Some Prose by Michael Basinski
A Selection of poetics, criticism, microreviews and interviews
Compiled by jim leftwich
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Born in Buffalo, New York in 1950, Michael Basinski is an American poet, critic, and theorist. Much of his poetry participates in the traditions of visual and sound poetry. He is the curator emeritus of The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at The State University of New York in Buffalo.
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in Taproot, Issue #6.0, February 1995
JUXTA--(#1, 1994), 977 Seminole Trail No. 33l, Charlottesville VA, 22901. $4.50. Editors: Ken Harris and Jim Leftwich.
Here is something new and unknown. Ambergris floating in the sea of tired magazines. And it is a goooood magazine. A thing like this needed. Reminds me of the first issue of Jon Edgar Webb's THE OUTSIDER: A wonderful magazine of the 1960s that published Olson next to Bukowski. It is good to see that the editors drink wide the map of poetry. The juxtapositioning includes: Spencer Selby, Cheryl Townsend, John Byrum, Hugh Fox, Crag Hill, Rod Smith. If Santa Claus wanted to give poets a present it would be more mags like JUXTA. The Easter Bunny would do the same. And the Ground Hog. And Venus.--mb
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in The Experioddicist #8 June 21. 1995
ON EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
by Michael Basinski
My first thought on experimental poetry is that it is hardly experimental
enough. There is far too little pushing and pulling and manipulating of
literary boundaries in the realm of the poem. I think that this is the result
of poetic careerism. Some of our best and potentially brightest poets are
more concerned with prizes and photo sessions than poetic limits.
Experimental poetry is left to poetically positive outsiders, radicals, and
eccentrics, and to the poets from the working classes or from working-class
backgrounds. Fortunately, at this time this is a fantastically rich loom of
writers who are not rich or suburban in mentality. There are two veins of
progressive marginal writing. There are those working with the visual and
aural potential of poetry and those pushing the moral content of poetry -
that is, those engaged in writing about the body (particularly anything that
has to do with human sexuality). Interestingly, both of these forms of
writing are locating their audiences in an increasingly growing non-literary
community. That is to say , there are non-poets listening and reading poetry!
True, it is a small audience, but real, and it is now as it has not been in
the near past. Experimental poetry is therefore a populace event. People are
interested in it! Experimental poetry has made the poem again an exciting
experience. And it must continue to do so. It is something that titillates
the senses (as well as the mind). A poetry slam is as experimental in
presentation as a performance in a dark, obscure gallery. Experimental
poetry's mission is to engage the ordinary (this means ordinary people and
ordinary readers too!) and make poetry alive again to those beyond the
egg-head world of too much of modern poemitry.
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from TapRoot Reviews #9/10, edited by luigi-bob drake, 1995
Jim Leftwich: KHAWATIR--Runaway Spoon Press, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00.
This book feels much like intuitive writing. Feels like because within the structure of the texts are scattered bits of manipulated historic poetic maxims from William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson for instance. "Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust." These poems combine a form of chance with forms of premeditated writing. This is writing by phrase as well as single word paratactic development. From the poem "Isnowthe": "Along a mobius strip in which all depths are brought to the surface, all surfaces fall to depths." So, within the context of this book flesh and nature, words as a medium of the imagination, literary philosophy, parrot fish, poetic wondering and wanderings surface and sink and rise like schools of sea beasts on the horizon, like a dance for the reader's mind eye.--Mike Basinski
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in Local Effects For Robert Creeley @ 70
Special Issue of RIF/T Version 6.1 from Buffalo
Fall 1997
1973
What I did was work the day shift, 7 to 3, at a grinding wheel, grinding the glaze off the bottoms of cups as they came off the kiln cars. A thousand cups a day: Jose cups, Caprice cups, Mark cups, Conservo cups. Dozens of colors and designs: black spray mist, red 245, Newport gold, Bar Harbor, White Tower. What I did at night was go to U.B. night school. I had some vague interest in poetry. There were Beatniks in Mad Magazine. I found On The Road in a drug store. Jack Clarke was teaching Modern Poetry. In between sips of Red Barrel beer, he told us to check into Creeley. Well, hell, I thought this is easy homework. I was never at a poetry reading. There were few in Cheektowaga. And rather than class we had to go out and get IT, that is read for IT: the poetry and the reading. We were left to select the means from which to approach IT. So, over in Norton Union in what was Norton Cafeteria, it was Creeley's return from someplace and here is this guy I never heard off in knit hat with his new book: A Day Book. The first poem I ever heard, Do you think that if / I said, I love you, or anyone/ said it, or you did. DO you/ think that if you had all/ you really/ would have to think it all into/ reality, the world, each time, new. Each of the cups then was not a cup in my hand. Each was full for the sipping with an equal full cup being sipped someplace. One million cups on tables somewhere my ears to intimate imaginative endless loving conversation.
Happy Birthday
Michael Basinski
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in Lagniappe, volume 1, number 1 [nd, circa 1999]
A Working Paper Towards an Eventual Visual/Concrete Essay
by Michael Basinski
I began to wonder how best to serve poetry with a visual poetic. As I wrestled with the term Concrete, the title of this piece became variously: "ConCrete Zoot Suite," "A Few Slabs of Broken Concrete," "It Happened down the Street, as It Did in Crete," "NeVVisual," "Viz & Aur," "The New Bold, Visual Poetry and a Few Thins You Might Wanna Panda." All of these were unsatisfactory.
A dissatisfaction arose from the term Concrete. The phrase "Concrete Poetry" seems to define everything that has the slightest hint of poetic innovation in the realm of space, color, font size, typography, inner margins, short lines, marginal manipulation or enhancement, poetic animation, etc. I asked my daughter, Natalie, who had just completed an 8th grade unit on poetry, what she knew about Concrete Poetry. She said "poetry in the shape of a cat." I wanted more.
"Concrete" seemed to be an archaic word that defined something that was rather than is a movement in poetry. In fact, it remains active, hence way alive, developing and influencing (if not altering) the landscape of all adventurous poetry. "Concrete" is less a definition than a barrier that separates and isolates the proposals of visual poetry from other poetry. "Visual" poetry as a defining term is not much better.
