

Ferrazzi, A. Portrait of Giacomo Leopardi. C. 1820. Oil on canvas. Casa Leopardi, Recanati, Italy.

“Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian uprising and refugee crisis.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 23 October 2006. http://www.unhcr.org/453c7adb2.html.

Fifield, William. “The Mime Speaks: Marcel Marceau.” The Kenyon Review 30, no.2 (1968): 155-65.

Fleeing the Hungarian Revolution, Settling in Canada: Photos and documents of Robert, Ibi and Aniko Zend’s voyage November 1956 – April 1957. 1956 Memorial Oral History Project: Materials accompanying Eve (Ibi) Gabori’s interview, 31 March 2007. Prepared by Natalie Zend, 24 June 2007.

Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.

Frye, Northrop. Afterword to Daymares: Selected Fictions on Dreams and Time, by Robert Zend. Vancouver: Cacanadada Press, 1991.

Gabori, George. When Evils Were Most Free. Deneau, 1981.

Gabori, Ibi. Interview 01544-2. Visual History Archive. USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Accessed online at the University of Toronto Library.

Gould, Glenn. “If I were a gallery curator . . .” Dust jacket of From Zero to One by Robert Zend. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Mission, BC: The Sono Nis Press, 1973.

Hahn, Lionel / McClatchy Newspapers. Photograph of Marcel Marceau performing in Westwood, California, in 2002. Available from: The Seattle Times. http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2003899052_marceau24.html.

Hamlet. Directed by Lawrence Olivier. London: Two Cities Films, 1948.

Hidas, Peter. “Arrival and Reception: Hungarian Refugees, 1956—1957.” In The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives, edited by Christopher Adam, Tibor Egervari, Leslie Laczko, and Judy Young, 223—55. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume 1. Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004.

Hungarian American Federation. “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Photos.“ The 1956 Hungarian Revolution Portal. http://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/1956/photos.htm.

Jones, Frank. “The first time I met Ibi Gabori.” Toronto Star. 29 February 1992. K2. ProQuest. Web.

Józsa, Judit, and Tamás Pelles. La Storia della Scuola Italiana di Budapest alla Luce dei Documenti D’Archivio [The History of the Italan School of Budapest, in Light of Archival Documents]. http://web.t-online.hu/pellestamas/Tamas/bpoliskol.htm#_Toc189916144.

Kafka, Franz. “An Imperial Message.” Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 4–5.

Karinthy, Frigyes. “Chain-Links.” Translated by Adam Makkai, edited by Enikö Jankó. http://djjr-courses.wdfiles.com/local–files/soc180:karinthy-chain-links/Karinthy-Chain-Links_1929.pdf.

———. A Journey Round My Skull. New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2008.

———. Tanár úr kérem [Please Sir!]. Budapest: Dick Manó, 1916.

———. Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver’s Fifth Voyageand Capillaria: Gulliver’s Sixth Voyage. Translated by Paul Tabori. London: New English Library, 1978.

Kearns, Lionel. By the Light of the Silvery McLune: Media Parables, Poems, Signs, Gestures, and Other Assaults on the Interface. Vancouver: Daylight Press, 1969.

Kieval, Hillel J. “Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel.” The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. 2010. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tiszaeszlar_Blood_Libel.

Koehler, Robert. “Pantomimist Marcel Marceau in Performance at Segerstrom Hall.” Los Angeles Times, 11 February 1988. http://articles.latimes.com/1988-02-11/entertainment/ca-41839_1_marcel-marceau.

Kossar, Leon. “Canada Heaven for Hungarians.” The Telegram, 30 April 1957.

Kramer, Mark. “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings.” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (April 1998): 163—214.

Lenvai, Paul. One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy. Translated by Ann Major. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010.

Lloyd, John. Portrait of Robert Zend. Cover of Beyond Labels. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1982.

Luther, Claudia. “Marcel Marceau, 84; legendary mime was his art’s standard-bearer for seven decades.” Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/24/local/me-marceau24.

Madách, Imre. The Tragedy of Man. Translated by George Szirtes. New York: Puski Publishing,1988.

———. The Tragedy of Man. Translated and illustrated by Robert Zend.

Magritte, René. Le fils de l’homme. 1964. Magritte Foundation. http://www.magritte.be/portfolio-item/fils-de-l-homme-2/?lang=en.

———. Radio interview with Jean Neyens (1965), in Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, translated by Richard Millen, 172. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977.

———. Les valeurs personelles (Personal Values), Series 2. 1952. Magritte Foundation. http://www.magritte.be/portfolio-item/les-valeurs-personnelles/?lang=en.

The Maple Laugh Forever: An Anthology of Comic Canadian Poetry. Edited by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie. Edmonton, Alberta: Hurtig Publishers, 1981.

Marceau, Marcel. Comments on front inner dust jacket of From Zero to One by Robert Zend. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Mission, BC: The Sono Nis Press, 1973.

