vispoets-visua poetry in the news

Last VisPo in Moscow

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:33:34 +0000

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=100000105188171

Last VisPo in Smolensk & Budapest

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:40:33 +0000

http://scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score/2010/04/selections-from-the-last-vispo-anthology-on-exhibit-in-smolensk-russia-budapest-hungary.html

vispo intro at one night stanzas

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:53:43 +0000

Here's an intro to vispo designed for young poets (so no one over 35! Ok, 40) at a Scottish based blog.

http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/?p=600

I wrote to the young woman who hosts the site and she seemed keen - lots of links, she's obviously been looking around - and I think her intro is just fine for up n coming poets.

Stephen.

review of vispo in POETRY magazine

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:59:37 +0000

comment at your own risk:

http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/0...l.html#comments

Mary Ellen Solt, 1920-2007

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:09:32 +0000

Mary Ellen Solt, 86; poet, poetry critic
By Mary Rourke
Los Angeles Times
June 29, 2007

Mary Ellen Solt, a poet and poetry critic who often arranged words on the page in a visual graphic, resulting in such works as "Forsythia," a poem that looks like a flowering shrub, has died. She was 86.

Solt died June 21 at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Santa Clarita after suffering a stroke, her daughter Susan said.

She was a leader in the concrete poetry movement that emerged in the 1960s. It held that the visual effect of letters, words and phrases on a page is an important element in poetry.

A poem is "an object in its own right for its own sake" that "communicates first and foremost its structure," Solt wrote in her book "Concrete Poetry: A World View," published in 1968.

She traced the history of the movement from 17th century English sonnets with their exacting form, through the stream-of-consciousness writing of symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme in the 19th century and Irish novelist and poet James Joyce in the 20th, to the free-association poetry of e e cummings. All three writers experimented with the arrangement of words on the page.

Solt also credited her friend and poet William Carlos Williams as a mentor, because he aimed to "revitalize a language divorced from meaning," she wrote in her poem "Words and Spaces."

"Forsythia," her most popular work, is the clearest example of her concrete verses. The title appears at the bottom of the page. Each letter has a different word "growing" out of it to form a "branch" of the plant.

The poem speeds along on free association: "forsythia out race springs yellow telegram hope insists action." The work was first published during the social upheavals of the mid-1960s and suggests that the yellow blossoming shrub announces change.

Although concrete poetry never received the attention of the Beat poetry that came before it, poets from Western Europe to Latin America were part of the movement.

The Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote a love poem, titled "Au Pair Girl," that was arranged on the page in the shape of a pear.

Poetry critics gave concrete poetry a mixed review in the 1960s. "One's first impression � is of trivial though perhaps charming playfulness," wrote M.L. Rosenthal in his 1967 book, "The New Poets, American and British Poetry Since World War II."

He compared concrete poetry to "amusing wallpaper for intellectuals."

In their defense, however, he gave the concrete poets credit for raising the basic question, "What constitutes poetic power?" from a new perspective.

In recent years, the movement has been reevaluated as a forerunner to digital poetry, which is composed on a computer, Marjorie Perloff, a poetry critic on the faculty at USC, said in an interview this week.

Digital poets choose their type font, add color choices and arrange the words on the screen in the spirit of the concrete poets, "who felt that poems are to be not just heard but seen," Perloff said.

Solt was born Mary Ellen Bottom on July 8, 1920, in Gilmore City, Iowa. She gradated from what was then Iowa State Teachers College and earned a master's degree in English literature at the University of Iowa.

She met her future husband, Leo Frank Solt, at teachers college. The couple married in 1946 and had two children.

After graduating from teachers college, Solt taught high school English for some years and then joined the faculty of Indiana University, where she taught comparative literature until she retired in the early 1990s.

She moved to Los Angeles in 1996.

Throughout her career, Solt's poems were published in poetry magazines and anthologies.

Besides Susan, a faculty member in the theater department at the California Institute of the Arts, Solt is survived by another daughter, Catherine of New York City, and a sister, Jean Peterson, of Iowa City, Iowa. Her husband died in 1994.

