Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
MaOAS '09 flickr Set
Visit the MaOAS '09 flickr Set to see works from the show. I will be adding images of only a fraction of the works shown. The image to the left is by Carl Baker, '09.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Bob Grumman's Review of Zen Concrete & etc. by d.a. levy
from Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera Blog:
22 October 2009: The following essay on d. a. levy (from #574) is either a review I wrote for the May 1992 issue of Small Press Review (my copy of which I seem to have lost) or an expansion of it I later did. Whichever, I think I did a pretty good job on it, although no levy scholar has paid any attention whatever to it:
d.a. levy, Pioneer in Visio-Textual Art
Zen Concrete & Etc.
by d.a. levy, edited by Ingrid Swanberg. 245 pp; 1991; Pa;
ghost pony press, 2518 Gregory St., Madison WI 53711. $29.50 ppd.
The initial charm of this nicely-produced, richly-illustrated large book is the immediacy with which it brings the sixties to life, at least for anyone who spent his twenties there, as I did. Just about everything of the era is in it: the sometimes jejune but always impassioned and compassionate politics; the sometimes jejune but always free-ranging and committed devotion to art; the struggles over obscenity, complete with busts; marijuana and various psychedelic drugs; the paraphernalia both physical and mental of exotic Oriental religions; and the wonderful, if sometimes frazzling, sense of everything's coming to fruition at once.
Almost always an implicit or louder part of the textual poems that make up about half the book are the politics of the time, as in his "Suburban Monastery Death Poem," for example, where he writes, "Really/ the police try to protect/ the banks - and everything else/ is secondary," or in his four "visualized prayers to the American God," which are comprised mainly of dollar signs.
The devotion to art is burstingly there in the sheer amount of poems and collages in the book, particularly considering that they are a mere selection from the ouevre of a man who died at 26.
As for the obscenity wars, they explode in the excellent over-view from the early seventies of levy's life provided by Douglas Blazek. Twice, according to Blazek, levy was arrested for distributing obscene poems. AND THIS COURT HAS A RIGHT TO PROTECT KIDS FROM THIS KIND OF FILTH FOR THE SAKE OF FILTH AND NOTHING ELSE as one of the judges involved thoughtfully put it. Levy was clearly a victim of persecution, for one of his arrests was for publishing a poem by a minor that contained the word, "fuck," in it. Although levy was never convicted of the charges against him, the persecution took its toll on him and certainly contributed to his eventually killing himself.
Drugs are only peripherally in levy's poems and collages, but get more attention from levy's friend, the poet D. R. Wagner, whom the book's editor, Ingrid Swansen, interviews, and in the personal reminiscences of levy by Kent Taylor, as well as in a wonderfully black-humored fragment from a radio talk show featuring levy and a few of his friends which ends with a woman caller's saying, "I think the boys are absolutely right! I think it's great! Why don't we all just bug out, and we'll see who provides the groceries, and makes the shoes..." with Levy interrupting by asking who needs shoes and the host's observing that levy is wearing a pair.
Buddhism permeates levy's poetry and collages, though in tension with his propensity for agitation and despair. As for the sense of going-somewhere that the sixties symbolized for so many, it is there not only in levy's poems and collages, but in the descriptions of his publishing (via offset and then mimeo), his organizing of and contributions to poetry readings, his leaving free copies of books he'd published at public libraries, and selling them on the street, and all his interactions with people like Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg.
By now it should be apparent that a signal virtue of this book is its bringing levy himself, through his friends' reminiscenses of him, to life. Literary Biography and Social Document-- as just these two things alone, Zen Concrete is well worth buying. But its greatest value is as a collection of levy's art.
That begins with Zen Concrete, 1967, which consists of a sequence of what levy called "experiments in destructive writing." Its first page contains something that apparently was a poem, but all its letters have been blacked out. Trivial? Perhaps. But considered as a kind of drawing of literary process, it begins to say more than On one level it says not of silence but of silenced writing--and this no doubt refers, in part, to the attempt of the police in Cleveland to silence levy as a poet by twice arresting him for purveying obscenity. But it also speaks of the poet's disappointment with his medium. Also, the canceled words look like they're seeping larger, flowing toward the paper's edge, or even misting upward off it, into subtler expression. Other things that cross the mind: that some portions of the poem are only lightly scratched out, and others heavily, and passionately, defaced suggests the poem's personality--as does its still apparent shape. As a composition its author turned against, it is amusing, too, particularly at its start, where lines between lines had to be canceled--as if the poet, dissatisfied with his effort first tried to rewrite the beginning of it, then gave up. The title, "Selected Writings," which is left unmarked at the top of the page with levy's name and the year of composition, suggests something of the artist's sardonic self-contempt for his presuming to work up an Ouevre out of matter better blacked out.