———. Marceau, Marcel. “Marcel Marceau Paintings.” Encyclopedia of Mime. Available at http://www.mime.info/encyclopedia/marceau-paintings.html.

———. The Mask Maker./em> Available at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ffi4_marcel-marceau-le-masque_fun.

———. Portrait of Robert Zend. Drawing (medium unknown). Dust jacket cover of From Zero to One by Robert Zend. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Mission, BC: The Sono Nis Press, 1973.

———. “This Drawing, Poem, and Zend During and After.” In A Bouquet to Bip by Robert Zend. Exile Magazine 1, no. 3 ( 1973): 121-22.

———. Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death. Film stills from 1965 performance. Available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5RLTZSrr4A.

Marcus, Frank. “Marceau: The Second Phase.” The Transatlantic Review 11 (1962): 12—18.

Marinari, Umberto. Introduction. Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks. Translated by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 3—26.

Martin, Camille. Entry on Lionel Kearns for The Canadian Encyclopedia. 2013. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/lionel-kearns/.

Messerli, Douglas. “Frigyes Karinthy.” Green Integer. The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog. 30 November 2010. http://pippoetry.blogspot.ca/2010/11/frigyes-karinthy.html.

New Poems of the Seventies. Edited by Douglas Lochhead and Raymond Souster. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1970.

New York Café, Budapest. Photograph. Available at Famous Coffee Houses. http://www.braunhousehold.com.

Nichol, B. P. The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader. Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007.

———. Art Facts: A Book of Contexts. Tucson: Chax Press, 1990.

———. “Calendar” (detail). Broadside. S.n, n.d.

———. Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2004; originally released in Canada in 1974.

———. The Martyrology, Book 6 Books. 1987; reprint. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994.

———. The Martyrology 5. 1982; facsimile edition. Toronto: Coach House Books, 1994.

———. Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol. Edited by Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2002.

———. Merry-Go-Round. Illustrated by Simon Ng. Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1991.

———. Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations. Toronto: Coach House Books, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 2000. 1—144.

Nyugat 1938, no. 10. Budapest. Frigyes Karinthy memorial issue.

Pirandello, Luigi. Right You Are, If You Think You Are. In Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks. Translated by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 69—118.

———. Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays. Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.

———. Six Characters in Search of an Author. In Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks. Translated by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 119—67.

Priest, Robert, Robert Sward, and Robert Zend. The Three Roberts: On Childhood. St. Catherines, Ontario: Moonstone Press, 1985.

———. The Three Roberts: On Love. Toronto: Dreadnaught, 1984.

———. The Three Roberts: Premiere Performance. Scarborough, Ontario: HMS Press, 1984.

Q Art Theatre. The Tragedy of Man publicity poster. Montreal: Q Art Theatre, October – November 2000.

R., Patrick. Robert Zend. “Memorial.” http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=10862727.

Rippl-Rónai, József. Portrait of Frigyes Karinthy. 1925. Pastel. Petőfi Museum of Literature. Available from Terminartors. http://www.terminartors.com/artworkprofile/Rippl-Ronai_Jozsef-Portrait_of_Frigyes_Karinthy.

Robert Zend bio. Ronsdale Press. Available at http://ronsdalepress.com/authors/robert-zend/.

Robert Zend fonds. Media Commons, University of Toronto Libraries, Toronto, Canada.

Sanders, Ivan. “Karinthy, Ferenc.” The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. 2010. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Karinthy_Ferenc

Six Degrees of Separation. 1993. DVD Culver City, Canada: MGM Home Entertainment, 2000.

Sled, Dmitri. “Partisans In The Arts: Marcel Marceau (1923—2007).” Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. 12 June 2012. http://jewishpartisans.blogspot.ca/2012/06/partisans-in-arts-marcel-marceau-1923.html.

Standelsky, Eva, and Zoltan Volgyesl. Tainted Revolution. Dir. Martin Mevius. The Netherlands: Association for the Study of Nationalities, 2006.

Stark, Tamás. “‘Malenki Robot’ – Hungarian Forced Labourers in the Soviet Union (1944–1955).” Minorities Research: A Collection of Studies by Hungarian Authors. Edited by Győző Cholnoky. Budapest: Lucidus K., 1999. 155-167. http://www.epa.hu/00400/00463/00007/pdf/155_stark.pdf

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Edited by Howard Anderson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.

Szabó, László Cs. Qtd. in “Frigyes Karinthy Author’s Page.” Publishing Hungary. Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum. http://www.hunlit.hu/karinthyfrigyes,en.

Szaynok, Bożena. “Stalinization of Eastern Europe.” Translated by John Kulczycki. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1. Edited by Richard S. Levy. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2005. 677—80.

Talpalatnyi föld [Treasured Earth]. Directed by Frigyes Bán. Hungary: Magyar Filmgyártó Nemzeti Vállalat, 1948.