All the terminology I could muster didn't do more than strengthen the existing apartheid. I wished for a term that would meld visual and Concrete poetry with all other poetry and thus be void of the connotations that "Concrete" carries, i.e., tricky, cute, gimmicky, trite, redundant, precious, ephemeral and peripheral. I wished for a term that would reveal the fact that aspects of visual work are presently in vogue, usable, acceptable and even expected in the writings of all practicing poets. I couldn't find such a term, but I think that any word defining visual poetry and its potential would be, at this time, inadequate. Inadequate because at this moment poets and editors are involved in a complete integration of all the possibilities offered by visual poetry (including collage and sound poetry) for development into the next wave of progressive poetry. Poets are dusting off the monuments and looking for a heritage from which they can progress, but not without a certain irony regarding past terminology.
Concrete is being integrated into a number of poetry camps and this is being accomplished in various fashions. These freshly honed and imagined facets of visual, aural and collage poetry sharpen the best aspects of all writing and open a few fresh considerations for all poets, editors and readers who might engage and use them to encourage an art beyond the mundane.
First Outtakes:
You should know that in 1951 Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Rot and Marcel Wyss instituted a magazine they called Spiral, which was to be a magazine that would embrace poetry, the plastic arts, graphics, architecture, and industrial design. Gomringer, a poet, was impressed by concrete art. His poetry and the visual poetry of others of his generation (Augusto de Campos, et al.) has become classical Concrete Poetry.
That was nearly 50 years ago.
Along the path the photocopy machine infused visual poetry with a much needed proletarian surge of folkCrete energy.
In da USA visual poetry, photocopy work primarily, becomes a political event. The crude nature of this poetry, raggedly cut-out words enjambed with lewd or ridiculous images, is a direct assault on conservative, narrative-bound poems, the academic avant garde and the poetic careers of the privileged. The visual is a call to war. Visual poetry is anti-art, anti-culture and anti-imperial. Visual photocopy poetry comes from an active subculture. It is the most populist poetry being written. This poetry is read by more people than those who consume work published by sanctioned publishers.
C.P. is Concrete Poetry and Communist Party.
Do not neglect the Fluxus experiment, John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, and Mac Low's and La Monte Young's An Anthology.
In the visual word, there is thus a tradition and a history and a patriarchy and all of this has been and is philoprogenitive.
The Gondwannaland of the poem insists that poetry must have a lexical vocabulary. This restriction constitutes a form of fundamentalism.
Concretions or crustaceans?
Isn't this just a bit too far fetched and romantic?
Visual poetry and sound poetry or V/S is still considered extreme and sometimes mundane experimental writing. 80 years after the death of Apollinaire.
Poetry utilizing shape, font size, visual image, sound scoring, sound constellations, fuzziness, cross-outs, layering techniques, multiple states and a host of rather now common poetic tactics, for good or bad, gets lumped and dumped into the Concrete oeuvre.
V/S poetry has suffered because of the purity and puritanical Gomringer Concrete (art) Poetry and the apparently messy, anti-concrete Concrete, photoconcrete Concrete, and, of course, from the reluctance of fundamentalist career poetry to extend itself.
Some of My Questions Were:
Where does this nontraditional, perhaps limitless, bold poetry locate its heritage? What is the tradition and who is in the history? Can Concrete really change? What is the current slab of Concrete? What potential does a Concrete creativity offer? Will the past haunt the future? Will fundamentalists burn Concrete books? Can the V/S escape the political, anti-art stance of photoconcrete? Is it all too primitive? Private? Pirate? Precious? Can there be innovation or has the innovation been drained dry?
Six of my Answers Are:
1.
Essex, vol. 1, no. 3-4, Fall-Winter 1997-98
83 Macdonell Ave.
Toronto, ON M6R 2A4
$20.00 per year.
Edited by William R. Howe and Scott Pound, Essex is the unit of composition for these editors. The visual work in their magazine is the raw material they use to generate there own exploratory Vis/AuralCrete composition. (Talk about appropriation!) Essex finds its program in the physical, tactile activity of poetry. It is impossible to open the magazine (this issue) and hastily flip thought the pages. Fastened with Velcro, you initially experience sound. Maneuvering through the Essex ensemble each reader has a separate, unique language event. Fold-out poems, inserts and pockets of poetry join to engage the participant in a physical language experience. There is also a textbook insert. So, at this time when visual poetry finds a comfortable, accessible medium on the web, Essex refuses Concrete fatigue and launches itself into the non-cyber space of presentation poetry. Essex is an exhibition and a performance. The Essex presentation includes a conversation between the new concretadors: Chris Vitiello, Dave Babtiste Chirot, Carra Stratton and the best heritage of North American visual poetry: Canadian monuments bp Nichol and Steve McCaffery loom as a heritage, at least for this issue. Essex also brings European (high and appreciated) visual poetry into the mix. Conversation at this round table includes many Europeans (Marton Koppany, Fernando Aguir, John Havelda) and also the New Toronto experimenters (Beth Learn, Joy Learn, Darren Wershler-Henry). From all the corners of the peripheral the old and new are joined to reinvent visually, aurally, word- dominated art and physical space within the realm of otherwise armchair poetry. For the most part, the paty guests are avant-garde intellectuals (artists and friends). BYOI (Bring Your Own Imagination). Here all is equal in performance. E SEE SEX, ESSE X, E see X marks the spot.
Blurb: Downright revolutionary.
2.
Generator no. 8 (2 vols.)
