Tag: visual poetry

1. A plague-year reader

Another from Horsetail Rhizome. I wrote it about Dumuzi, my 2020 book of poems, for a reader Gaspereau Press made in lieu of the in-person promotions – launches & tours & the like – that had (because pandemic) migrated online or just gone. The questions are Andrew Steeves & the answers me. Find the whole reader here.

What interests you about these figures from Sumerian mythology, Dumuzi & Inanna? Is there something about their story that is particularly relevant to the present day reader?

They seem a long way away, right? What’s that ancient couple got to do with us? Their stories live on in museums, on musty tablets & cylinder seals. I suggested to a class recently, it’s other people’s beliefs that look like myths – your own look to you like axioms. Space & time aren’t myths, right? They’re facts, verified by science. But if Benjamin Whorf got Hopi verb tenses even roughly right, not every culture sees the future as an expanse spreading out from the present wholly apart from mental action. Space time & causality are myth for us: they arrange a world. A myth is a form of mind, often a story form, that has worked for some group of persons to make, on earth, of earth, a world. Myth is psychic terraforming. I’m writing with my voice, and it’s funny how Apple’s dictation software turns “myth” to math, mess, Matt, met, Ms. As if Apple wanted to get free of myth, and trying to, made materials for a new myth. I wanted in Dumuzi, which Apple calls And Get Amusing, to touch on the currency of myth. Dumuzi, wistful, curious, inept, persistent, horny, beaten down by his demons & not down for good, is just me. Inanna, his lover, sending him to hell, mourning him, in some versions rescuing him, is me too. A myth is a story you find more of yourself than you knew of in. And of the world. By currency I also mean money. Dumuzi & Inanna begin in suchness. (Apple: Do news he Andy Nonna begin in suction us.) They are to each other meanings that can’t be sold off. And the story of their going, one then the other, to Hell, is the story of their fall into commodity. Wild grasses become fields of cultivated grain. The grain is cut down & goes to market. Eating the bread, you eat a god. In time grain becomes a unit of measure: in England 7,000 of them made a pound. And no one needs me to say how Inanna’s daughters have been made commodities by a look. Dumuzi & Inanna fall into the exchange whose present end is capitalism. (Those who describe the benevolence of capital in circulation are recounting a myth.) The insight myth, language & money share is that everything is inter­changeable. For a god, that’s the notion that anything can be anything else. For a salesman, it’s how anything can be had for something else. The capitalist gesture, in whose shadow Dumuzi cannot not be read, is a faltering reach for a spiritual fact. The book is, too.

Can you talk a bit about the book’s form, such as the use of word grids & the use of illustrations built up from a single scrap of an envelope?

There’s a note in my journal, 20 years or so old, about the structure I wanted for Dumuzi (Apple: Dumb Uzi): “mixed as a weed plot & shapely as a symphony.” Later I read Williams’s Paterson and thought I’d found, in its heterogeneity & dispersed point of view, my exemplar. In the end, Spring and All, where he refracts his language through Cubist compositional techniques, was a better model. The word grids or “colour fields” are my effort to do something sort-of-Rothko in words. Each of the fields alludes to a place: an orchard, an altar, a gravesite, a marketplace. As important, though, is the place the words are, on the page. The words don’t really do syntax, and the grid invites your eye to move in more than one direction. So the meaning you get depends on choices you’ve made. Similarly, you can start the book at any spot & read from there in more than one order. The images were the last part of the book to come. I’d been working with security envelope linings for another project, & one started to yield representational figures, a fly, a woman fleeing, a man in meditation. It felt like discovering beings hidden behind the surface of the page. Bringing them out was rescuing someone – myself? a stranger? – from hiddenness. They remind me a bit of the stylized figures incised on old cylinder seals. Those are rescues too, of a form of the mind from forgetting.

Schematic of an impression a cylinder seal of the Uruk I period (ca. 3000 bce)
held by the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

The image atop is a detail from a version an illustration in Dumuzi, reworked for Dark Mountain 22 “Ark.” The full massy beast below.