The Toronto Mirror. Published and edited by Robert Zend. October 1961.

Troper, Harold. “Canada and the Hungarian Refugees: The Historical Context.” In The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives, edited by Christopher Adam, Tibor Egervari, Leslie Laczko, and Judy Young, 176—93. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.

Ungváry, Krisztián. The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II. Translated by Ladislaus Löb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Hungary after the German Occupation.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Last modified 10 June 2013. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005458.

Veidlinger, Jeffrey. “Stalin, Joseph (1879—1953).” Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1. Edited by Richard S. Levy. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2005. 676—77.

Volvox: Poetry from the Unofficial Languages of Canada . . . in English Translation. Edited by J. Michael Yates. The Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia: The Sono Nis Press, 1971.

Wershler, Darren. “News That Stays News: Marshall McLuhan and Media Poetics.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 no. 2 (2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.208.

White, Norman T. “The Hearsay Project.” The NorMill. 11—12 November 1985. http://www.normill.ca/Text/Hearsay.txt.

Zend, Natalie. A Biography of Robert Zend. Unpublished manuscript. 8 March 1983. Personal library of Janine Zend.

Zend, Robert. Ararat. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Arbormundi: 16 Selected Typescapes. Vancouver: Blewointment Press, 1982.

———. Beyond Labels. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1982.

———. A Bouquet to Bip. Exile Magazine 1, no. 3 ( 1973): 93–123.

———. Dancers. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Daymares: Selected Fictions on Dreams and Time. Edited by Brian Wyatt. Vancouver: CACANADADADA Press, 1991.

———. Eden. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Fából vaskarikatúrák. Budapest: Magyar Világ Kiadó, 1993.

———. Film poster produced for Hamlet, directed by Lawrence Olivier (London: Two Cities Films, 1948). Press and Publicity Department of the Hungarian National Filmmaking Company, 1948.

———. Film poster produced for Talpalatnyi föld (Treasured Earth), directed by Frigyes Bán (Hungary: Magyar Filmgyártó Nemzeti Vállalat, 1948). Press and Publicity Department of the Hungarian National Filmmaking Company, 1948.

———. From Zero to One. Translated by Robert Zend and John Robert Colombo. Mission, BC: The Sono Nis Press, 1973.

———. Genesis. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Hazám törve kettővel. Montréal: Omnibooks, 1991.

———. Heavenly Cocktail Party. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. How Do Yoo Doodle?. Unpublished manuscript. Private collection of Janine Zend. Coloration is the author’s.

———. “The Key.” Exile Magazine 2, no. 2 (1974): 57-67.

———. LineLife. Ink drawing on paper. 1983. Box 10, Robert Zend fonds, Media Commons, University of Toronto Libraries. Adapted for digital medium by Camille Martin.

———. “Months of the Super-Year.” Exile Magazine 2, no. 2 (1974): 50.

———. Nicolette: A Novel Novel. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 1993.

———. Oāb. Volume 1. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1983.

———. Oāb. Volume 2. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985.

———. Pirandello and the Number Two. Master’s thesis. University of Toronto, 1969.

———. Polinear No. 3. 1982. Ink on paper. Private collection.

———. Quadriptych in Gasquette series. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Science Fiction. N.d. Paper collage. Private collection.

———. Toiletters. N.d. Ink on toilet paper rolls. Private collection.

———. “Type Scapes: A Mystery Story.” Exile Magazine 5 nos. 3-4 (1978): 147.

———. Versek, Képversek. Párizs: Magyar mühely, 1988.

———. Windmill. N.d. Mixed media with thumbtacks, sewing pins, string, and paper on wood. Private collection.

———. “The World’s Greatest Poet.” Exile Magazine 2, no. 2 (1974): 55-56.

———. Zendocha-land. Unpublished manuscript, 1979.

Zend, Robert, ed. Vidám úttörő nyár (Happy Summer Pioneers). Magyar Úttörők Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Pioneers), 1955.

Zend, Robert, translator and illustrator. The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách. Unpublished manuscript.

Zend, Robert, and Jerónimo. My friend, Jerónimo. Toronto: Omnibooks, 1981.

“Zend, Robert.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Edited by W. H. New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 1234.

