Sometime early this year, Scott Helmes, the visual poet and architect from St Paul, Minnesota, asked twenty fellow visual poets to submit a single visual poem that would be suitable for publication at 3½ inches by 3½ inches for a feature on visual poetry in a free Twin Cities tabloid. Ten of the invitees (apparently) responded, which allowed for a five-page spread in the Spring 2006 issue of Whistling Shade.
I like this idea. Scott has used his connections to afford the people of Minnesota a little exposure to visual poetry. And his chosen venue is both appropriate and unexpected. Unexpected, because Whistling Shade is simply a quite traditional literary tabloid. The poems therein are accessible to the non-reader of poetry. The short stories are colloquial pieces, often first-person narratives—a bit breezy, with few pretensions besides the Joycean (and, okay, French) dashes that identify quoted speech in one of the stories. The expected audience of this tabloid is a reader mildly interested in literature, but not at all interested in the avant-garde. It is exactly this disconnect between the style of the visual poetry presented and the rest of the contents of the issue that makes this tabloid a good choice for this gallery of vispo.
Michael Basinski, “July, 1929” (2006)The cover that greets the reader sitting down at 2nd Moon Café in Minneapolis or buying a book at Midway Books in St Paul (a favorite bookstore of mine) or even checking out a book in the Ames Library in Ames, Iowa, includes a slightly muddy, but still vibrating, reproduction of Michael Basinski’s “July, 1929.” This visual poem is classic Basinski, created out of bold glyphic strokes, a couple of collaged bits, and lapidary swirls of Basinskian text (twisted, pulled, and misspelled) filling in all available space on the page. The grey reproduction on the cover of
Whistling Shade 5:1 (Spring 2006) is too small for me to make out the text, which is too bad, because Basinski’s visual poems depend on their readable texts for their effects, even if those texts are nonsense syllables. What I think most when I see this, however, is how sedate this grey flannel version of “July, 1929” is compared to
the psychedelic, full-color original. I wonder how that version would go over with the readership of this tabloid.
The “exhibition” of visual poetry within the pages of
Whistling Shade is enhanced by an introduction by Scott Helmes that is both elucidating and accessible to the neophyte. His opening paragraph even urges the reader into the fray, explaining that the Web is making visual poetry more accessible and, therefore, more popular. I think this point is perfectly true, but what I like most about it is its deviousness—even if unintentional. What makes people like certain pop songs is their mere popularity. People are governed most often by forces external to their own consciousness. So explaining the growing popularity of this form of art is a subtle hook that pulls the audience in.
Scott goes on to explain that visual poetry is “both art and literature,” and he asks the audience to take that bipolar reality of these works of art into account. He asks them to open their minds to possibilities of meaning that they cannot necessarily understand purely through the textual elements of the pieces.
I like the pieces in this issue. There is a wide variety of work, from Karl Kempton’s massively controlled koanical piece (in the style of the contemporary Kemptonian typoglif), to the inscrutable scripts of mIEKAL aND’s “Sunrise is Sunset,” to a fairly atypical handwritten piece by Sheila Murphy, to a stylish (as always) asemic and calligraphic poem by Kathy Ernst (“Weaving in Tongues”). I might have chosen a couple of different exemplars from a couple of the featured artists’ repertoires if I’d had the choice, but this wasn’t the point of the exercise. This gallery contains only self-chosen pieces.
Whistling Shade, Vol 5, no 1, p 20 (Spring 2006)My favorite page is the twentieth (which, unfortunately, includes a piece by me), because it has three pieces in completely different styles: the overtypings of Jim Leftwich (which will confound the uninitiated), my spare punctuation poem (which is all about the printer’s fist), and Michael Peters (as always) weird and wonderful “muted p_robe” (which will cause a bit of head-scratching, but which will also pull people in with its visual beauty). What Peters has over most visual poets is that he is a trained visual artist (and a recorded musician, a singer, and a scholar—a man of enough talents to be a great visual poet).
In the end, I can do nothing but praise this little gallery and the yeoman’s work it is doing for the cause of visual poetry. My only real concern is that the gallery itself is one of only three features from this issue of
Whistling Shade that is not available on
its website. But you could maybe order a year’s subscription to this quarterly by sending $7 to Whistling Shade, Attn: Subscriptions, PO Box 7084, Saint Paul, MN 55107 USA, and asking them to start with volume 5, number 1. That way, you would have the opportunity to see the enigmatic visual poem by Scott Helmes that ends the exhibition, and which takes curving strips of collaged text (traditional meaning excised) and combines them with a few swoops of ink or paint to give us a tiny space for careful observation.
ecr. l’inf.
