Geof Huth   dbqp: visualizing poetics VISUAL POETRY AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

AB - To blog or not to blog, this is the question…

GH - There is no reason to blog, and every reason. Blogging is a mania, an urge, an insistence, a regimen. Every day, an empty screen appears in my imagination, and I wonder what I’m going to write there. Sometimes, I know my plan days ahead of time, and sometimes I allow the day to surprise me with an idea. But my tendency is to publish something every day, to say something daily, to be quotidian.

Over the past three years, I have allowed myself a few breaks in that flow of thoughts (a day or two here or there, once a run of four or so days), but usually I pound forth some sense into the cyber-atmosphere, touch-typing my way into people’s skulls. Blogging, after all, is a reaching out more than it is a reaching in. If I had wanted merely to write, merely to entertain myself, I could write in a paper journal or type notes to myself. Blogging is a public affair, and it involves all the same intrigue and troubles and benefits of any public experience.

About 140 to 150 people a day visit my blog for some amount of time. Some of the visitors are lost, looking for something my words cannot provide them, and others are daily visitors, people who for some reason are wondering what I’ll write or otherwise post every day. I write for all those people, even those unable to discover serendipity when they stumble upon my words.

AB - How would you characterize your blog should you describe it to one of us, i.e. another blogger?

GH - Definition is hard, a nine or a ten on a geologic scale of hardness.* I would say that my blog is easy for me to describe to myself, but difficult for me to describe to others. The blog does, however, announce its intentions fairly obviously. Its full title is dbqp: visualizing poetics. The title proper is a series of self-mirroring letters best represented in this manner:

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That title, those particular letters in that specific order, are meant to tell the reader that this blog is about the visual qualities of written language—coded markings sometimes sucked dry of conventional linguistic meaning and afforded the chance to mean visually, to signify otherwise than in a traditional manner. The subtitle, “visualizing poetics,” informs the reader that my blog is meant to be a blog focusing on criticism and theory of poetry, but primarily focused on the visual elements of poetry. But that is not quite right.

Beneath the title and its subtitle is a line of description: “VISUAL POETRY AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.” This describes my mission clearly, so long as the term “visual poetry” is understood, but it never quite is. To anyone. Visual poetry might be any poetry that exists in some kind of visual environment that is essential to its meaning. Examples of this include shaped poems, which are standard poems—previously, even accentual-syllabic rhymed poems—structured to form shapes that are meaningful to the topic at hand. Visual poetry has, however, evolved to include non-verbal examinations of the meaningfulness of typographic shapes, so some visual poems consist of invented linguistic characters or the legs, but not the bodies, of letters from existing alphabets.

In general, my focus is on the real and potential meaningfulness of the visual representation of visible language, so I discuss typography, poetry (including the sound and sense and shapes of poetry), and even such topics as graffiti and advertising art. My goal is to teach myself to think more clearly in verbo-visual ways and to drag others along in my frantic search through the dark forest of meaning.

Finally, my blog is about myself—this is the “personal experience” part—and that might be the Achilles’ heel of any blogger. All bloggers become personalities more than intellects. The focus of a blog, somehow and inexorably, turns towards the typist and away from the typed (and type itself). Glimpses of personality might be interesting, and that is what seems to propel bloggers and to compel others to read blogs, but the ultimate goal of a serious blogger has to be the chosen topic. Thought must trump personality; meaning must mean more than man.

AB - I sometimes regard my blog as a safe place where I can meet my chosen people, is this the same for you?

GH - Because blogging takes place in cyberspace, and since this means that no physical experience with others is necessary, a blog might seem like a safe place to meet. I doubt it, though. First, most dangers—if I may use such an overloaded term—of life are not physical dangers, but psychological ones. We rarely are faced with physical threats or realities in our regular lives, but daily we face the psychological warfare of fleshy interactions with people: sniping, backbiting, demeaning, arguing, criticizing, denouncing. Usually, these are low-level conflicts, and the same is true in the blogosphere. The world of blogging, however, allows people a bit of anonymity even when they are not anonymous, and this sometimes encourages energetic criticism and condemnation where, in person, these responses might be cooler and more reasoned.

I think, finally, that people create dangers and protections for one another, no matter what world we live in, and that our lives as bloggers is to create a world that suits our needs—knowing always that we’ll have to deal with people we love and people we hate, online as well as off.