Camille Martin

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Robert Zend – Part 13. Gaskets, Thumbtacks, Toilet Paper Rolls . . . and Doodles

Posted on March 15, 2014 | 1 comment

TITLE WITH BUSINESS CARD IMAGE AND BYLINE

Part 13. Gaskets, Thumbtacks,
Toilet Paper Rolls . . .
and Doodles

          Robert Zend dissolved boundaries, or perhaps more accurately, ignored them. The preceding eight installments demonstrated two ways in which he did so: his international outlook and his exploration of humanity’s place within the cosmos.
          In this last substantive installment, I’d like to show a third way. To create his visual art, Zend used technologies that were available to him, including the typewriter and computer. He also used whatever materials were at hand, including automotive gaskets, thumbtacks, and toilet paper rolls. Zend was also a prolific doodler, drawing his casual sketches (some quite intricate) on everything from Post-It notes to cocktail napkins.
          I hope that you enjoy this visual feast of works by an extraordinary Canadian writer and artist. I think it’s fair to say that many of these have not been seen publicly for a very long time, possibly not since his death almost thirty years ago. The time is overdue for these visual works to reach a broader audience.
          The display of works here is made possible by the kind permission of Janine Zend, who generously allowed me to view, photograph, and (in the case of the toiletters) video them.

The Toiletters

          The first time I was invited to the Zend home, in October 2013, Janine led me to the dining room table, where there was a box full of cardboard toilet paper rolls on which Robert Zend had drawn poems and designs. In his usual punning humour, he called these found objects “toiletters.” He created scores of these, also drawing on tape rolls, paper towel rolls, and mailing tubes. If it was cardboard and tubular, he drew on it. I knew that he was aesthetically versatile, but these took the notion to a new level. I immediately loved them.
          After the arrival that afternoon of Janine and Robert’s daughter, Natalie, the two showed me upstairs, where they searched around for more such objets trouvés. In a closet they found a long mailing tube on which Zend had written a poem spiraling from bottom to top.
          Spontaneously, Natalie began reading the poem while she and I slowly rotated the tube. It was a poignant moment, and I was mesmerized. I can only describe the poem as a spiritual crescendo, and as Natalie reached the top of the tube, it seemed all but inevitable that the poem would end on the word “god” or some such epiphany. Suddenly her voice halted, for the cardboard where the last word should have been had been roughly torn off. It looked as though the word had been gnawed off by a rodent. Then it hit me that the tear wasn’t caused by a mouse; it was classic Zend humour, building up anticipation and then thwarting it, in this case with silence at the height of an expected revelation.
          His choice of found object, the humble cardboard tube, rings true in the context of his writing and other visual works. The toiletters bespeak an absurdist (and scatalogical) sense of humour and a love of doodling. And he was drawn to the circularity of the tubes as he was drawn to themes involving cyclical processes of creation and destruction as well as images of the uroboros. On reflection, the ultimate household throwaway seems a natural canvas for Zend.
          I selected a few toiletters to give an idea of their variety and filmed them on a turntable (Fig. 1).

FIGURE TOILETTERS

The Gasquettes

          In a series of collages, Zend traced shapes with automotive gaskets, or “gasquettes” as he dubbed them in tongue-in-cheek eloquent French. More mundanely, he describes the objects as “automatic transmission valve-body separator gaskets . . . courtesy of Gabriel Nagy of Low Cost Automatic Transmissions, Ltd., Toronto.”1 Using these little machine parts as templates, he created highly stylized works such as the following two works in the Gasquette series (figs. 2 and 3):
ARARAT AND QUARTET

The Humble Thumbtack

          Zend found inspiration in quotidian objects like thumbtacks, pushpins, and string to create multi-media works such as Windmill (fig. 4), which manages to be simultaneously playful and haunting:
THUMBTACKS 365

Collages

          The three paper collages below (figs. 5, 6, and 7) show a range of Zend’s stylistic approaches in this medium. The lively motion and rhythm in these works have a musical effect, perhaps owing something to his background as a pianist:
BLACK WHITE RED REVISED 500
DANCERS 500 REVISED
HEAVENLY COCKTAIL PARTY 500

Typewriter and Computer Art:
Typescapes and the Polinear Series

Scattered throughout this essay you’ve seen examples of Zend’s remarkable “typescapes,” such as “Stormelancholix” from Arbormundi (fig. 8):
STORMELANCHOLIX 450 W
In this installment I’d also like to present examples of different approaches he took to typewriter art. Oāb is full of playful experimentation with typed characters to illustrate the two-dimensional characters Oāb and Ïrdu exploring the possibilities of their world of paper and ink, as in “ÏRDU IMITATES THE SNAKE, OĀB THE PREY” (fig. 9):
OAB SNAKE 550 W
and the following representation of the four creature-creators of Zend’s generational fantasy:
OAB 2 450 W
Zend was fortunate to live at a time when computer programs were being developed that allowed artists to take advantage of the possibilities of digital technology. Using such software, he created delicate works of parallel lines and concentric patterns, as in Polinear No. 3 (fig. 11):
POLINEAR NO 3 459 H