But the piece is most important for setting up levy's series as a whole. The second work in it, "Totem," consists of more blacked out lines of print, but with a little oval sun added off to the left, and the text reversed (due, d.r. wagner informs us in an interview included in the book, to levy's practice of "backfeeding" pages through his mimeograph). Most of the text is in a narrow, irregular column, and looks like a totem pole. But not all the letters in the thing have been blacked out. The result? Words in the process of going against themselves, and into self- obliteration in an act of worship? Or the reverse: letters backing out of a dying act of worship and on their way toward asensual pragmatism as normal words? Both, I contend--into a tension of opposed magics.
In the third segment of levy's sequence cut-up texts are superimposed on a silenced text; one of the additions concerns Cambodian statues of the Buddha; another is a snippet that contains just the word, "(dharma)." The main addition, however, is an upside-down text, mostly blackened out. But scraps of material remain readable: "come," "gain refuge" and "they didn't," among them in the upside-down portion; "red walls" "as twilight formed" and "staring at" in the rightside-up text it covers. Many meanings are possible: a world of words and orientations going meaningless, but with havens preserved within? And of course more than a hint of the salvation of levy's brand of Zen. So, like many poets after him such as Doris Cross, John Stickney, Greg Evason, jwcurry and Tom Phillips, levy is here silencing a given text down to some poetic or otherwise aesthetically meaningful essence.
As the sequence continues levy adds more and more subteties, e.g., a half-page with just a few scattered fragments of illegible words above a text on . . . the Beginning, which opposes a page whose silenced text looks like a brick wall. As a whole, Zen Concrete becomes a treatise on the Varieties of Disintegration and Ressurection, as well as a visual poem one can go back to as often as one can to the best paintings.
A year later levy was adding visual cut-outs from girlie magazines, books of reproductions of Buddhist statues and other artworks, and elsewhere, while building on his techniques of textual destruction and collage for even richer though sometimes disorganized-seeming work that looks contemporary, and has had a wide if not yet academically- acknowledged influence on the best visual poets of the present..
Meanwhile he was turning out visio-textual work of an elegance that almost seems slick. Ny favorite of these appears to be something clipped from a Greek newspaper. Three circles of equal diameter have been collaged over the clipping, and two more circles of the same size drawn intersecting two of them. One of the first set of circles contains blown-up Greek lettering in white on a black ground; a second has similar lettering in black on a white ground. The texts are perpendicular to the clipping's text. The third of the cut-out circles is mostly blank, with just a shade of small disappearing lettering. Some dots, a dotted line, a solid line and a bent line have also been drawn on the work to suggest, for me, some kind of geometric analysis.
What to make of such a jumble? I'm not sure. But I find all kinds of hints of antiquity versus the ultra-modern field that particle physics, with its extensive re-use of greek lettering, is; headline-topicality versus details of Final Importance that are turning away and rising from them. Platonic ideals.
As a textual poet, levy was not as significant or groundbreaking as he was in what I call "pluraesthetic art" to mean art that is meaningful in more than one aesthetic way, as visual poetry is expressive both as words and as visual images. An early extended poem, "Cleveland undercovers," is mostly angry stream of consciousness near-prose in the manner of Ginsberg's "Howl" about levy's hometown, and perhaps greatest obsession, for he wrote about it constantly, and could not seem to leave it for more than a month or two at a time, in spite of the growing attentions of the police. But some of its lines have a poetic flare, for example, "i have a city to cover with lines,/ with textured words &/ the sweaty brick-flesh images of a/ drunken tied-up whorehouse cowtown/ sprawling & brawling on its back." He was only 23 or 24 when he wrote it. Others of his longer poems are as energetic, and solider. My favorite of them (at the moment), "Warriors Rest," performs all kinds of incantatory, surrealistic zigs on the idea of a "Spade Queen" as playing card, queen of night, queen of death, black woman, whose "dark dancing is/ a shadow moving across/ the moon at dusk," versus a warrior's white horses, and other whites until "later the shadows/ of new sun dances/ enter her mind/ like frightened moons// in the morning smoke/ like black bridges to cross."
There is so much more to be said, but, oh, the Cleveland of space considerations! So I will end with my conviction that it would be no disservice to Keats, one of my greatest heroes, to describe d.a. levy as his 20th-Century American equivalent.
22 October 2009: The following essay on d. a. levy (from #574) is either a review I wrote for the May 1992 issue of Small Press Review (my copy of which I seem to have lost) or an expansion of it I later did. Whichever, I think I did a pretty good job on it, although no levy scholar has paid any attention whatever to it:
d.a. levy, Pioneer in Visio-Textual Art
Zen Concrete & Etc.
by d.a. levy, edited by Ingrid Swanberg. 245 pp; 1991; Pa;
ghost pony press, 2518 Gregory St., Madison WI 53711. $29.50 ppd.