AB - I am wondering do we sometimes forget that personal remarks, notes, poems are there for everybody to be seen?

GH - I never forget this. My work is focused on information. I understand the power of searching electronic text. I realize that friends of mine who had known nothing about my blogging have found out about it by searching out my name—just as people in Australia keep looking for “Geof Huth” or “Geoff Huth” and finding their way (almost daily) to me and my blog.

I simply don’t worry about privacy as much as others do. I never have. I tend to be very private about some pieces of information in my life (I rarely tell anyone my birthday, for instance). But in general the performance expected by most blogging is to expose one’s being every now and again, and I’m generally comfortable in that role. Recently, I reviewed some of the autobiographical stories and personal essays I published in my college’s student monthly magazine. It even amazes me what ostensibly private stories I told to thousands of people a month almost thirty years ago. That public performance of self is essentially part of my art and being.

Even when I give the most technical of presentations about recordkeeping in my work life, I intersperse stories about my life. I do this because I believe stories are what hold people’s attention and allow them to learn, but also because that is my way. My only worry—and it is well founded—is that people will mistake these occasional forays into autobiography as narcissistic and arrogant, when they are merely supposed to be parables anyone can use to tear apart and understand the structure of the topic at hand.

AB - Do you post many poems on your blog? Is there an actual difference between publishing online, mainly through a blog, or printed publishing?

GH - I try not to publish too many poems of my own (whether visual or not) on my blog. I still do this, but I believe that each posted poem of my own is evidence of a failed blog—because my true focus is theory, and the presentation of my own work won’t necessarily aid as well in such an endeavor as the presentation of the work of others.

I do try to post visual and textual poems of others as often as I can, especially when I’m reviewing books or journals. I think these are important as illustrations. I might write forever about some poem, describing it in detail almost impossible to swallow and digest, but there is no substitute for reality. So the actual poem is important to me, important to show. And I believe it is vital to post visual poems (along with commentary), so that I can entice people into a mindset that appreciates such works of verbal and visual art.

Publishing in blogs is ephemeral, even if it is permanent. Publishing in paper is permanent, even when it is ephemeral.

Blogs—and other web resources—disappear at a moment’s notice, almost without any notice, sometimes without being saved in any way. Also, the volume of daily digital output to blogs dilutes the message of blogs in general. But, worst of all, few people ever read through old blog postings. Blogs tend to be about the top of the page, about the last posting posted. Anything older than a day or two doesn’t exist. I try to fight this growing forgetfulness of the past by linking to older postings of mine, but it is almost fruitless.

Paper, however, demands attention. A magazine might rest on a coffee table for months without being read, but it doesn’t vanish with the snap of a finger, and its mere visible presence reminds us to read it. People return to codices, they flip through their pages, they find things that were at one time lost. The real world—all tactile and squishy—still harbors its pleasures and affordances for us.

AB - What kind of actual or immaterial feedback do you receive from publishing online through a blog?

GH - Blogging provides me the benefit of positive feedback. Many visual poets appreciate what I do and thank me for my efforts. Others thank me for introducing them to visual poetry. And others insult me, fairly or not, for various reasons. I have to accept that range of opinions because reality necessitates it. Overall the feedback I receive (in terms of comments received and hits to the blog) is enough to convince me that my blogging is worth my time.

AB - What do you think of the blogosphere when related to blogs that deal with poetry?

GH - Thank goodness for blogging. Poets and lovers of poetry tend to be tiny in number compared to the general population, so there are fewer chances to find someone with your particular interests in the world of flesh and paper. But in the world of electrons and pixels there are more opportunities for connections. And connections are what make reality enjoyable. The large number of blogs about poetry allows us the chance to write about poetry and discuss poetry (almost) together much more so than had been possible in the past. That I appreciate. Most blogs by poets are pretty weak as vehicles of criticism or theory. Their authors post a few thoughts on their lives or some of their poems—but these people still contribute to the conversation. And some blogs by poets are exceptional. These give us insights, discussion, new ways of thinking about poetry, and that is what makes the blogosphere the real world of today’s poets.

I thank the latter the most for creating this world, but I thank all participants, even those I don’t know about, for their participation. The richness of blogopoetic experience is increased by having a world too large for one person to understand.

Today, I received (at work, no less) a spam poem that seems to say everything I’ve tried to say here better than I have, so I end with this sinister masterpiece.

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* The Mohs scale of relative hardness of intellectual activity.