The Doodles

          An overview of Zend’s visual works would not be complete without a gallery of his doodles. I knew that Zend was a compulsive and prolific doodler, but it was not until I began researching his fonds that I began to understand the sheer number and scope of these off-the-cuff scribblings. His restless creative energy spilled over onto any paper product in sight, be it party napkin, doctor’s tablet, Post-It note, manila folder, or toilet paper roll — all were an invitation to play. If he ran out of paper, he would doodle on the back of a drawing he just made. Thirty-five years later, I was finding these little drawings scattered throughout the scores of boxes in the Zend fonds. Who says research has to be dull?
          The doodles are by turns humorous, beautiful, erotic, abstract, and punning, and often a hybrid such as comic-erotic. He took especial delight in caricatures and intricate monograms. Sometimes his sketches turned into ideas for typescapes or other works, and sometimes they seem to be outlines for longer visual sequences. In the punning category, he created a collection of visual/verbal puns entitled How Do Yoo Doodle?, which he produced as coloured slides.
          Zend was a paper hoarder – the wastebasket was his enemy. Janine points out that this may have been a reaction to having lost everything, including all of his poetry, during his escape from Hungary in 1956. How fortunate that after that loss he saved every scrap, and that after his death Janine took great care in archiving all of his papers, from the gorgeous and labour-intensive typescapes to the humblest scratchings on an envelope.
          The following gallery contains a sampling that I gleaned from the Zend fonds as well as a selection from How Do Yoo Doodle?
          Behold Zend’s doodles, like sparks flying from a creative mind that never seemed to rest.
FIGURE DOODLES
You can hover your cursor over the image for pause, reverse, and forward buttons.

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Next Installment —
Afterword: Citizen of the Macrocosm

Camille Martin

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Robert Zend – Part 6. Canadian Literary Cross-Pollination: Marshall McLuhan

Posted on February 13, 2014 | 1 comment

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Part 6. Canadian Literary Cross-Pollination: Marshall McLuhan (1911—1980)

Introduction:
Multiculturalism before Multiculturalism

          In the last installment, “Hungarian Literary Roots,” I traced some of Zend’s foundational influences in his native Hungary. In this section, I’d like to investigate the corresponding Canadian “cross-pollination”: writers and artists who inspired in Zend new aesthetic explorations. The 1960s saw an explosion of experimentation in the arts as well as paradigm-shifting ideas (to use Thomas Kuhn’s term) in cultural theory. Many of these would likely have been banned in Communist Hungary as decadent or counter-revolutionary. In his adopted country of Canada, Zend was free to delve into these new trends, to which he responded with a spirit of generosity and enthusiasm.
          I’m describing the influence of Canadian cultural figures on Zend as cross-pollination, for although his inalienable roots were in Hungarian traditions, his poetry and art that emerged since the 1960s blended aspects of both. His penchant for humour, mythology, and the fantastical, inherited from his Hungarian lineage, merged with ground-breaking Canadian ideas such as Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media culture and bpNichol’s avant-garde mixed-genre poetics. Knowing Zend’s delight in creating hybrid words like “peapoteacock,” I like to think he might have called such a hybrid of Magyar and Canadian influences something like “Magyanadian.”
          As this essay took shape, I’ve been continually reminded of the illusory nature of unified national culture in my description of literary lineage. Zend’s Hungarian influences included traditions from populations that immigrated to Hungary (as we’ve seen from the Budapest joke, which also provided a creative wellspring for Zend’s “spiritual father,” Karinthy), as well as poetry and novels from around the world, thanks to translations of world literature into Hungarian (including Zend’s own translations of Italian poetry). Similarly, Zend’s Canadian associates were often writers and artists who, like him, immigrated to Canada from other countries, such as poet Mary Melfi (Italy) and artist Jiri Ladocha (Czechoslovakia).
          In this respect, Zend’s work in Canada embodies a multicultural spirit — not only by virtue of his country of origin. His was among the crescendo of immigrant voices that eventually led to Canada’s official embracing of multiculturalism as a defining national feature in 1988 with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.
          Although lineage can be documented, in reality the entangled network of influences is much more mysterious. Impossible complexity notwithstanding, what follows is an attempt to point out some Canadian cultural figures who had a transformative effect on Zend’s development as a writer and artist.
          And the most striking transformation of his work is due to the influence of the Canadian avant-garde. Although all of Zend’s early poems written in Hungary were lost to the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution, his earlier poems written in Canada in Hungarian, some of them unpublished, are likely a continuation of poems in a humorous and fantastical vein, sometimes with logical twists. Others are impressionistic, sometimes exploring dream states, more in the vein of Miklós Radnóti’s lyricism than Frigyes Karinthy’s modernist satire and science fiction.
          It is possible that Zend was influenced in Hungary by avant-garde culture, which most likely would have come from his knowledge of 1920s Russian constructivism. Janine Zend astutely points out that some of the concrete poetry in Oāb is reminiscent of such visual art. Certainly the work to which he gravitated in Hungary was influenced by European international modernism as opposed to traditional lyricism and narrative. However, I think it’s fair to say that his exposure to the Canadian avant-garde was transformative to his work, in ways that can be traced to specific influences.
          Among Canadian writers, Zend’s work is most closely related to the formally innovative writers of the 1960s and onward, such as the TISH poets of UBC Vancouver, including Lionel Kearns; other experimental poets such as bpNichol and Steve McCaffery; his fellow poets named “Robert” in a performing and publishing group called The Three Roberts (Priest, Sward, and Zend), and media theorist Marshall McLuhan.
          The following correspondences do not, of course, fully explore the breadth of Zend’s Canadian aesthetic affinities, and I’m no doubt omitting some important ones. Perhaps someone will take this topic as an opportunity to write a more developed analysis.