The initial charm of this nicely-produced, richly-illustrated large book is the immediacy with which it brings the sixties to life, at least for anyone who spent his twenties there, as I did. Just about everything of the era is in it: the sometimes jejune but always impassioned and compassionate politics; the sometimes jejune but always free-ranging and committed devotion to art; the struggles over obscenity, complete with busts; marijuana and various psychedelic drugs; the paraphernalia both physical and mental of exotic Oriental religions; and the wonderful, if sometimes frazzling, sense of everything's coming to fruition at once.
Almost always an implicit or louder part of the textual poems that make up about half the book are the politics of the time, as in his "Suburban Monastery Death Poem," for example, where he writes, "Really/ the police try to protect/ the banks - and everything else/ is secondary," or in his four "visualized prayers to the American God," which are comprised mainly of dollar signs.
The devotion to art is burstingly there in the sheer amount of poems and collages in the book, particularly considering that they are a mere selection from the ouevre of a man who died at 26.
As for the obscenity wars, they explode in the excellent over-view from the early seventies of levy's life provided by Douglas Blazek. Twice, according to Blazek, levy was arrested for distributing obscene poems. AND THIS COURT HAS A RIGHT TO PROTECT KIDS FROM THIS KIND OF FILTH FOR THE SAKE OF FILTH AND NOTHING ELSE as one of the judges involved thoughtfully put it. Levy was clearly a victim of persecution, for one of his arrests was for publishing a poem by a minor that contained the word, "fuck," in it. Although levy was never convicted of the charges against him, the persecution took its toll on him and certainly contributed to his eventually killing himself.
Drugs are only peripherally in levy's poems and collages, but get more attention from levy's friend, the poet D. R. Wagner, whom the book's editor, Ingrid Swansen, interviews, and in the personal reminiscences of levy by Kent Taylor, as well as in a wonderfully black-humored fragment from a radio talk show featuring levy and a few of his friends which ends with a woman caller's saying, "I think the boys are absolutely right! I think it's great! Why don't we all just bug out, and we'll see who provides the groceries, and makes the shoes..." with Levy interrupting by asking who needs shoes and the host's observing that levy is wearing a pair.
Buddhism permeates levy's poetry and collages, though in tension with his propensity for agitation and despair. As for the sense of going-somewhere that the sixties symbolized for so many, it is there not only in levy's poems and collages, but in the descriptions of his publishing (via offset and then mimeo), his organizing of and contributions to poetry readings, his leaving free copies of books he'd published at public libraries, and selling them on the street, and all his interactions with people like Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg.
By now it should be apparent that a signal virtue of this book is its bringing levy himself, through his friends' reminiscenses of him, to life. Literary Biography and Social Document-- as just these two things alone, Zen Concrete is well worth buying. But its greatest value is as a collection of levy's art.
That begins with Zen Concrete, 1967, which consists of a sequence of what levy called "experiments in destructive writing." Its first page contains something that apparently was a poem, but all its letters have been blacked out. Trivial? Perhaps. But considered as a kind of drawing of literary process, it begins to say more than On one level it says not of silence but of silenced writing--and this no doubt refers, in part, to the attempt of the police in Cleveland to silence levy as a poet by twice arresting him for purveying obscenity. But it also speaks of the poet's disappointment with his medium. Also, the canceled words look like they're seeping larger, flowing toward the paper's edge, or even misting upward off it, into subtler expression. Other things that cross the mind: that some portions of the poem are only lightly scratched out, and others heavily, and passionately, defaced suggests the poem's personality--as does its still apparent shape. As a composition its author turned against, it is amusing, too, particularly at its start, where lines between lines had to be canceled--as if the poet, dissatisfied with his effort first tried to rewrite the beginning of it, then gave up. The title, "Selected Writings," which is left unmarked at the top of the page with levy's name and the year of composition, suggests something of the artist's sardonic self-contempt for his presuming to work up an Ouevre out of matter better blacked out.
But the piece is most important for setting up levy's series as a whole. The second work in it, "Totem," consists of more blacked out lines of print, but with a little oval sun added off to the left, and the text reversed (due, d.r. wagner informs us in an interview included in the book, to levy's practice of "backfeeding" pages through his mimeograph). Most of the text is in a narrow, irregular column, and looks like a totem pole. But not all the letters in the thing have been blacked out. The result? Words in the process of going against themselves, and into self- obliteration in an act of worship? Or the reverse: letters backing out of a dying act of worship and on their way toward asensual pragmatism as normal words? Both, I contend--into a tension of opposed magics.