3503 Virginia Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44109
$12.00
Generator 8 consists of two volumes. A masterful editing job is engineered by long-time, old-time, computer Vis poet John Byrum. There is not one single male poet in these volumes. Volume 1 joins Lyn Lifshin, Ann Ericson, Sheila Murphy, Gail Sher, Marcia Arreta and other text-poem poets with visual poetry by Carla Bertola, Myrna London Aidlin, and Frederica Manfredini. The volume unites the aggressive anti-poem, text avant-garde, photoCrete, language experiments and visual minimalism. Consider the little lit magazine where Lifshin most frequently appears as a heritage from which Generator originates. In this little lit world, the network of sexual frank naked beast poetry consistently finds room for the aggressive, raw and ragged American photocopy collage poem. (The relationship between the peripheral beer-drinking, weed-smoking, constantly copulating poem and collage, visual poetry needs some in-depth study.) Volume 2 features a generous spread of poetry by only four artists. Arleen Hartman's poetry makes image of word. Wendy Collin Sorin's poetry finds its origins in "Things of August" by Wallace Stevens. Both Hartman and Sorin were first visual artists so words very literally become their material. This is unique. Instead of visual poetry being derivative of visual art, visual poetry is now a derivation of text poetry. Peggy Kwong-Gordon's work layers eastern brush stroke writing with computer generated words. Her poetry meshes form, medium and culture, and the poem is, therefore, representative of a new phase of visual melding where not only visual art and poetry but also culture, philosophy and poetics fuse. Myrna London Aidlin's framed structures enclose lines metamorphosing into letters of the imagination. Her poem called "Matrices" thoroughly melds words and images. Both volumes of Generator 8 expose fine visual poets finding their way towards new poetry by way of visual art, rather than escaping from the conservative text poetry to the visual poem. All black and white, the magazine is center-folded 8-1/2" by 14" sheets. See also Byrum's and Crag Hill's "Core: A Symposium on Contemporary Visual Poetry."
Blurb: Finally, art. Expansive, open and progressive, pushing the pulse. Generator widens the portal and welcomes the visual artist to writing. Way out. A rabbit for all the greyhounds to chase.
3.
Leftwich, Jim
Sample Example: visual lyrics
Luna Bisonte Prods.
137 Leland Ave.
Columbus, Ohio 43214
$5.00
The philosophic and intellectual creativity of poet Jim Leftwich becomes immediately obvious in his new book Sample Example. Never haphazard or compromised, Leftwich's word-collage poetry expands to include hands-on, written word gestures, and from this combination arises his lyricism. The texture poems can be a score. Layered and with multiple access or entry points, the poems must be read or spoken and permission to enunciate is what the poet (or, perhaps more, the poem) grants the reader. The texture is in the reading. They demand that you get physical. The long poem titled "Improvisational Epistemology" features layered language presentations. The text is sometimes obliterated. Meaning via reading sometimes surfaces. There are also many silences waiting to open. Art, lit, the visual and the layered are fused in Leftwich's poetry. Of like interest are books of visual poetry published by Bob Grumman's Run Away Spoon Press (P.O. Box 3621, Port Charlotte, FL 33949). See also John M. Bennett's books from Luna Bisonte Prods. and his magazine Lost and Found Times. Bennett is now curator of Ohio State University's Avant Writing Collection. Contact him for more information (address above).
Blurb: Many poems beg to be read; few, however, twist and pinch (pitch) the tongue to be song. What a terrific and terrorific music Leftwich makes.
4.
UbuWeb
The main Ubu is Kenneth Goldsmith, whose massive 606 page No.111 2.7.93-10.20.96 is a banquet. A directory of Concrete, visual, and sound poetry, UbuWeb features history, comment, found visual, real-time sound poetry, European Concrete, South American concrete, New York subway concrete, Con-art history and poetry animation. A place to stop and shop and explore lots of visual heritage, history, through useful links to other outpost-poets of the Viz-Word World. The Web is the ideal place to popularize visual poetry, which was once only available to an in-crowd. On the Ubu it is obvious that color is now an important part of writing. Foreshadowing the wave to hit, Ubu includes hypertext poetry and poetry movies. Certainly, the Web has been a gigantic leap forward in expanding and developing visual poetry. The Web makes visual poetry less precious and less snobby. It is the next leap forward in re-peopling poetry. Nevertheless, ConWebCrete poetry is still in its infancy, which is not a critical jab. More poets need to work in the field. Kenneth Goldsmith's compilation is therefore of much use as a poet's how-to Web-site. The contemporary work presented on Ubu is decidedly New York City-centric and features Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Bruce Andrews, Bill Luoma, etc. This defines a new community of visual poetry entrepreneurs, perhaps New York Concrete. Initially writing in other areas, Bernstein and Andrews, for example, now utilize visual poetics in their writing. Ubu is therefore progressive and grand and draws from many of the past major collage and sound poets, literary experimentalists like Kurt Schwitters, Cage, and Mac Low. Gomringer is on UbuWeb, for instance, and Ubu offers not only a history and tradition but a venue to new (untainted by poetry wars) visual poets, e.g., Mark Peters.
Blurb: UbuWeb is the place of wonder and wonderful possibility picnics. Really, an Ellis Island of Concrete Poetry.
5.
Light and Dust Mobil Anthology
(http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm)
The magnificent Light & Dust Mobile Anthology was manifested and is tended by Karl Young. This massive web site is user friendly and diverse, yet focused. Here visual and hypertextual poets like Christy Sheffild Sanford reside beside writers like Rochelle Owens, Susan Smith Nash and Antler. A balance between sound and visual forms and text-anchored poetry is established at Light and Dust. All forms are equal and integrated. Light and Dust is a mobile anthology because, of course, it is everywhere available via internet. This is a populace event. Karl Young is a long-time resident of Poeticonnecticut. His historical depths allow him to link various poetries to the common goals of progress and access. Young creates no barriers. In Light and Dust are works by Dick Higgins, d.a. Levy, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, Joe Napora, Myung Mi Kim, Robert Grenier, Maureen Owen and a host of others. Karl Kempton has a Kaldron Section (Kaldron was an old time visual poetry mag). The heritage of this site is an accurate map because visual, sound and concrete poetry had a close evolutionary connection with anthropological and eco-political poetry. Truly, a fully interrogated site. There are endless additions. Several sections of Michael McClure's "Ghosts Tantras," for instance, have recently been added. Long out of print, they are wonderful and still original sound poems. Each time I visit the site I find it more varied and better anchored to visual poetry's active participation in American literature.
