The Blake Test

 

When I compared Brian Kim Stefans’ Please Think Again (Poem for Airports) with Carla Harryman’s Open Box on 13 December, I set off a flurry of responses on the ubuweb listserv, some of them defensive, one or two of them uncharitable, and at least one openly ageist:

 

It strikes me that Ron is admittedly very old fashioned, rather conservative, and stuck in his ways (perhaps as an artist of his age should be).

 

I got what I deserved, I suspect. I was trying to do one thing (explain why I liked Carla Harryman’s work so much) & veered off into another realm altogether (setting up a quick comparative chain between her piece, Stefans’ and the deliberately “uncreative” writing of Kenny Goldsmith). I might have been able to articulate that connection more effectively had I taken the time & space to spell out each of my ideas along the way, but instead I compacted it into a couple of paragraphs. Everyone – even Carla Harryman – pointed out that I was failing to note all that is excellent in Brian Kim Stefans’ work. It was, Harryman wrote in a Squawkbox comment, “an apples and oranges comparison.”

 

As Harryman, Stefans & Goldsmith all noted, conflating Brian & Kenny together, especially in Please Think Again, was a misdescription. It fails to capture what either is doing. Trying then to link this imaginary union back to Carla’s work just sort of turns into so much mumbling. The logical structure was A = -A, therefore B. Not my finest moment.

 

So what was I getting at? What precisely do I mean about the Blake Test & what is it about that apples & oranges comparison causes me to prefer apples to oranges, so to speak? Vispo Geof Huth took up the challenge of making sense where I had not, especially since he came to conclusions that, in his own words, “differ remarkably” from my own. In his first post, he examines the Blake Test itself. In his second post, he contrasts Harryman’s text with Stefans’, finding that Brian’s text integrates the verbal & the visual while Harryman’s is, in Huth’s words, “essentially a text trapped within a meaningless carapace.”

 

I don’t agree with either of Huth’s conclusions – no surprise there – but I appreciate his ability & willingness to take on the question in pretty much the same terms as I posed them. You can’t ask much more of a reader than that.

 

At the core of where I disagree with Huth is, I suspect, the stance he takes vis-à-vis the Blake Test, that the poem, if it be a good one, prove to be “platform independent.” There are, according to the Amazon database, over 1,200 books currently in print by, about or significantly including William Blake. These range from some really magnificant facsimile editions of Blake’s own illuminated manuscripts to pocket-sized gift books that turn him into so much neat rime & good feeling, perfect for that nephew whom you have heard is “vaguely literary.” The remarkable thing is that while it is manifestly clear that Blake understood his poems as fitting into the richly textured graphic presentations he gave them, they manage to survive the awful redaction into cold Bembo type in a mass market pocketbook.

 

Huth does something interesting in his reaction to this phenomenon, something actually not so unlike my conflating Stefans & Goldsmith in my original muddle of an argument. Using “The Chimney Sweep” as his test case, he concludes that Blake does indeed pass the Blake Test. “Certainly, the words . . . can stand on their own.” So far so good. But Huth continues: “but that only proves that Blake has written two different poems,” one visual, one verbal. One oranges, one apples, we might as well say.

 

Huth doesn’t quite get my position right when he argues that “I find it easy to understand why a poet would believe that the language of a poem must stand on its own: Words have primacy to the poet.” That’s not actually what I said, or at least not exactly what I meant. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

 

It’s Huth’s other definition that interests me most:

 

The visual poem is not platform-independent. It depends on a certain operating system, a particular software, and sometimes even a certain piece of hardware to be its intended visual self.

 

This I think is more problematic, although I would agree with Huth that this does seem to be the current state of practice for most visual poetry. Huth’s description of Blake’s “two poems” draws this problematic out:

 

One of these poems is the bare text itself, haunting and woeful. The other poem is that Blake created by combining his poet’s pen with his painter’s palette—by devising a hybrid presentation that is both exceptionally visual and definitely verbal.

 

This “hybrid presentation,” any upstanding Junior Woodchuck who has earned his Deconstruction Badge could tell you, is an oxymoron. One does a “presentation” precisely because that which ought to have been immanent turns out not to be, in actuality, present. Insert all the discourse on supplements & absence here.