Marshall McLuhan, Lionel Kearns,
and Norman T. White’s Hearsay Project

          Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media theorist who wrote about the effects of media and electronic communications on society, was a frequent guest speaker at the CBC, where Zend worked as a producer. Zend was obviously fascinated by his ideas; some of his works were written under the sign of McLuhan, such as the following short one in a series entitled “Tissues:”

QUOTATION MARKS 7

The time will come
when there will be no time
only electronic circuits
and I will remember
what the dead have forgotten
what the unborn have planned1

In a futuristic world in which brains are replaced by electronic circuits, time, memory, and desire will have collapsed into a static omniscience in which every thought — past, present, and future — is always already immortalized. In such a world, total knowledge paradoxically becomes oblivion, a vacuous nothing (in human terms), since it is no longer parsed by the meaning-producing processes of remembering, forgetting, and planning. Birth, growth, change, and death would be equally meaningless. In a few linguistic strokes, Zend captures the essence of the age of electronic information, and we don’t have to exchange brain cells for circuitry to experience the effects of a culture increasingly reliant on electronic information storage.
          A closely related work is “The Message,” which Zend dedicates to McLuhan:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

          The messenger arrived out of breath. The dancers stopped their pirouettes, the torches lighting the palace walls flickered for a moment, the hubbub at the banquet table died down, a roasted pig’s knuckle froze in mid-air in a nobleman’s fingers, a general behind the pillar stopped fingering the bosom of the maid of honour.
          “Well, what is it, man?” asked the King, rising regally from his chair. “Where did you come from? Who sent you? What is the news?” Then, after a moment, “Are you waiting for a reply? Speak up, man!”
          Still short of breath, the messenger pulled himself together. He looked the King in the eye and gasped: “Your Majesty, I am not waiting for a reply because there is no message because no one sent me. I just like running.”2

“The Message” is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “An Imperial Message,” in which the dying emperor’s words, whispered to a messenger, never reaches its intended receiver, who nonetheless daydreams about the message’s content.3
          Zend’s parable tells the reverse tale of a messenger approaching the king, whose expectations are thwarted by the runner’s denial of the role of messenger and thus the very existence of a message. The messenger-who-is-not-a-messenger is himself the message—which is simply the fact of his enjoyment of running. The king, like a good consumer of messages, has failed to comprehend the significance of the medium of that message.
          In 1985, electronic media experimenter Norman T. White honored Zend several months after his death by using “The Message” for The Hearsay Project (fig. 1), a conceptual electronic art happening that took place in a span of twenty-four hours from November 11 to 12.

HEARSAY PROJECT

The story, minus the title, dedication, and author, was sent in succession to various countries around the world, in which each translator passed their rendition on to the next translator, in the manner of the children’s game of telephone, also known as hearsay. White reports that Zend’s “widow, Janine, was on hand to hit the ‘return’ key which sent the message on its way around the world,” from Toronto to Des Moines, Sydney, Tokyo, Vienna, Newport, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and back to Toronto. En route, “The Message” was translated into Spanish, Japanese, German, Welsh, Hungarian, and finally back into English. Not only was the text of the story transformed by the successive translations, but also the process “preserve[d] . . . the text distortions generated by typographical errors and by telephone-line ‘noise.’”4
          The following is a comparison of the messenger’s last words in Zend’s story and the end result of The Hearsay Project:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

Your Majesty, I am not waiting for a reply because there is no message because no one sent me. I just like running.

QUOTATION MARKS 7

YOUR MAJESTY, THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ANSWER. AFTER ALL, NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. NO ONE SENT ME. I RISE ABOVE EVERYTHING.

