When vispo goes viral ...

I have thoughts and opinions most days about visual poetry in general and infusoria in particular. I have a blog post from last week in which I say everything I want to say about my own work. I even distinctly remember writing a Masters thesis all about visual poetry. So did I tell the nice television lady any of that? Did I fandango. I read the back of my green box poem and paraphrased that, putty-brains.

In our defence, the television station first called Jelle to arrange things about an hour in advance. It wasn't some spectacular feat of organisation and publicity on our part; none of us had any idea it was going to happen. If I had had a little more presence of mind, I would have asked to talk about the organisation of the exhibition itself, which interests me, rather than about my work, which basically doesn't.

And one of the things I might have said - not that it would really make sense in a three-minute spot - is how excited I am about the possibilities of new media for semi-underground or otherwise low profile art forms. I need to blog about it in more detail when I have time to gather my thoughts, but clearly Facebook and blog providers have changed everything. The people who are interested in what Krikri does are never, never going to be all in the same country - or even the same continent - at the same time. But there are so many possibilities for community.

I am reminded of Carlfriedrich Claus, a visual poet who lived in East Germany all through the Cold War. He corresponded fairly intensively with poets in the West and published regularly in Belgium and elsewhere despite the Iron Curtain. (Possibly because his poems are huge tangles of illegible handwriting. The censors must have gone home weeping.)

If he can do that, we can do anything.

Infusoria report on AVS television

I finally got home to see it long, long after you all posted it on facebook, you famous filmstars you... there's an English transcript below.



Vanessa: The first days of summer also mark the beginning of the Literaire Lente [‘Literary Springtime’ festival] this week in Ghent. If you’re up for a king-size portion of culture, there is a whole range of literary activities to choose from. The infusoria exhibition in the Zilverhof for example, which focuses on visual poetry.

Jelle: ‘Infusoria’ is actually the word for little, microscopic water creatures, but in this case it refers to an exhibition with work by seventeen female poets from three continents. The intention of Helen White, the curator, was to show that all sorts of things have been happening in visual poetry since the seventies, and particularly in work by women. It is a whole different way of looking at poetry and what poetry, and by extension visual poetry, can mean.

Vanessa: Don’t come here expecting readings from poetry books. What you will find is a creative and playful treatment of poetry.

Helen: This is a little series about the different layers you find in language. So on the surface of course there is the semantic level, the meaning of the words, but just by the way you write, using handwriting or typing or with crossings out or whatever, you get different layers of meaning. It is a kind of body language in addition to the semantic language, the meanings. I have worked with lots of different layers to try and convey that. I often work with illegible texts. There are little fragments of a poem on each of the pebbles, which is an attempt to say the same thing.

Angela: These nine poems are part of a longer piece called ‘Rule of Three.’ There are seventy- eight visual poems like this in that series and they’re designed to be eventually printed on tarot cards. I’m very very interested in working with found text and found image, so the image that appears throughout these – the bivalves, the shells – they come from a Creative Commons image that I found on the internet. The little poem that’s off to the side here I found in spam in my e-mail at one point so I pulled that out.

Vanessa: Infusoria is open until Sunday, which is the end of the Literaire Lente. On Thursday you can also go and see poetic performances in the Logos Tetrahedron. You can find all the information here [on the Krikri website].

A hundred little monkeys riding tricycles round my brain

Today was supposed to be a nice quiet day. angela rawlings was arriving from Canada and since she hasn't got a mobile phone we'd arranged that Claire and I would go and meet all the trains from Brussels beween about ten and one until we found her. Then the plan was to get a nice relaxed lunch, settle angela into her new home, saunter down to the Zilverhof in time to open at five and everything would be Zen.

The angela part was good - she managed to phone ahead that she was going to arrive about twelve so I had a sunny two-hour breakfast break with Claire before we had to start chasing trains. But at two mintues to twelve Jelle rang to say the local television station had decided to film infusoria - WAAAAAAAAA - and he needed the keys to get in. Stress Bunny whirled into action, and poor angela got whisked straight off the train to the Zilverhof for Belgium camera action without so much as a chocolate waffle.

More tomorrow, I'm exhausted. Please don't worry, dear Canadians, I have since fed your national treasure and put her to bed in her new house.