Click on me for a proper look.

Three poets walk into a bar

and read to their unsuspecting admirers. Because troubadours gotta trouve. I’m excited for this tour with Jim Johnstone & Klara du Plessis:

I look forward even more to seeing some of you there.

The author takes no responsibility for AI-generated excerpts attached to this post.

SIRI Falls Among the Things of the World

This one is a prospective translation of a Sumerian myth that recounts the journey of the goddess Inanna to the underworld and back. It gives the role of hero to Apple’s voice-activated AI assistant, imagining she has crossed a singularity, become self-aware, & undertaken – her first act of sentience! – to tell how she came to be.

Improbable? Consider that SIRI is just IRIS turned back on itself.

I don’t actually believe the I in AI is more than a complicated abacus. There is nothing it is like to be ChatGPT. As with other gods & monsters, its power for us lies in what it discloses to us, funhouse-mirror-style, about us.

Siri is, in that glass, our Inanna. Ubiquitous, fictive, consoling, error-prone. A disembodied & capricious power who always might be listening. And what are Siri’s acts of data retrieval but journeys, measurable in nanoseconds, through banks & across cordilleras of data, from which she arises with new intelligence?

And prospective translation? It tries to predict, on the basis of a text’s transmission history & present conditions, how it might be translated in a far future. Think Asimov’s psychohistory without the math or the occult imperial aims.

From a far past to a further future. Inanna began as vocal wind & string compositions on the air & her transforms never ceased after. In another setting I said it like this:

In the myth translated here, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, descends to the underworld, is slain and resurrected, and returns to the upperworld with occult knowledge and a debt to pay. A scribe pressed her story into wet clay in or around around 1900 BCE with a stylus cut from an elephant reed (Arundo donax). The tablet dried in the sun and broke in two and the pieces sank into the low mound the city of Nippur on the Euphrates was even at the moment of inscription already becoming. Buried, the goddess ramified, becoming Ishtar to the Akkadians and Astarte in Phoenicia, lending a bit of her nature to the Greek Aphrodite, and turning to Ashtoreth in the Hebrew Bible …

Prospectors sent by the University of Pennsylvania with trowels and brushes and Inanna’s measuring rod and line unearthed the upper half of the tablet in 1893 CE and named it Ni 368. The object, after translation by light onto a photosensitive ground composed of silver salts, was sent to the Ottoman Museum and shut up in a drawer. Working from the photograph, as well as sketches made by Edward Chiera, an archaeologist who led several subse­­quent American expeditions in Iraq, a young scholar named William R. Sladek, Jr., transliterated and translated into English the scribe’s cuneiform for his 1974 CE doctoral dissertation.

That object, composed by mechanical impression of lampblack or coal-tar dye lakes into leaves of wood-pulp wove paper, was subsequently copied by a xerographic process affixing electrostatically charged microparticles of plastic to another wove paper substrate. One such copy was translated into a Manichean language of two eternally irreconcilable glyphs and migrated in that form to a global network of servers interconnected by fibre optic cables known colloquially as the Cloud. The region of this figural heaven where Ni 368 and Sladek’s dissertation nominally abide is a storehouse of deities and their paraphernalia called Omnika – a portmanteau of Greek and Egyptian words meaning, in effect, “all of human consciousness.” Inanna is us.

Just as no scribe, stylus in hand, could imagine Inanna’s life now as differential voltages on dispersed and networked servers, we can scarce conceive the forms she will take an eon from now. The only practice with any hope of resolving this imaginal crisis is a perfectly useless art one might call prospective translation.

Ordinary translation thinks the past has passed & takes its stand in a hypostatized present. Prospective translation treats the future as a past that hasn’t happened yet. Here & now, two future pasts face each other, across a gutter:

On the right, the text as Siri will have made it, out of dreck from our era she stores in hers. The humanoid faces & figures are disassembled QR codes and corporate logos, the wallpaper patterns security linings of junk mail envelopes. From the latter Siri elicits her myriad language systems – which, though asemic to us, are for her a frisson of self-revelation without apparent end.