Blurb: It is endlessly enriching. A most balanced and valuable site. As the poetry world evolves towards an ever more visual poetic, beacons--no--Light-Web-Houses--like Light and Dust will guide the path. A long visit is required. Take a vacation. Everywhere the horizon. This is a beach.
6.
Zine Guide, no. 1
P.O. Box 5467
Evanston, IL 60204
$4.00
Progressive poetry finds its first publication in the most obscure of lit places. The evolution of innovation is vertical. The little lit magazine has always been the home of the progressive in poetry. The current 'zine underground is a realm rich in possible exotic and chaotic visual scores, texts and poetry. Not hindered by literary, artistic or career peer pressure and governed by anti-conventionality mandates, 'zines are a cauldron of wonderful, zany, visual possibility. Zine Guide is a point of embarkation from which to explore for tomorrow's form of poetry. Zine Guide lists and briefly describes over 1600 independent magazines (not all little lits). Closely linked with independent record production and distribution, this gigantic print underworld of publishing most certainly contributes to the dissemination and development of non-conformist visual poetry. Many 'zine publications have as their agenda being contrary towards anything conservative, middle-class or ordinary. Freaky otherness is IN. Therefore, the rude, crude and sometimes greatly creative and new flourishes in 'zines. Perhaps the romantic desire to go against the grain is political. Whatever, on the pages of 'zines you can find: word/image collage (in which image has the same purpose as word, which is to be read); the collage poem with multiple entry points; work in which the unit of composition is page, plastic bag or 'zine rather than stanza or line; the anti-poem which is purposely flat and void of literary devices (such as simile); sexual and political terminology and imagery (leftist and liberatory); the editor rather than individual artist as the principal creator; multiple narratives; poems in matrix (with other words or images); juxtaposed and enjambed words and images; chaos collage. Collage is perceived as anti-form, anti-narrative, anti-art, and has, when hastily composed, the raw, homemade, unique feel of total independence. Crude vigor rules over polished banality is a rule that guides 'zine poetry. Over the years these titles have become Basinski favorites: Tensetendoned We Absorb, The Bobby Star Newsletter, Bitch, Beet, Losers are Cool, Latex Generation, Riverside Art Scene, The Bowel Movement, Frontier Unction, Frozen Hypnosis, Puppet Smut, Lime Green Bulldozers, Bone Sauce, Art Mag,Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, and Bad Newz.
General Blurb: Cool.
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Michael Basinski in The Hold, February 2003
Buncamps Trolls - by John Crouse and Jim Leftwich.
Xtant books 2002. Send bread, maybe $5.60! to Jim Leftwich. 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, Va. 22903-9797
Here are 33 (Christly!) pages of colored printed collage poems that are made from words and worded crumbled paper, manipulated text, drawings, alphabetic manipulations, found language, cartoons etc. It is contemporary word and collaborative contemporary word art at that! Both artists are established experimentalists and this bonding strengthens the bond of their network and enhances the exchange of experimental and progressive poetic ideas that has manifested itself in combo art, of which this is a fine representative chunk sample. This form of poetry is the venue in which Charles Olson's composition by field in currently applicable. Only in contemporary visual poetry does Olson's notion of poetry come into place and play. And here composition by field is developed, experimented with and in this poem those notions are evolving in compositions of found field visual poetry. All things can and do and may come into the poem. Truly, we can trace these poems back to Ezra Pound. However, one must twist and weave that tread with the visual underground as it matured in the 1990s. This is an exciting and innovative poetry. If you are interested in where poetry is going (and leave the history with Pound and the rest to pedants), then contact Leftwich and Crouse. See address above. And it does not hurt to send a buck or a twelve pack of eggs. Maybe some bananas.
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Michael Basinski
The Hold
September 2002
Switch - by Tim Gaze.2002. Anabasis/Xtant.
Unconscious at Cape Paterson - by Tim Gaze & Cornelis Vleeskens. 2002.
Anabasis/Xtant.
Xtant is Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707.
Anabasis is Thomas Lowe Taylor, Oysterville, Washington 98641-0216. Write to these folks about prices and other good great books. www.anabasispress.com
Visual works. I am sure that these are examples of imaginative deep writing, they being other symbols and lines merged into new forms or developing alphabets - now we have a name for these works - Asemic writing. That is the word: Hear it: ASEMIC. But for me the delight of these books, written in Asemic, is the reading of this work - because the new writing in these new worlds/works with other alphabets demands a form of reading that translates into sound each glyph or string, poem- therefore new sounds must be made and the expansive experience is then IT. Wonderful to touch down on this terrific planet of other writing. These authors stretch it and brake it and broke it and IS now someplace else … in the other… place of creativity. Obviously the air is there breathable, beautiful. Let's go. Paint your wagon, and come along.
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Asemia - by Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich and Louise Tourney and Joe Maneri and Abdourahamane Diarra.
2003. 96 pages. Anabasis. Xtant, 1512Mountianside Ct. Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707. Write for price.
A form or branch of verbo-visual poetry, Asemic writing is an original progression within this genre. Thank the Gods (and Pixies) some poets are getting beyond the 1960s and into something other than simulations of Finlay or Cobbing, although, thank the Gods if these had a proto-generator it might be Cobbing. But, nevertheless, Asemia strikes out boldly into a form of writing that locates itself in primitive emotive states, pre-aural, pre-intellectual, when the sound of emotions took forms like these. Carefully rendered glyphs of proto or other writing the works ask the reader to fully engage them via what senses might be strongest in their particular reading field. They are not puzzles. Not riddles waiting to be solved but works that form a state of being that might be or should be the imaginative state. Like keyholes into the substructure of the spiritual life of letters and words enter and enjoy. Maneri writes a sequence of 24 spirit poems – sort of a form of spiritually dictated or guided automatic poetry! Poet as medium – I like it. Not seen this! And Diarra is from Mali – my first read of a vis-poet from that continent. We speak to each other with a poetry form from the other! Wow again. Wow.
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Asemic Magazine. No. 3. - Tim Gaze, editor.