If the media of language and electronic transmission are the message, then the vaguaries and fallibility of those media are rendered transparent in this conceptual game. And the final words, “I RISE ABOVE EVERYTHING,” seem oddly apropos and fortuitous, for to rise above all is perhaps also to become less visible as a medium to consumers of messages.
          Such theoretical concerns were emerging themes among TISH poets such as Lionel Kearns, who shares Zend’s fascination with the ideas of McLuhan: Kearns’ book of poetry By the Light of the Silvery McLune: Media Parables, Poems, Signs, Gestures, and Other Assaults on the Interface (1969) explores the ironies and paradoxes arising from mass media fallout on society.5 A prime example of Kearns’ preoccupation with media is “A Collage Education,” which “exposes television’s ironic juxtaposition of African-American poverty and pharmaceutical painkillers. . . . Kearns’ engagement with media culture also infuses poems of postcolonial irony, as in ‘Bleeding,’ in which Mexican Day of the Dead ceremonies are marred by arrogantly voyeuristic tourists and the intrusion of travelogue filmmakers.”7
          In other poems, such as “Medium,” Kearns more directly pays tribute to McLuhan:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

Once I’d be filling up poems
with outrageous images
                    and impossible ideas
just to keep track of them
and let you know I’m here

Now I give you only
silence and blank paper
but this too
                    is a kind of message7

KEARNS BIRTH OF GOD 130 W          One of the most striking (and most widely anthologized) works from By the Light of the Silvery McLune is the concrete poem “The Birth of God” (fig. 2), which Kearns calls “a mathematical mandela embodying the perfect creative/destructive principle of the mutual interpenetration and balanced interdependence of opposites.” In its creation of an image of the binary from characters that denote the binary system, it might well also be an homage to McLuhan.
          An interesting counterpart to Kearns’ depiction of binaries is Zend’s Espanto (fig. 3), which creates the yin and yang symbol in Daoism using the Spanish words “no” and “si.” While I would not say that this work was directly influenced by McLuhan, it’s possible that the spirit of Kearns’ “Birth of God” was in the back of his mind when he created Espanto, which was, by the way, Zend’s first venturing into the kind of typewriter art exemplified in his collection Arbormundi.

YIN YANG 350

          Kearns, White, and Zend responded creatively to McLuhan’s theories of media communications. And in this section I have confined myself to poems that effectively transpose McLuhan’s theories into descriptive, allegorical, or concrete-poetic form. But McLuhan famously upheld modernist and avant-garde poetry as an exemplary manifestation of changes in the nature of communication through their juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, disruption of syntax, and disjunctive narrative, as he relates in a 1969 interview:

QUOTATION MARKS 7

I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of processes of cognition and creation.7

          It’s beyond the scope of my present project even to begin to document such vast and complex territory, which is being explored by such communications scholars as Darren Wershler and Richard Cavell. So I will close by simply pointing out that in a similar way that bpNichol, Zend, and many other poets of their time were drawing attention to the medium and materiality of language through disjunctiveness and fragmentation, poets and New Media artists such as Kearns, White, and Zend were exploring ways to make visible the media and effects of mass communication, which despite (or because of) its pervasiveness tend to fade into background noise.

Next Installment: Part 7.
Canadian Literary Cross-Pollination:
bpNichol, The Four Horsemen,
and Jiri Ladocha

Camille Martin

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Robert Zend – Part 1. Linelife: Premiere of a Rediscovered Treasure

Posted on January 26, 2014 | 3 comments

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Part 1. Linelife:
Premiere of a Rediscovered Treasure

          I begin my series on the life and work of Robert Zend with the presentation of a previously unpublished short visual work entitled Linelife (1983), a flip-book animation sequence of dots and lines (fig. 1) that Zend dedicated to his daughter Natalie. I was excited to find Linelife in the Zend fonds at the University of Toronto.
          Fortunately, Zend left instructions for its production. Although he had drawn the images in black ink on white paper, he preferred that the colors be reversed to white-on-black. So I digitalized the images and, according to his wishes, converted them into negatives. I thought that the digital medium would enhance the animated sequence of frames, so using film editing software I gave them a time-lapse animation to imitate the effect of flipping pages. Natalie made some excellent suggestions for the most effective presentation of the work. I hope that her father would have liked Linelife in this digital incarnation.

Fig. 1. Robert Zend, LineLife, ink drawing on paper, 1983, Box 10, Robert Zend fonds, Media Commons, University of Toronto Libraries. Adapted for digital medium by Camille Martin. Copyright © Janine Zend, 1983, all rights reserved, reproduced with permission from Janine Zend.

LINELIFE LONGER TITLE PAGE          Although the narrative of Linelife unfolds in a geometrically abstract sequence of creation and disintegration, it also suggests an anthropomorphic trajectory of a life. And in fact, there exists a longer unpublished work entitled The Tense Present (fig. 2), which consists of the sequence of images in Linelife and interpellates text and other images to explore the arc of human life from conception to death.
          In the Linelife sequence above, which does not include that programmatic narrative, the gradual creation of a complex pattern of lines and dots could also suggest human creativity at work, and the deflation and ultimate disappearance of that triumphant pattern implies that in the cosmic order of things, art as well as life is short. Yet its very abstraction points to a more universal signification: the drama of development and decline, on microcosmic as well as macrocosmic scales. As well, the mirroring of the opening and closing suggests a cyclical pattern as things arise and fall apart in a continual succession of order and entropy.
          I thought it appropriate to begin with this little gem because, although I know of no other flip-book in Zend’s oeuvre, its theme emblematizes his recurring concern with cycles of creation and destruction.

