Dear All,
Here are the readings for Weds. It appears as a long list, but don’t forget, these are concrete and visual poems, along with two beautiful altered books. What are concrete and visual poems? “Vispo,” as the movement is now called (kinda gross), comes out of Dada and Fluxus. Again, here, the ideas set forth have sociopolitical, as well as performative, implications. From early Dada works, especially among the group of artists within the broader early French movement that called themselves “Lettrists,” there was the notion that a) normative modes of speaking, writing, and living, were habituated and harmful. Many Lettrists, with neo-Marxist backgrounds, felt that the elemental structures of poetry and writing in general, needed to be deconstructed, and viewed as codes made up of material sensuous objects that can be invented anew, thus inventing a new way of thinking about self, other, community, etc. More on this in lecture. But that is the background for what has turned into a broader movement of writers and artists looking to move away from the sentence as unit of meaning, and move towards the physical structures that make up languages, moving ever further from the normative “page” and normative notion of “the book” and “the poem.” Think reinvention, interrogation, and new media as you look at these.
Regarding the altered book, just look for now at these 2 below, and if you feel like hearing about where my lecture will go, think about the photo of the Talmud I showed during the opening lecture, and feel free to visit the optional “discussion” blog covering my two programs, here: http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/ (scroll down till you get to my entry on Gardner’s “Altered Book”).
Ultimately, what do visual poems and the altered book have in common? How do they relate to “movement” on and off the page? In what sense are they “performances” of text?
See you Weds.
Very Best,
David
bpNichol
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf03.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf10.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf08.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/4hm-int.htm – OPTIONAL, the first writings regarding bpNichol’s and Steve McCaffrey’s sound – performance – poetry troupe, which we will get to when we get to sound poetry and performance & collaboration (weeks 4 and 5)
Betty Danon
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/danon/bd-staf1.htm – Concrete poem: keep clicking “next” until you get to artist’s statement, read that.
Bruce Andrews
http://www.vispo.com/A/aa.html – visual poem (feel free, once you’ve done the readings, to look around this site – some interesting things, some not so much)
Wheelhouse Installations
http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/spring_summer08/give_it_up.html – Concrete Poem, Jesse Patrick Ferguson
http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/winter08/portal_1.html – Concrete Poem, Andrew Topel
The Altered Book
http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)