 

So what’s missing? Not the words – they’re still here. Rather, a connection between the language of the poem – the same language in either case – and its connectedness to the system of writing & its social instituions, ranging from doodling & drawing all the way to fine press printing. It’s exactly the failure of the “bare text itself” to call forth that dimension that forces Blake – indeed, any visual poet – to create a “hybrid,” to augment textuality.

 

Now this is not necessarily an argument that the bare text approach is any better than a hybrid one. It really depends on what one is after. But what is especially important, from my vantage point, “old fashioned, rather conservative” as it may very well be, is that these two kinds of textuality differ decisively in the state of being they seek to attain. The integration of the visual & verbal that is the goal of vispo is pretty much beside the point from a “bare text” perspective. But what exactly do we mean by “bare text”?

 

It’s not, in fact, the words. Or not only & possibly not even most importantly. Rather, it is what comes through them, is embodied by them, comes into being through no other means. Syntax for one – a dimension that Robert Duncan equated with God on occasion. The self-presence of consciousness itself. The cornocopia of the vertical – each word a selection out of so many possible alternatives. As I put it, writing of Harryman’s Open Box,

 

There is that instant of cognitive depth – no one has ever defined more acutely than Bob Grenier in “On Speech,” “the word way back in the head that is the thought or feeling forming out of the ‘vast’ silence/noise of consciousness experience world all the time, as waking/dreaming, words occurring and these are the words of the poems . . . .”

 

Grenier is an interesting case in point. He is, after all, some kind of visual poet, making his living by selling his poems in limited fine press prints through art galleries. Consider, for example:

 

 

This poem reads

 

A

RED

HOUSE

BORN

 

and is rather characteristic of recent texts of Grenier’s. Here, reduced to “bare text”, are some other poems of Grenier’s from 2004:

 

AFTER

NOON

SUN

SHINE

 

*

 

SHOWER

AFTER

DARK

RAINS

 

*

 

MOON

IT’S

THE

RE

 

*

 

ANY

AND

EVERY

FROG

 

*

 

PLUM

AND

PLUM

WHITE

 

*

 

DARK

IT

OFTEN

WAS

 

These are not necessarily the poems as they appear on Grenier’s page, but rather the language involved: words, sounds, syntax. Anyone who has read Grenier’s work going back the last 30 years or thereabouts will recognize concerns & strategies in these poems that are absolutely consistent with his writing in the now-classic “Chinese box” edition of Sentences. That work, which began as a deck of cards – no two boxes were in the same sequence – now lives on the web, it is worth noting, in a flash version thanks to Whale Cloth publisher Michael Waltuch. These poems pass the Blake Test in flying colors.

 

Huth uses a poem of his own for a sample of his test:

 

 

Much harsher on his own poem that I would be inclined to be, Huth writes that it

 

seems to me to be not very much at all when reduced to

ope( poen
o’er poem

 

In fact, the poem’s elaboration of possible displacements that might extend out of one of the English language’s rare instances of a muted or hidden consonant (o’er for over), that old Shakespearean rag, strikes my ear as playful & incisive. It is not at all self-evident to me that the poem is “reduced” when extracted from its graphic format. Ditto, I must say, for the Grenier above.

 

Huth’s poem “ope(“ has a clearly defined sound element that enables it to move across formats effectively, as do all of Grenier’s. Some visual poems, however, eschew that realm:

 

 

 

Hmmm. This piece, Huth’s own “The Letter Three Hairpin Turns,” involves sound only incidentally, or at least this is how I hear it. That Huth would think to design this poem & say of his own “ope(“ that it “seems . . . to be not very much at all” suggests that Huth’s interested in language as sound is only incidental – nice to have when it pops up, but not necessarily vital. Certainly not central or decisive.