LINELIFE DIVISION
          The next installment, “Dissolving Labels and Boundaries,” will explore Zend’s thoughts regarding the potentially catastrophic results of labelling people, his relationship to nationality, and aspects of his cosmopolitanism.

If you’d like to receive notification of these installments on Robert Zend, please use the email subscription feature to the upper right. And please kindly spread the word to anyone who might be interested. Your comments and feedback are most welcome.

Next Installment: Part 2.
Dissolving Labels and Boundaries

Camille Martin

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And/Or: Word – Image – Provocation

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 5 comments

After all these years, my heart still skips a beat when I get a poetry magazine in the mail, and I’m usually ripping into the envelope and flipping through the pages even before I’ve walked back down the hall to my apartment.
         A few days ago I received my contributor’s copy of And/Or, Volume 2 of the perfect-bound indie journal dedicated to experimental writing and graphic art. I have to admire a magazine that embraces the word “experimental” in its description—I’ve never had a problem with that word, not least because it shares a Latin root with “peril.” And what’s not to love about perilous poetry?
         I hope there will be many more issues of And/Or—it’s beautifully produced and edited and it has a focused mission. Its 144 pages feature poetry, prose, and visual art, plus work in the aptly-named category “and/or”: hybrids that don’t neatly fit the usual slots. Contributors come from places as diverse as Sugar Tit, South Carolina (yes, the author may be punking us, but such a hamlet actually exists), and a more believable “old house in Kolkata, India.”
         I read magazines for some of the same reasons I read anthologies—I’m likely to encounter the work of people I know and admire, but there’s also the excitement of discovering voices previously unknown to me. My copy of And/Or is already marked up with checks next to the names of writers whose books I’d like to follow up with in the future. And—not incidentally—creating a palimpsest of the page with your own pencil is one of the joys of print journals.
         A poetic salute (however you want to envision that) to Editor-in-Chief Damian Ward Hey, Managing Editor Mike Russo, and the other editors. The admirably indecisive And/Or can be ordered here.
         Below are a couple of samples that snagged my attention. I deliberately chose younger writers whose work I’d never read. First, an excerpt from Kelley Irmen’s short prose sequence, “This Is Not Voyeurism.” The whole sequence is worth the price of admission.
         Second, a work by Joshua Ware classified in that undefinable “and/or” rubric. A short poem is followed by absurdly pedantic exegesis and nested footnotes. It’s tongue-in-cheek tone and process reminds me a little of Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, or Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in miniature.
         Lastly, a painting by the inimitable Bunny Mazhari, who was kind enough to send me a jpeg of the work to share on Rogue Embryo.
          Oodles more great stuff have found a home in this issue, including poetry by Dawn Pendergast, Christophe Casamassima, and Donna Kuhn; and art by Danielle Tunstall. And much more.

Kelley Irmen, from “This Is Not Voyeurism”

          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


Camille Martin

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Poemicstrips

Posted on September 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

I just posted a comic strip collage, “Full Size Patterns,” at Piotr Szreniawski’s Poemicstrip blog – contributions also by Gary Barwin, Sven Staelens, Rappel, and others. I think Piotr is looking for other contributors, so check it out!

About Full Size Patterns:
I alternated frames of “cowboy and Indian” and sci-fi comic strips from 1950s British Boy Scout magazines, narratives that play out the idea of the “other” in society. In one narrative, the cowboys kill the Indian “others,” a failure of their civilization to recognize the humanity of the native people. In the other narrative, the earthmen’s rocket fails and crashes, but instead of the alien “others” killing the earthmen, they help them.

 

 

Camille Martin

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Rae Armantrout’s Waves of Punchlines

Posted on July 8, 2009 | 1 comment

Versed

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to open a package, in which I was half expecting to find another pedestrian textbook on essay-writing for my students, but which instead contained Rae Armantrout’s new collection of poems, Versed. The cover is gorgeous—a piece of digital art by Peter Ciccariello, whose recent collection of art, Uncommon Vision, I’ve been poring over with pleasure. Ghostly female manikin parts hover before and seem to merge into a rugged landscape. Opening the book at random, I find this gem:

Wires dip obligingly
between poles,
slightly askew

Any statement I issue,
if particular enough,

will prove
I was here.

There is something here that reminds me of Anselm Hollo, that quality of self-awareness, reflexivity, immediacy, the poem enacting its own claim, the poet conjuring her own DNA sequence in the particularity of the translation of perception into language. I remember years ago hearing Rae read in New York. I had only read her poetry on the page and didn’t really connect with it. But hearing her read was a revelation. The only way that I can describe it is that it sounded like waves of punchlines washing ashore, splashing over me. I felt exhilarated to connect with her work so suddenly and viscerally.

Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

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