P.O. Box 1011, Kent Town, SA 5071, Australia. You gotta write to Tim for the price or send some dollars – I understand he is outta work so he needs support. Ya can’t expect something for nothing. See – being a poet means you be broke and broke – down-under or up-under – don’t matter. Maybe send a lettuce!
Now… why a magazine? – ? “Paper has more presence than electronic media” that’s a quote from Tim Gaze – I mean you gotta like this poet – him being Australia’s and world’s inonavigator and flashlight light into the darkness. Visual poets and poets or all stripes gotta wish there were more Gazes. And you see Asemic is the best new brand new nude thing coming in visual poetry in twenty years! Let me quote, “The world “asemic” means having no semantic content.” That means it is not writing but writing that demands improvisation to translate. This means there is no arrogance of learned poet. This means sound improvisation is always a possibility – all works sing! This means pagan – pre meaning. Ah! What joy. All favorites of visual poetry work within this one like Ross Priddle, Jim Leftwich, Jack Berry, Ficus! And more endless. And I was happy to find a Brion Gysin work in the mag also. He was once colleague of William Burroughs. And when I saw it, I said, why yes, Gysin was into this in the 1960s. Now it is asemic and Tim Gaze on his non semantic eastern dragon bakes the cake of this brand new writing form. A fat issue. You need it. You gotta get with it. Remember that small press ushered in visual poetry 40 years ago. Time to reinvigorate this genre again you of small press, you who are gods and goddesses and humble slices of peach pie and black coffee poem.
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Michael Basinski, The Hold, September, 2003
Death Text Book 5 - by Jim Leftwich.
2003. Xtant books. 50 or more unnumbered pages. Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA, 22903-9707. Write for price.
Someone enters who might be a reader. There are these pages of color images of women in bikinis, provocative, erotic. And they are wearing and merging, emerging from the letters. So it is Eros that pulls me to the page and I read with that arrow in my heart and Leftwich creates a communion of language and image, with metaphors of hieroglyphs and petroglyphs and texts layered upon created and found text, juxtaposing meaning upon meaning, Eve and Gilgamesh and this horrible American fiasco in Iran, in that place of our original sexual sin energy. And what is wonderful about this text is that the text is not obliterated but coaxes with enough meaning to force a reading, an enter-gizing not by meaning but by imagination. Jim Leftwich, I am happy to see that he has leaped to yet another other place. I’m comin, I’ll be there. Come-on. Let’s leap.
Michael Basinski, The Hold, December 2002
Staceal 1 - by Jim Leftwich.
2002. Unpaged but there has got to be a hundred. Avantacular Press.
1813 Belmar Drive A5, Fort Collins, CO. 80526. $11.23
(Let me must write that this visual work, poems are in the broad general a poetry that demands eyes and ears working as if these senses were wed and web and that somehow there is this sexuality/textuality that you must come to.) You see you must read as an improvisation. So you must write improvisation. Here Leftwich follows the designs of the speaking imagination that does not speak with dictionary words. Staceal is a neologism. Neologisms rejuice! Leftwich's work is a reading vertical rather than narrative or even elliptical progression. As one enters the OPEM, that is a work without boundaries, sort of the way your ship travels in the universe, so then the imagination enters the contexts and the reading is a finding and discovery, slipping the hand that is the mind undercover to come upon. The upon is where you are at as a poet. Not where the French would like you to be. Not where the academy or the non-academy would wish you to be. But where the poetic source? THE GREAT PO! Is. Yore Is, is the place Leftwich's Opems arrive.
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published in Plantarchy 2, 2006
Michael Basinski
Someone Wake Up The Rip Van Winkle Vis-Poets or Basinski is Running off at the Mouth, Yet Again• (Hasn’t he anything better to do?... like: put on a tie, think about chirping sparrows, Excuse the pigs the rest come letter,
Poetic fatigue crawls rampant thought the entomological veins of nearly all contemporary poetry and in visual poetry it is likewise rampantly rancid. The pool of creativity shrinks via our publications and expositions and poets flip and flop about like bottom feeding fish in the broiling quotidian sun. The page and poem are frozen waste without expanse and expression. What is done is has been. Visual poetry has become an empty gun, a stale gem, a polished chuck of costume jewelry, a product crafted in an Asian sweatshop, a faux metal candelabra or a potted plant stand. After generations of the same antique recipe producing the same antique New England clam chowder, the contemporary condition needs illumination, theory, poetic, direction, focus. Visual poetry, if its poets be daring, is positioned to take advantage of the void. I’d like to suggest that forms abandoned in favor of high-e-speed email/internet (don’t be trapped in the net and beyond) communication and the pastime of reading — both aloud and to the self — are vehicles that via visual poetry voodoo (insurrection) can resurrect visual poetry from its casket and position the poetry to become the conduit where vitality and poetic importance and purpose might return to our beloved visual poetry and, thereby, recharge all of our poetry.
Visual poetry is bound frozen in the Arctic antique imagination, in the rigidity of the graphic, minimal and the clever metaphor and in silence. V.P. is on display. What was once beautiful is now a fading museum exhibit. Most VizPo is stuffed and static. It is item and icon, all of which must be abandoned to the literary historian and left for pedantic scholar to ponder. A rich mine there is there to be found. But repetition and mimic is not going to shatter the glass-print ceiling. A venue is to take poetry in hand. Return it to a hand since handwriting is abandoned somewhere about the fourth grade. Having it in hand and making cursive and printed handwriting visual poetry proposes a focused venue for poetic exploration. Write by hand without the rules of handwriting, its lines, and sizes and without the tyranny of spelling. Handwriting allows manipulations and juxtaposition of image and words and expressionistic and aggressive spontaneity. It could be a hybrid of types, or a merger of them with others. Invent (vent the word). A visual poetry with focus on the handwritten opens visual poetry to a larger directed possibility than the constraints of any and all graphic manipulation. It’s in your hands.
And forms for the handwritten poetry? Choose the vessels abandoned by the sheep rushing towards their poetic mediocrity. The friendly and business letter, for instance, an outmoded and abandoned communicative tool, is waiting for rejuvenation as a form of visual poetry, which should extend far beyond our understanding of mail art. Perhaps there are other abandoned forms, painting, sewing, building temples, pyramids and so forth that are the venues of a reinvented poetry rising form from the rotting poetry of the accepted and sanctioned.
