Category: Poetry

More Concrete Poetry

After I wrote about the sideway poetry project in St Paul, Bonnie Baker wrote “you may be interested in the concrete poetry in bpnichol Lane, a lane in Toronto, Ontario which is named for Canadian poet, bpnichol (1944 – 1988). bpnichol, one of the 4-Horsemen (a Canadian sound poetry performance group), was also a world reknowned ‘pataphysicist and Toronto small press promoter.” There are images, including the one below, here. You can hear the 4-Horsemen read several of their poems here. Anyone else know of cities with poetry in the sidewalks?

Concrete Poetry in bpNichol Lane in Toronto

Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

The city of Saint Paul’s Public Artist in Residence, Marcus Young, is working in tandem with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program to install poetry where sidewalks are replaced. The project is called Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk and in its first year has the goal of one hundred stampings of twenty poems written by Saint Paul residents. Young says:

Sidewalks are the blank pages of our city as a book. If you look closely, however, you see traces of text, such as Knutson Construction or Standard Sidewalk, stamped discreetly into some of the panels. I wondered if we could borrow this simple stamping idea, enlarge the stamp to a prominent size, and give our poets this everyday public space for writing.

We held a poetry contest open to all residents of Saint Paul and received more than 2000 original poems. The outpouring of verse was unexpected and heartwarming. Poems about spring and winter, mothers and fathers, love, and many other things imaginable reassured us that in Saint Paul we lead poetic lives. Through an anonymous judging process, our thoughtful panel chose twenty winners and fourteen honorable mentions. We made large stamps of the winning poems and teamed up with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program with the goal of one-hundred stampings this construction season.

First seen here. The website for the project is here and includes pictures of the plates they made, the poems, like the one below, and more.

Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

The Word Snag

Obstacles & ImpedimentsThe other day, I saw a mention of an artist’s book called “Mappings” by Mary Ann Sampson of the OEOCO Press (One-Eye Opera Company) and, intrigued by the title, set off to see if I could find pictures of it. While I didn’t find that book, I found some lovely broadsides. The one to the left is called “Obstacles & Impediments” and the illustration is of a “word snag” eating letters and words (see a larger version where you can read the poem here).

Divagations on Printing and Poetry

Hermetic PressThe other day I followed a link to Philip Gallo’s blog and spent a wonderful hour reading the posts. Gallo is a letterpress printer and poet in Minneapolis. That’s his broadside to the left (see the post about it here — it’s about daffodils, printed on daffodil embellished paper, and with a subtle ff in the background). He doesn’t write often, and the posts vary widely, from writing poetry, to typesetting 40 years ago, to a poem called Imagine You Are A Craftsman to hand-setting mouse type. And a few of them are handy letterpress printing tricks:

Epigrams

I taught my intro to platen press class this past Sunday. One of the students brought along this poem from J V Cunningham, a mid-century poet I didn’t know.

On the Calculus

From almost naught to almost all I flee,
And almost has almost confounded me;
Zero my limit, and infinity.

During class she gave me more Cunningham’s poems to read — they are wry and very concise — haiku-length, which may be one reason I like them. That evening, when I read about Cunningham on the Poetry Foundation website, I found out he’s a master of the epigram — a brief, clever, and usually memorable statement. Here’s one:

This Humanist whom no belief constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

Looking deeper, I found this poem I particularly liked:

Meditation on Statistical Method
J. V. Cunningham

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

Read more about Cunningham here, where you can also hear some of his poems read aloud.