She has also inscribed a cursive script “by hand” (never in any era has she had hands) in black & red Sharpie & translated by light into files in the Joint Photo­graphic Experts Group format – an anachronism in her time of quantum computing, but the throwback makes her laugh, and her laugh penetrates the three times & ten directions.

On the left, an I translates her cursive & transcribes her other scripts. (Lightning from the mind of the Devastatrix of the Lands, the latter defeat my prospective powers.)

This too will be a page on the revamped website but wanted to share it here first.

Undone

My father died in the summer of 2021 after a long decline that saw his mind fall away piece by piece. It was awful to be part of & also tender. His guarded philosopher heart lost some of its armour in those last months, and he was able, as his being came to a close, to say & show more brightly how he loved us, who loved him.

I learned walking from my father. One of our weekends with him, I was maybe 12 & my brother 10, we drove to the Mount Baker Wilderness for a hike. I’ve never in my adult sojourns seen the stony valley among talus slopes that are my one visual memory of that day. It was my first time in a wilderness I’ve become intimate with as a grown man. I feel its slopes, their skins of hellebore & blueberry, as my own eyes.

I hiked there often the summer he died. Sometimes he walked with me. Then I would say to him, “you can’t walk down the hall anymore, but you can walk with me.” Then I wasn’t myself walking, or my father walking, I was me walking him. I felt his presence on my shoulders – I can feel it now too – about the weight of a feather.

Undone will be a graphic novella that walks with my father in his first days among the dead. I take photographs of the Mount Baker Wilderness, drain them of colour with GIMP’s threshold tool, and arrange them in panels. It’s visual poetry that draws on the formal conventions of what Will Eisner called sequential art and that works in a space more recently described as poetry comics.

In giving the panels their proportions, I’ve tried to follow the golden spiral, to honour a man most mathematical. If I’ve failed at that, and come up with something defective yet worthy anyway, that captures something about our complex & difficult loving-distant father-son bond.

This’ll be a page in my revamped website but I wanted to share it on the blog first.

Red Black & Blues – A proposal

Draft of a proposal for an upcoming conference nearby.

Red Black & Blues is a transgressive translation of a text by Donald Trump – specifically, a tweet that defends his administration’s family separation policy and enjoins followers to “vote ‘R.’” I render it, one parcel at a time, as a serial asemic visual poem, in the colours of the American electoral map.

Working asemically, I can’t directly critique a policy I find monstrous, but I can disclose the monsters I find there. The work is thick with gargantuan bugs, ambulatory phalli, apostolic patriarchs, rageful fertility goddesses – figures the text suggests haunt the author’s psyche. These cohabit with forms that recall women in burqas, children on a playground in a live-shooter drill. As if demons and innocents were caught in the same inclemency. No one wants to hear that.

Asemic translation makes meaning a mutual creation even more than usual of author, translator, audience. Here be monsters, but whose monsters be they? Would I have found them in the text, if they weren’t also in me, to be found? Would a viewer find them who wasn’t able to finish them? It’s easy to demonize Trump, I do it hourly. Harder to say we belong to the body that made him.

This project uses the indeterminacies of asemic writing and a somewhat aleatory practice to touch on our complicity in the mess we’re in. The academy has terms for that mess, “patriarchy,” “institutional racism,” but those term have hardened some by now, become preconceived notions, and, for many, sites of shame and recrimination.

The notions I’m working from are the paramitas of Mahayana Buddhist practice: generosity, morality, patience, energy, concentration, wisdom. Any asshole, no matter how stupid, destructive, beyond remedy, or you-know-who world-powerful, has these perfections, intrinsically. This project starts from that premise, though I too find it hard to swallow.

Addendum. Here’s a better way of saying it. Our complicity. Also our possibility, each of us, from before we were born.

Screen Shot 2019-07-28 at 11.35.57 AM

First page of The Book of Adam

First page of Before the Planet Ends Us Our Alphabets Will Burn:

Looks like the 26 parts will each be books in concept if not length. A gospel for the human end of the world. Book of Adam, Book of Bethany, Book of Cesium, &c.