And visual poetry, in whatever form, must not be a silent, pretty, static Kodak photo. Silence is murdering visual poetry. A handwritten visual poetry must invigorate the poetic vocal mind that is engaging it in open and active unstructured recitation, without the rigidity of a timeline movement. Speak and sing it as a steek and spring it! No, no commanding a reader to follow a line in time OR force a poor reader to ADMIRE craft, like a fine pair of shoes. Hard or soft tongue: each rendering of a visual poem in out loud in concert or softly in bed before sleepy time-time recitation must be a unique, individualized, new act of conceptional composing on the tongue, off the cuff. Ad-lib. Liberated. Visual poetry is improvisation that is active and organic. But it is not simply mumbo-jumbo, mumble-stumble, and heebiejeebies. Improvisational recitation is a poetry that follows along trajectories in poet mind — the text is a portal into it. The poet speaks poetry from this open portal. The poet improvises without memorizing performance patterns. Current is what matters, finding the current. There is only minimal current in type. It’s a switch (on and off). The energy rests in the hand writing, handwriting that incorporates the possibilities of the word without rigidly, released with pssassion, unrestrained or stained by rule this or rule that or look at my new shiny brass ring, I bought with my father’s money at the MFA sale.
In essence poetry resides on the tongue and is breathe. Sound is what I am writing. The engaged current. To explore and expand the possible in visual poetry, a visual poem must be readable, translatable along trajectories and into words understandable and not, where information as insight epiphany is paramount. It is the poet and not the poem that is priestessly supreme poetry. You poet must sing, sing.
To bring visual poetry into being, in order to release its potential, make its information humanly wealthy poetry, the words or worbs (new living words with metaphorical impact) gotta-be creaking and cracking open. Open as speaking in ungovernable flashes. The words/worbs in active composition in the poems are not directed but become the points from which trajectories spring. The emancipated visual poem in active improvisational recitation resides in the continuous state of birth.
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Michael Basinski interviewed by Doug Holder
Lucid Moon Interview #5
Mike Basinski: A poet. A curator. A dishwasher.
As an editor of the small press, I find myself spending much of my time pushing my journal and the chapbooks we produce to (for the most part) an apathetic public. So it was a pleasure when I received a letter from Mike Basinski, poet and assistant curator at the University At Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection, requesting the complete line of Ibbetson St. Press books and journals. I can't tell you the thrill it was for me and my group of poets to see our work archived and on their on-line catalogue. Basinski and the library seem to have an insatiable appetite for the small press. At a poetry conference in Boston he told me, "Send us more, whatever you have." That's the first time I ever heard that line, and probably the last.
The Poetry/Rare Books Collection at Buffalo is as rare as the poetry it includes in its diverse archives. Rivaled only by Brown University, it contains 90,000 volumes by every major and more importantly (to this editor), minor poets working in English. The collection includes recordings of poets reading their work, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and a huge assortment of literary magazines.
About 60 years ago, Charles Abbot, the head of the Library, began collecting "little" magazines. He knew, (and scholarship has proven this), that poets start in the minor leagues of the small press and sometimes advance to bigger and better things. Currently the Library has 3,500 titles of magazines, 1,100 subscriptions, and about 6,000 broadsides.
When I asked Basinski what he considers himself, a poet/curator or a curator/poet, he answered in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner, "Labels, again. I am a dishwasher." Basinski probably was at one time and I can only assume he used the experience in his poetry. He is a poet from a working class background, in the once-thriving industrial city of Buffalo, NY. In 1973 he was a night student at the University of Buffalo, working a shift job at Buffalo China, a factory that made cups. Indifferent to his poetry, his imagination was jump-started by a reading with Robert Creeley. He writes that he now viewed the cups that he made as being sipped all over the world, participants in conversations, dramas that make up the theater of life. In other words the banal took on a lyrical, transcendent quality. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. He involved himself in the poetry scene, made religious pilgrimages to the poetic holyland of North Beach and Charles Olson's Gloucester, MA. He wrote poetry that stretched the boundaries , full of fragmentary word play, odd topography of text, poetry for music or music for poetry, a host of innovative offbeat styles and modes. I arranged to do an interview with him, via the internet. I found the answers were often unconventional, and as irreverent as his poetry.
Q: Mike, you are not only a curator, but a poet in your own right. I must say I find your work as a poet, "challenging". That is, it does not follow a traditional narrative format. Do you define the body of your work as "experimental"? What is "experimental poetry"?
A: I don't think my poems are experimental at all. I know what I'm doing and am not screwing around at all. My notion has been to expand the material a poet can use in a poem. The alphabet limits. The dictionary limits (Webster is the anti-christ). TV limits. Above all these: other poets limit the potential of poetry. I hear a lot about my "new" work, and then I look and it is not new at all. Is that sad? My fear is that I am setting limits. Poetry is a revolutionary tool if it breaks the mundane of its own existence. Of course, if you make something new, most poets won't like it. We are all, after all, in the business of FAME. My favorite poems are those that come back rejected. I have a picnic basket full of these. Each is an apple that will cause poetry to be flung from the sofa of Eden. It is great to be uncomfortable. This entire notion of poems meaning something or even having meaning of any form is suspect, isn't it? If all writing/words etc. in any form is poetry then there is not experimental poetry--all is and has been and will be already invented. Utilize.
Q: You have written that domesticity is important for a poet to be "centered". This runs counter to the popular notion of the poet as the free living Bohemian, footloose and fancy free. If the poet has the "ball and chain" of family responsibility around his neck, is his work bound to suffer?
A: No, the free-living, Bohemian, footloose and fancy free poets are the most mundane. Did you ever watch hamsters on exercise wheels? Like all immaturity, dressing in personality is a limit. Domesticity, I say, is Nature. Capital N.
Q: You mention Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski as seminal influences on you. You write you didn't want to write like Jack, but that you wanted to be him. Bukowski made you feel that your experience as a working class kid was valid and worthy material for poetry. Can you expand on this?
