Small Press Review, Volume 35, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2003

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Said presentations, each a half hour long, began with Miekal And's visiopoetic computer animations. He showed an especially winning one he had at his website called "After Emmett" that had gotten many hits for a short time because noticed by the mass media somewhere. Inspired by Emmett Williams's "Voy Age," it consists of squares made up of the nine letters of one, two or three words (e.g., "e v o/ l u t/ i o n," "e a r/ v o y/ a g e"). The squares appear one at a time, their letters blinking arrestingly through numerous, extremely varied fonts--and spelling beyond, way beyond, simple denotation. Another I particularly liked was "SeedSigns for Philadelpho, an homage to South American visual poet, Philadelpho Menezes, who recently died. Here And formed the letters of "Philadelpho" with seeds that he placed on top of his scanner, then animated and danced through various yowwy gyrations. Both these works--and much else of high interest--are at http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/floraspirae/inhale.html.

Next on my schedule was Ficus strangulensis. He showed slides of many of his transforms, as Crag Hill calls such pieces (or "transmorfations," as Ficus calls them). These are pieces in which a word or phrase--"live," in one of Ficus's--is graphically altered in discrete steps until some poetically appropriate new word or phrase--"live" becomes "erode" in the one mentioned--is revealed. I was familiar with most, but not with the details of how Ficus uses his computer to make them, which should help me with future poems of my own. He showed other works of his, as well, mostly textual collages. I had also seen many of these, but only in black&white, so was pleased to see them now in full color.

I caught Igor Satanovsky's presentation after Ficus's. Igor mainly showed and discussed stuff from his book, American Poetry (free and how), which I reviewed here some time back. Carlos Luis, whose presentation I next attended, went back and forth between Spanish and English. I may have understood his Spanish better than his English, and I don't speak Spanish. But he's a dynamic, extremely personable performer, so what he did physically more than made up for any words I missed.

After Carlos's half-hour, I went to a reading from his translations of Malcolm de Chazal's Sens-Plastique by Irving Weiss, with the silent, knitting accompaniment of his daughter, she all in black, he all in white. Lots of sharp observations, a few not-so-sharp, but fun. Fairly sex-centered, many of them. Scott Helmes's presentation followed. It included some ravishing new pieces from his Visual Specere series of cut-outs from magazines which he claims are not collages. I think he's right, as they are narrative, as he also claims, and more linear than collage in that there are definite starting and ending points for their reading. He brought up his and my disagreement as to whether they were poems or not, John M. Bennett and others saying they were, which made me yell out that they weren't--in what I considered a humorously annoyed fashion. Later Scott said he'd asked people their opinion on the question, and about half agreed with him, half with me.

I wandered around the campus during the lunch break, one of the very large, rich muffins the library had out for snacks making up my lunch--with some cracker jacks I had bought during my bus ride to Columbus. I got lost, naturally, but was helped back to the library by a few nice people (it took more than one!). When the symposium began again, I took in John Byrum and his wife Arleen Hartman's "Generator & Another Incomplete Understanding." It used two slide projectors and a boombox. Two walls of images, in other words, one of which I wasn't aware of till more than halfway through the presentation, for it was behind me. Lots of interesting graphics, some usually who-knows-what texts. While the slides were shown, John read some kind of jump-cut, numbered list whose contents I now forget but which held my attention at the time. And I remember seeing a lot of fascinatingly resonant-in-the-context networks (tree branches, nerve branches, river systems, capillaries, etc.).

The presentation beginning times were not in synch, so I missed the beginning of Dave Baratier's presentation, but think I got the main gist. He said some provocative things about letter-writing and read some letters from a published collection of letters of his. They sounded like poems to me. Certainly they were full of arresting lines--but, alas, I was too out of it to take notes, so can't quote any. Equally enjoyable was Sheila Murphy's later reading, with lots of genial, interesting commentary in-between poems. Just before Sheila's reading, I went to Kathy Ernst's slide show of various works, most of which I was already familiar with, but enjoyed seeing again, particularly her pieces from Plaisir D'Amour, which I'd call a break-out work, except that she's always doing break-out works.

At 3, almost everyone went to John M. Bennett's reading. I've been at a couple of John's readings, though, and heard him a lot on tape, so went to Michael Magazinnik's presentation. Mike read in Russian and English along with and/or against overhead projections of visual material. The highlights included his consonant poetry, and a piece incorporating a toy musical box. Mike ended early, which gave me a chance to appropriate five or ten minutes of his time and show and try intelligently to comment on Karl Kempton's fine "In Her Own Words" sequence.

My own presentation followed. I probably hurried a little too much but still didn't get through all my pieces. Here's what Igor Satanovsky later said on the internet about me: "I have seen some math poetry before, but nothing like Bob's work. He specializes in Mathemaku (his hybrid of haiku and math poetry), which he creates by constructing weird division formulas, where instead of numbers we find entities like 'spring', 'woods' and 'memory.' What I most admire about Bob is his ability to pick up the most cliched romantic notions and turn them into poetry." He said a little more, but it wasn't sufficiently flattering for me to quote it here.

The day ended with a panel discussion on collaborating. I don't think anything truly memorable was said, though Marilyn Rosenberg said some particularly sensible things, and Scott Helmes started things off well by admitting that his main reason for collaborating was that he was lazy. My main pleasure was listening to people whose presentations I'd missed or who hadn't presented, and fixing names to faces, especially of Lewis LaCook and Jesse Glass.