Services are pending.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...home-obituaries
(h/t Silliman)

Painting and Calligraphy, Converge of Two Arts

Thu, 24 May 2007 06:31:34 +0000

Born in 1949 in city of Kermanshah, Karami has a bachelor degree in interior design. Karami who has created a large number of painting and calligraphy works during the past 23 years, has hold some 15 individual exhibitions from his works and has participated in more than 30 group exhibitions inside Iran and some other countries so far. Just like the other exhibitions which are held by Pasargadae Gallery, the Painting and Calligraphy Exhibition by Alireza Karami in which 20 of his works have been displayed, was greatly welcomed by visitors who came to the gallery to enjoy the works of this great artists and share in this philanthropy activity, which a percentage of its sales benefits belong to WFP projects. In an interview with CHN, Karami explained about his experience in painting and calligraphy works.

Details here.

Taiga-Gyokuran painting/calligraphy show

Fri, 18 May 2007 17:10:14 +0000

Review in today's NY Times of �Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush� at Philadelphia Museum of Art, with slide show. Worth checking out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/arts/design/18nang.html

johnny hart (1931-2007)

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:51:32 +0000

yes folks, the creator of b.c. and the co-creator of the wizard of id has died. seems sol lewitt's passing might've eclipsed this equally important passage in north american arts and letters, so please take note.

the various links to and from johnny hart and concrete poetry are legion. many have cribbed, borrowed, quoted or downright stolen from him. (guilty!)everybody's favorite dead canadian concrete poet bpnichol named one of his many imprints after the sound a dinosaur from the strip made -- GRONK !

his early strips were really wonderful and funny. his use of pared down, spare, clean lines is nearly without parallel. (or it was then, when he introduced these features to newspaper cartooning.)

et cetera.

here's an obit:

�B.C.� and �Wizard of Id� Cartoonist Johnny Hart, 76

Adam Bernstein; Washington Post Staff Writer

�Johnny Hart, 76, whose comic strips �B.C.� and �The Wizard of Id� used wisecracking cave men and henpecked sorcerers to comment on modern life, and who attracted controversy when he introduced Christianity into his work, died April 7 at his home in Nineveh, N.Y., near Binghamton. Mr. Hart recently completed treatment for non-Hodgkin�s lymphoma and died at his drawing table after a stroke, said his wife of 55 years, Bobby Hatcher Hart. Mr. Hart became one of the most popular cartoonists of his era, with a readership estimated at 100 million since starting �B.C.� in 1958 and �The Wizard of Id� in 1964 (with artist Brant Parker). Creators Syndicate distributed both strips, each of which appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers, including The Washington Post.

�B.C.� refers to the age �Before Christ� and also is the name of Mr. Hart�s naive cave-dwelling protagonist, but for years there was little overt religious plotting in the strip. Among the characters were the one-legged cave man poet, Wiley, and a menagerie of talking animals, including an ant, a clam and a lovelorn dinosaur named Gronk. The female characters were Cute Chick and Fat Broad, names that were anatomically, if not politically, correct. For a strip whose tone was lighthearted, �B.C� suddenly became controversial in the 1990s when Mr. Hart included themes influenced by his fundamental Christianity and literal interpretation of the Bible. He did so sparingly, often around holy days, but its inclusion was perceived by many readers as making him far more frank about Christianity than any of his mainstream contemporaries. Some newspapers canceled the strip. Others, including The Post, pulled it selectively.

On at least one occasion, the Los Angeles Times relocated it to the religion page. The Times initially canceled the strip -- scheduled to run on Palm Sunday 1996 -- showing Wiley drafting a poem about Jesus�s suffering on the cross. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson told viewers of his �700 Club� show to protest, especially as political cartoons often criticized religion. The uproar that followed led the paper to run the �B.C.� strip on the religion page. Other work by Mr. Hart brought criticism from Jewish and Muslim groups for what they called insensitive and at times offensive themes. One Easter �B.C.� strip showed a menorah�s candles being extinguished as the candelabra morphs into a cross; the final frame included the words, �It is finished.� To his critics, this symbolized a triumph of Christianity over Judaism, but Mr. Hart said it was meant to �pay tribute to both� religions.