A: I think social class is important to recognize. Both K and B are not rich kids. Therefore, they represent voices other than those in control of everything. I wouldn't want to be anything like these two writers.. I liked Kerouac . I like Kerouac. I don't hitchhike or etc. He is very romantic. Me-not. He did have a purity. I think this is the Zen of it. Bukowski also. Essentially it makes me tired. Like thinking about the impact of the WEB. Does this have meaning in my life?
Q: Please talk about how you became Assistant Curator at the University Of Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection?
A: I know something about the poem. I come to work on time. I have the form of my mind that remembers where certain objects are. In the middle of all the poetry published in English, even if it is catalogued, alphabetized etc. a lot of things still have a place in mind. All of this is pretty much like a warehouse. I worked in warehouses before I got here. This isn't a lot different than Walmart or Goodyear Tire. It's a warehouse of the imagination. Any imaginary spice you need--we got!
Q: What is your personal mission, and or the mission of the archive?
A: The collection is above the personal. Our charge is: To collect first editions of all poetry published in English. That simple.
Q: What is the criteria for accepting a book, chapbook, or journal into the collection?
A: A book/chapbook has to be a first edition in English. A magazine has to be more than fifty percent poetry. We don't generally collect University, English Department published magazines. Wisconsin does that. They are great at it.
Q: What projects are you working on?
A: I am working on more collage mailing tubes so I can do more instrumental poems with scores. I am making this poetry cartoon called Tarzan Movie. I am fully involved in the performance and propagation of early FLUXUX and new FLUXUS with ensemble called THE BUFF/FLUXUS PROJECT. I'm working on multi-voiced and choral poems, visual and score poems. I am attempting at times to stay away, but working on not being dead. Also I am going to paint the bathroom and insulate the attic. I am also shopping for new rugs. Can't decide if we want green or beige. What do you think? This week I was deciding to get some concord grapes. They are in season and my daughter likes them.
Q: Any parting shots?
A: In the end, I deal with the horrible beauty of poetry. I always was reminded of Acteon sneaking a peak at Diana. He of course was transformed by that act and was torn to shards because of it. This then is the tension of poetry. Can you get a peek without killing yourself? Can you get a way from the dogs or will they tear you up? What will you see? Not what is given on a plate. What do you see when you peer into the pine grotto? And why is Diana so pissed off? Why does Acteon want to peek? Essentially then, this is my poem. All of them. It is a moment when both Diana and Acteon realize the future of their situation. Romance and sorrow. Beauty and destruction. Love and yearning. Lust and fury. Well, it seems the poem is not beauty and the beast, but beauty is the creature. It is so marvelous.
This interview originally appeared in "Hunger" magazine. (no date, circa 1995)
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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2015
Doug Holder, Interview with Mike Basinski: Curator of the University at Buffalo Libraries' Special Collection.
I caught up recently with my friend Mike Basinski, curator of the University at Buffalo Libraries/ Special Collections. The University at Buffalo website states that the poetry collection is ".... the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century poetry in English. Founded in 1937 by Charles Abbott, the Poetry Collection now holds one of the world’s largest collections of poetry first editions and other titles, little literary magazines, broadsides and anthologies; a substantial collection of artworks; and more than 150 archives and manuscript collections from a wide range of poets, presses, magazines and organizations."
The collection has just about every Ibbetson Street Press title we published, and provides a huge service to the literary small press. I interviewed Mike about ten years ago--so I wanted to revisit him.
Doug Holder: So, if you are game, tell me what is up for you for the past decade—professional and personal
Mike Basinski: Well, I take care of the realm of the poem. As the world should know, libraries are changing. I don’t mean just the digitizing of certain materials. What is digitized is always somebody’s selection and things are selected for… money, power, prestige, and politics, for example. There is a selection process so democracy always at the end of the line. Not to gloom. I don’t. Libraries are changing and there is less publicly supplied funding for libraries. But what I am saying is that poetry and the poem is still small, relatively, and still lives in a book. Care is about funds to buy poetry books, subscribe to poetry magazines, secure poetry broadsides. The State of New York only funds 11% of the University at Buffalo, so poem funds have to come from someplace else and it comes from friends of poetry and the poem. I beg. Tin cup in hand. The priority for the Poetry Collection is expanding. Always I wish to maintain first our first edition collection but to do that we need friends. I have lots of ties, around my neck and in the community, community of art, the realm of the poem, anywhere. I say, this is a public institution so this Poetry Collection is the public’s collection and by facts we are all curators of this collection. So, what do I do at work: Keep the doors open so in may waltz and walk the poem. These are strange times. Fear not, I have my finger in the dike!
And, well, I am happy to say, I am on guard. And we have friends and more friends each day. A friend a day keeps the apple away. I am not just being old time. Tis a modern world. I don’t blame the State or the University. I also pay taxes, too many. But I also call to arms. Being a poet is being responsible for the world of the poem. Be poetry’s friend – write me and will work it out: basinski@buffalo.edu
I keep making the poem with real letters and visual letters as has been my form forever. Each day the poem summons and I respond. I am thinking of a poem of just end lines. A poem that is a text for pure improvisation. I keep thinking of one phrase in Ulysses, which is “a form of forms,” which is in one sense jazz but should be the poem. There is where I am happy. I am looking for the right combination of sounds which will be the spell that introduces magic back in this sometimes very stale and sour world. I know it is there.
What else? My wife and I have a home near some woods, some of which is ours, and there are deer and fox and such, and provides else viewing. I sit in the heaven of the woods. What more!
DH: Any poets you have your eye on?
MB: Eye Catching poets? I am at the stage of rereading. H.D., Pound, Basil Bunting. Like listening to old records – great. Kerouac. I like reading myself. I like reading new books by Lisa Jarnot, Dodie Bellamy, and Susan Howe. I always stop and read them. And I found the poems of Ruth Fainlight – all wonderful moons. And the poet – Patrick Riedy. He is a real poet – he is the Keats of Lackawanna, New York.
DH: Any magazines that strike your fancy?