In the third segment of levy's sequence cut-up texts are superimposed on a silenced text; one of the additions concerns Cambodian statues of the Buddha; another is a snippet that contains just the word, "(dharma)." The main addition, however, is an upside-down text, mostly blackened out. But scraps of material remain readable: "come," "gain refuge" and "they didn't," among them in the upside-down portion; "red walls" "as twilight formed" and "staring at" in the rightside-up text it covers. Many meanings are possible: a world of words and orientations going meaningless, but with havens preserved within? And of course more than a hint of the salvation of levy's brand of Zen. So, like many poets after him such as Doris Cross, John Stickney, Greg Evason, jwcurry and Tom Phillips, levy is here silencing a given text down to some poetic or otherwise aesthetically meaningful essence.
As the sequence continues levy adds more and more subteties, e.g., a half-page with just a few scattered fragments of illegible words above a text on . . . the Beginning, which opposes a page whose silenced text looks like a brick wall. As a whole, Zen Concrete becomes a treatise on the Varieties of Disintegration and Ressurection, as well as a visual poem one can go back to as often as one can to the best paintings.
A year later levy was adding visual cut-outs from girlie magazines, books of reproductions of Buddhist statues and other artworks, and elsewhere, while building on his techniques of textual destruction and collage for even richer though sometimes disorganized-seeming work that looks contemporary, and has had a wide if not yet academically- acknowledged influence on the best visual poets of the present..
Meanwhile he was turning out visio-textual work of an elegance that almost seems slick. Ny favorite of these appears to be something clipped from a Greek newspaper. Three circles of equal diameter have been collaged over the clipping, and two more circles of the same size drawn intersecting two of them. One of the first set of circles contains blown-up Greek lettering in white on a black ground; a second has similar lettering in black on a white ground. The texts are perpendicular to the clipping's text. The third of the cut-out circles is mostly blank, with just a shade of small disappearing lettering. Some dots, a dotted line, a solid line and a bent line have also been drawn on the work to suggest, for me, some kind of geometric analysis.
What to make of such a jumble? I'm not sure. But I find all kinds of hints of antiquity versus the ultra-modern field that particle physics, with its extensive re-use of greek lettering, is; headline-topicality versus details of Final Importance that are turning away and rising from them. Platonic ideals.
As a textual poet, levy was not as significant or groundbreaking as he was in what I call "pluraesthetic art" to mean art that is meaningful in more than one aesthetic way, as visual poetry is expressive both as words and as visual images. An early extended poem, "Cleveland undercovers," is mostly angry stream of consciousness near-prose in the manner of Ginsberg's "Howl" about levy's hometown, and perhaps greatest obsession, for he wrote about it constantly, and could not seem to leave it for more than a month or two at a time, in spite of the growing attentions of the police. But some of its lines have a poetic flare, for example, "i have a city to cover with lines,/ with textured words &/ the sweaty brick-flesh images of a/ drunken tied-up whorehouse cowtown/ sprawling & brawling on its back." He was only 23 or 24 when he wrote it. Others of his longer poems are as energetic, and solider. My favorite of them (at the moment), "Warriors Rest," performs all kinds of incantatory, surrealistic zigs on the idea of a "Spade Queen" as playing card, queen of night, queen of death, black woman, whose "dark dancing is/ a shadow moving across/ the moon at dusk," versus a warrior's white horses, and other whites until "later the shadows/ of new sun dances/ enter her mind/ like frightened moons// in the morning smoke/ like black bridges to cross."
There is so much more to be said, but, oh, the Cleveland of space considerations! So I will end with my conviction that it would be no disservice to Keats, one of my greatest heroes, to describe d.a. levy as his 20th-Century American equivalent.
Friday, October 30, 2009
"Extra Terrestials, too, play the lottery" by David-Baptiste Chirot
Visit NOS OBRAS OTROS for "a space for artists & poets of all different media to present works & to express ideas, comments, scraps, notes, rants, statements on anything & in any way they please. I wanted to have a space where artists & poets from all different points of view, styles, cultures, can present & discuss, comment on, each other's works. To encounter the works of other artists & poets in a freedom of existence and exchange, and to learn a lot and have a good time, too!
The name "Nos Obras Otros"indicates the works are a shared "Other" of each artist, an Other without any limitations or labels imposed."
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Visual Poems from Remote Poems
Remote Poems consists of a series of 22 Visual Poems: Part 1 - Remote Framed/ Part 2 - Remote Centered. The series was created the weekend after MaOAS '09, inspired by the works & books on view.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Photos from the 1st Annual MaOAS Visual Poetry Exhibition
Visit C. Mehrl Bennett's flicker photostream as well as my flicker photostream for photos of works & happenings of last weekend's MaOAS 2009 visual poetry exhibition.
Monday, October 19, 2009
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