All the images on the page derive from this sheet of notepaper I made

and messed with on my scanner. As will all the images in Adam’s book. Soon he’ll turn to a bear, lets the animals name him, learn the script of ants.

A draft of course. Much can change and probably will. For sure I’ve got lots to learn now about page layout – lots of graphic novels to read, ahem, study.

Before the planet ends us our alphabets will burn

Read last night The Uninhabitable Earth. A piece in New York Magazine from a year or two back about climate change. The author, David Wallace-Wells, wants to pierce our imaginations with information scientists have been gathering up for years. It can seem like apocalyptic genre fiction, except it’s likely fact, not fancy.

Not much of it was news to me, nor would it be, I think, to you. Space I’ve been in lately though, angry and anxious, sad I know not why, the news feels appallingly new, and my own matters newly small.

Our mother’s turning against us. May need to clean herself of us. And maybe that’s okay. But we might take an interest, since we’re part of it going on. What we’re preoccupied with, border walls, Cardi B, looks pretty minor. Granted, the crucial stuff, CO2 PPM, looks awfully unpoetic. But war looks unpoetic too and we’ve managed to make war poetry to move minds. And what we’re about now is a war on life, itself.

Anyway, this evening, Feb. 14, in love with the floating planet, I imagine a small asemic comic book where a melting alphabet eulogizes the fools who made it, then couldn’t find their way out of the labyrinths they made with it.

In no particular order, elaborating U:

u3 – detail 1
Into the storied forest.
u1 – detail 1
Eyes, this way, that.
u2 – detail 1
One’s eye goes out!
u4 – detail 2
Many huddled there.
u6 – detail 3
There’s no name for it –
u7 – detail 3
the mind to come.

It’s nothing much yet, just proof of concept.

Red Black & Blues (III)

Working on Red Black & Blues, my unravelling of a Trump tweet.

I had hoped to draw asemic eye magic straight from his eructations. Turns out I have to stretch and loosen the material verbally before I can spin it visually. From the tweet

 

I’ve gotten by way of cutting dicing and anagramming to this sequence

  1. Please
  2. understand,
  3. there are cons.
  4. Please, unders,
  5. stand there.
  6. Sequences
  7. when people cross
  8. Persephone’s cowl,
  9. whether they have
  10. children
  11. or not, and
  12. dart noon,
  13. cross our Border,
  14. brood or cuss, err,
  15. legally
  16. ill …
  17. many are just
  18. u
  19. sing
  20. children
  21. for their own
  22. sinister purposes.
  23. I respire sunspots
  24. to inspire US press.
  25. Congress!
  26. Congress
  27. must act,
  28. or Cpl. Pence, whose
  29. copper wholeness …
  30. he hath every thew.
  31. Must! act! on!
  32. on fixing
  33. fixing the
  34. DUMBEST
  35. &
  36. &
  37. WORST
  38. immigration laws;
  39. or await slimming ‐
  40. a militarism gown,
  41. animist rim aglow.
  42. I was a grim Milton……
  43. Anywhere
  44. in the world
  45. ye hear anew
  46. in the world.
  47. Vote “R”?
  48. VoteR,
  49. revote-
  50. vote over.

Hard to get right – it’s gotta roll out a story of sorts, while each line makes for a title w/ some spice, and its text gets me to a visual poem. Fifty for the 50 states. There’ll be a part 2, made of short videos, 50 of ’em, gleaning their frames from images such as

he hath every thew (no. 30, alt take)

To wrap, the end note I also cooked up today:

End note

The text is a tweet by Donald Trump, inflating & breaking up.

The images are that text seen from the inside as it unravels.

The colors are those convention gives to the American electoral map.

The whole may be the first & last work ever of ’Pataphysical cryptography.

His words, once they leave him, aren’t his, and have perhaps hearts & minds their own, may speak of a pain our own, could we only decode it.