MB: I am a local guy, so I like local literary magazines. Our freshest in Buffalo: Yellow Field . Edric Mesmer molds each issue. It is NEW! Yellow Field, attn.: Edric Mesmer, 1217 Delaware Ave. – Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. yellowedenwaldfield[at]yahoo[dot]com
DH: Your philosophy of poetry and good writing?
MB: I like all poetry. We have to join together and forget our camps and agendas and I am this poet and your write like that. We are all Ring Tailed Lemurs and the society is cutting down our Madagascar. All of this your kinda poem and my underground and ivory tower – poets, watch the hell out! We are one big union and have to think that way. Or it’s over the edge.
Good writing? I have no woRms of wisdom.
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Michael Basinski
The Sound Pome Today Must Come to Bum Impoemivsational.
House Press, Canada, 2001
Improvisational phoneticism and a constellation of improvisational techniques that utilizes all forms of sound equals an improvisational poetry or expressionistic poetry where all forms and multi-forms of poetic music can become part of a random aural poem spewing from the open door of the poet’s imagination.
Gone are the days, my overly scholarly, politically narrow minded, and economically endowed poet friends, when long hours of nightly masturbation and the freezing of words only on the helpless leaf will suffice.
Our form now shall be all spontaneous vocalization above and below speech and speaking, seeking and beseeching voice and the humdrum of the voice reading dictionary words. And also included will be all aspects of possible human manufactured sound, which could and will include eating, drinking, tapping the foot, slapping and clapping the hands, slapping the face, spanking and speaking, and noise and various noise abstraction. Singing and sing song, yes. A measure by breath only, no. But that can be an instrument also. This open syndicate places instantaneous, spontaneous music, expressive and experimental creatively back in the text without locking the text, like other toy trains, locked onto preordained dull shaped track patterns.
And relies upon aural presentation of literary score (what the ancient called a poem AKA antique text) and the delivery is accomplished by an individual performer in performance using ALL performance possibilities.
Poetry might even become popular if the trash collector's can banging becomes poetry. After all any imbecile may make noise.
How arrogant of those late night, over stuffed, too well read, bitter lettuce eaters to claim the word poem to mean what they write WHAT ARE void of expressionistic sound. It AINT correct to write the word SOUND and next to it the word POEM. It is an act consolatory. A defiant mood of poetry seize the word poem redefine its operative meaning and condemn the antique poem to the dust bin of literary history.
Antinue poems are restrictive in their reading rather than expressive. For all the talk of music, little music is made, simply because music, which is sound is absent. Most antinuqe poetry prefer soundless poetry.
The era and realm of the audio nature of words, letters, consonants and constellations of some, all or any of these and where pitch and noise becomes the prominent technique of the poem is most welcome. Our poem shifts focus from the (dictionary) meaning centered (narartiave or non narrative) poem to a poem centered on the audio nature of words, letters.
Reading poems isn't any longer reading but allowing, opening the body imangination to become an instrument of poetry. All persons are poets. The conversation is poetry. Live performance as in instaneous interpretation of un-maped poetic terrain is the only Live perfoance of improvisation poetry or the Impoemivsational entity.
Some proposals:
The Impoemivsational is the SUPERNATURAL LEFT OF POETRY.
Perform the poetic imagination with the tool of: THE ANALOGICAL PROPOSITION. The antilogical proposition. The poem acts as a pathway — a map to a devine instance.
That is how inspired is the poetry not how perfect is frozen on the page.
It is not only what the text said that counted but how the text is presented — he poem is said the own phonetically — but where and what is said — the state of the poet or the poet in the state of the her imagination
The increased speed of improvisation leads to apocalyptic reform/perform dance. Here the word poems equal sound sensation. Calling into time it's own style and judgement and oral tradition.
Phonetism of symbols livbe, shapes , talking sings. - composed of expressive script — all possible numance at anbyt - improvisational minutes. — multi-lingual state = leap into the impossiiblities
Language tricks to the dedreee the poet merges with the devine the peot eners the
imaginatiionand the act of that becomes the peotry.
as many different forms of sound that can be uttered becomes the poetry. The range of the poet's ability to deliver aurally, not the frozen
can occur and should because it is the range of the poet, not the technique, or deep
philosophical understanding that governs the poem.
It is the performance and it is the personality of that performance that is the poem. It is the amount of duende and the number of duende within the poet that is the measure of the poem.
Reading rate increases accelerates so the sound poems translate it as you the reader falls into the score — the poem translates itself. And that translation is also part of the poem.
The axiom that the writing reflected spoken language and thus words order could used to determine the word even when you could not red it therefore make an improvised meaning not to read but to red is to sound. Meant and meaning — again are left with books — a good, safe and suburban place for them.
Sound poems has a sacred proposition that has the capability to capture the order (the ordered chaos) of the cosmos and to inform dictionary history to give form to poetry ritual (reading the poem as exposing the immigration of the poet) and to transform the profane material of the dictionary in the supernatural.
WRITING IT - Improvisational guidelines:
The contents of a word contain emotional, cultural, political and sociological history, and any number of icals not here mentioned. As is, these Tupperware words - tupperwords - are the stuff of most poetry. The dictionary is a burial crypt larger then all of Egypt. Inside tupperwords is the moldy stuff you should have had for lunch 10 days ago.
The question is how to you spell YOUR words
The convention of text as the crysalis of poetry changes directly to the poet as vessel of poetry.
Improvisationcal poetry mixes systems utilized fully composed words, words signs combined with signs representing word signs, combinations with signs representing sounds of syllables.
Sound poetry is spells words were signs representing individual sounds as well as signs
representing whole words
A phonetic complement, a possible paratactic on a single word all consonants are utilities or possible
Spell the word using only phonetic signs strings or scapes of images or a combination of both - composed of a consonant-vowel consonant string
Semantic determinative — the word that should be read. The word becomes an image of a word an intermediary between sound and text a thing that exists is performance only.
Writing in cuneiform without breaks, and cue also strengthens.
Improvisation I poetry maenad
the written poem is simply a sound map or guide and it used only a May pole or poet around which to move.