 

This seems to me a vital & useful distinction between poetry & vizpo: the former “refers” or “extends” back to the domain of language in the classic ways that linguists have referred to language for the past hundred or so years. Vispo, on the other hand, refers to the system of writing, graphical & silent, a system that is not necessarily “secondary” (again, the old Derridean commentaries are calling), but which is certainly less well understood as a system. Huth is absolutely correct when he asserts that the “visual poem is not platform-independent.” All writing systems, from brush & papyrus to Macromedia software, are in some sense historical. If we’re conscious of this in our generation, it’s because we live in a time when these tools are coming into existence at a dizzying pace. A poem such as Please Think Again (A Poem for Airports) wasn’t even physically possible when I began writing in the 1960s, save in film (and there only using animation techniques that seem crude by today’s CGI standards).

 

If we have entered an age in which vispo is flowering – and I would think that this is pretty safe argument to put forward, frankly – it may be (in the larger sociohistorical frame) precisely because we as readers & writers have become hyperaware of these new methods of writing / printing / publication. Huth, who may be the first serious theoretician of visual poetries, has been trying out a lengthy series of propositions in his blog. Among these – further evidence for the flowering thesis – is an attempt at a thesaurus entry for visual poetry. But the one that comes closest to my Harryman / Stefans argument is Huth’s application of trobar clus:

 

Visual poets create visual poetry for visual poets, just as poets create poetry for poets.

 

This acknowledges – as the “Ron is old-fashioned, very conservative,” etc. argument does not – that the relationship between poetry & vispo is not temporal, the latter succeeding the former, but rather that they’re different genres altogether, at least as different as poetry vs. fiction. Or, say, the way different modes of music co-exist, even as we can trace their “origins” to different points in history. Otherwise, John Zorn & Fred Frith would be “old-fashioned” compared to Will Smith simply because the former “come out of” jazz tradition whereas Smith derives from rap.

 

Like Grenier, Stefans produces work that often has some relationship to both traditions, both genres. One glance at Please Think Again –

 

 

– and it’s self-evident that the work has a relationship to vispo. Less evident – to my eyes – is the relationship to poetry that Stefans & others insist that this piece has. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have one. It does mean, however, that it’s less successful because at least this reader can’t see it. In that sense, this poem is more like showing up for the Blake Test without a sharpened number two pencil. You might get 800s on both verbal & visual, but we may never know. At least not without a “translation,” not unlike the one above for the Grenier scrawl pieces.

 

What’s the bottom line here? For me at least, it’s a need to acknowledge the separateness of the two genres, poetry & vispo. I have an interest in visual poetry not unlike my interest in film: it informs what I know about the world and my times therein, but neither is a genre I’m ever apt to practice personally, and largely for the same reasons. Contrasting Harryman & Stefans, then, makes as much sense as contrasting Harryman with Douglas Sirk or Ousmane Sembene. Or Stefans with Ed Ruscha or Jenny Holzer. Goldsmith, whose work is conceptual & process oriented, and whose books are documents rather than texts, as such, is a different kettle of fish altogether.

 

There is, after all, a true tradition of poetic intermedia – not just works that operate within both poetry & vispo realms, but between, say, poetry & fiction, such as Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. My sense is – maybe this is my primary thesis after all – that any of these art forms is best served not by attempting to achieve perfect balance between genres – I actually suspect that this is impossible – but rather by artists who are thoroughly (thoughtfully) committed. Grenier, for example, is a poet who uses some of the tools of vispo. His work may be distributed, at least in part, in the same way as a Ruscha or Holzer, but it’s as a poet that his greatest & most long lasting value is to be had. It’s much harder to imagine Grenier the computer-phobe a century from now as being a key figure in the evolution of vispo; he could very easily play that role for poetry. A work like Huth’s “ope(“ is a visual poem that uses some of the tools of poetry. Harryman is a poet who allowed her work to be represented in a mode referencing vispo. But when Harryman wrote to me, she compared her process with web designer Deb King to her work elsewhere with directors & actors in theater. One might hear, thus, an echo in the title “Open Box” not only of stanza & other famous art boxes, but the open-walled box that is the stage.

 

 

Ж Ж Ж

 

 

NB: Special thanks to Geof Huth, from whom I appropriated all but one of the graphics above. Anyone interested in these topics should spend a fair amount of time at his weblog, dbqp.