Muslims were enraged by another �B.C.� strip that ran during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It featured an outhouse with multiple crescents -- a symbol associated with Islam -- and showed a cave man saying from inside the makeshift bathroom, �Is it just me, or does it stink in here?� Mr. Hart told The Post he intended the cartoon to be a silly� bathroom joke, adding, �It would be contradictory to my own faith as a Christian to insult other people�s beliefs.�

John Lewis Hart, a firefighter�s son, was born Feb. 18, 1931, in Endicott, N.Y. As a child, he said he drew �funny pictures, which got me in or out of trouble depending on the circumstances.� After high school, he served in the Air Force in Korea and produced cartoons for Pacific Stars and Stripes. The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and True magazines later published his freelance cartoon submissions while Mr. Hart worked in the art department at General Electric in Johnson City, N.Y. While at GE, he created �B.C.� and based many of the characters and their quirks on his friends and family.

�I tried to reduce my cartoons to the fewest words and the least clutter in the drawing,� he said in 1997. �The simpler you do things, the more genius is required to do it. I used to take ideas as far back as I could take them -- back to their origin. So cave men became my favorite thing to do because they are a combination of simplicity and the origin of ideas.� He told an interviewer for a Milwaukee newspaper that he and Parker, an artist he had long known, started �Wizard of Id� because �I felt I couldn�t get satirical enough as there�s no society to work with in �B.C.� It deals with the basics, man�s foibles and follies. So it was an obvious transition for me from cave man to medieval times where there is a set society.�

Among the recurring characters in �Wizard of Id� were a despotic king and a drunken court jester. In a 1999 profile of Mr. Hart, The Post reported that the artist�s own drinking �got out of hand� over the years before he found solace in religion. Mr. Hart said he was not from a devout family and �got mad at God� after his mother died of cancer at 52. He said he struggled with varieties of faith, including a belief in reincarnation, all the while enjoying the material success of his strips. He settled on a 150-acre property with a big lake and a private road.

One day, a father and son team of workers came to install cable television. They were born-again Christians and kept the television tuned to religious broadcasts, which Mr. Hart said �hooked� him. �B.C.� soon became a prominent outlet for his interpretations of faith. �I get incredible response on the positive side,� Mr. Hart told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. �I don�t know if it�s the liberalization of this country or whatever [that] has taken prayer out of schools and pulled the Ten Commandments off the walls of courts, and we�ve become a nation of heathens. �The Christians are still out there, but they�re hiding,� he said. �They�re afraid because every time somebody tries to make a move, somebody steps on them and pushes them back or locks them out. So they think that I�m a hero, and I�m not... That�s probably the most pathetic thing of all, that they admire me and think that I�m courageous and brave to mention God�s name.�

Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters; a brother; a sister; and two grandsons.�

a rare bird sings

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:45:05 +0000

one never knows what this guy will do TO an audience, but for those in the know or those just curious this may be worth their while?

Gustave Morin

Date: Thursday, March 29, 2007
Time: 7:30 pm
Place: Oakham House (Room G), Ryerson University
63 Gould Street - north of Dundas and east of Church, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

http://www.ryerson.ca/english/news/live_poets.html

(as someone pointed out, 'live poets' is a funny way to broadcast those not dead. -- i.e. get 'em while they're hot!)

Conserning about the "money" and the "visual poetry"?

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:09:39 +0000

Found that article/news at IndiaTimes.

Quote

"Art historian Saryu Doshi, also the former director of National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai feels that the beauty of visual poetry is enhanced by its display and presentation."

Well the basic idea of the article is "Can visual poetry appeal to connoisseurs of art as well as the masses and thereby create a market for itself?". Does it matter? I found that attitude towards Vispo a bit dumb.