·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Viz Lit, that is, digital camera in hand, the search to find visual analogs (objective correlatives?) for whatever it may be: a literary form, a specific memory - a heightened moment in a romance - the visual complications in a metaphysical conceit, a particular image inside a specific poem, or, pushing it, something found in a theory or practice. The definition here so abstract in comparison to the pleasures and surprises of the material search. Why not some examples?

Persimmons or
An optical derivation on a lost lyric in the early life of Robert Creeley
or, no doubt, as well, in the early, middle or late life of anyone,
so lush, so rich, so subtley horny.

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An abbreviated, late fall Arkansas Black Apple Sonnet:
its lines, sylables, nouns, adjectives & verbs
so contained, so robust.

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An Ezra Pound lay and open all your nuts on the table.
Make a good full, variegated orchestral show.
Let the outer skins crack & fall where & how they may.
Wait, as one must, to seize & crack the inner-shells.
Discover & pleasure the darker, sweet, cerebral meat.

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Eight o’clock Sunday morning high-wire meeting of Poets
gathered for a quiet, serene moment while examining
the intersection of Valencia at 19th Street.

There are differing opinions about whether or not ghosts - particularly
those of artists - can actually continue to paint, or whether they are limited and compelled to communicate with more sophisticated appearing signs.
That is, once one goes over to the other side, since it’s assumed an artist’s entire vocabulary is suddenly vanquished, how is it possible to continue to communicate with the living.

It’s been more than once noted that the spirits of the departed - still enflamed
with life - are desperate to remain among the living. No artist, for example, willingly likes to loose their public, whether its been a large affectionate audience, or, conversely, hostile and barely there at all.
Once dead, the quest for immortality apparently provokes many an artist’s ghost to hit the streets at night, always in search of a suitable venue, preferably a shop window. Once behind a shop owner’s glass it is considered to be the most public possible way to re-establish communication with the living.

Such as it was on Valencia Street the other night where we managed to catch
one well-lit ghost in action behind an artificially frosted window. We could not see it, of course, only the white flash of shadow on the glass. It was the marks it made that were terrific. It’s was as if the ghost had taken the time between life and death to take a night visit to study the abundance of glyphs on the moonlit stones on the eastern side of the Sierra. In the window we watched a barely visibile finger glide and form the diverse, undecipherable, cosmic appearing, clear, geometric shapes that gradually filled the glass. From the sidewalk we were both bemused an awestruck. What was the ghost trying to say was our question. Were we being teased into paying attention to a playful spirit and for no other reason? Were we being served a kind of ephemeral, cosmic joke? Or were we being given important signs, ones that we should heed, of another worldly dimension? A parallel Universe? A revelation of Plato’s universe of higher ineluctable forms?

Or was it just another, hard working artist ghost - much as in every day life - playing out another hand this evening for an audience momentarily enthralled be fore continuing on down the street,

Well, not really did my mother meet Helen Adam, but, maybe really. Recently I read her Memory, one of Adam’s darkest ballads in which the druid ghost in a oak tree - in the spirit of sacrifice - eventually eats an entire family: mother, child, and father. It’s a chilling piece with lines like these:

…Around the bode of the oak he crept
To the low mound where the man slept

He felt no pity to spare or save.
The man lay stretched on the woman’s grave.

He took the dagger and stabbed him deep.
He gave the sleeper eternal sleep…

When I finished reading the poem - I and my mother were sitting at the kitchen table - she nodded in a way that I could tell she enjoyed hearing the poem’s lilt and the way it rides to its totally murderous, savage conclusion. “What do think of it, Mom?” I asked, never knowing what kind of appraisal she might deliver.
“It has a nice dark sparkle to it,” she answers with a smile.
I am a little dumb-founded by how accurate dark sparkle appears to hit the poem on the spot. I don’t even know, if I have ever heard the expression used to describe anything, at least, a poem.
“Where did you get an image like that, mom?”
“I don’t know. I think it came in the mail.”

I let it go at that - indeed, again astonished at my mom with her current mind’s proclivity for the spontaneous, surreal response.

The ballad, by the way is from A Helen Adam Reader, a new book, including CD of Helen performing, published by the National Poetry Foundation.

This afternoon, Saturday, I went to Montalvo, the art center in Saratoga, about an hour south of San Franciso. Brenda Hutchinson, the sound artist, invited me to her studio for the afternoon where she made a lot of great noise through a nine foot pipe while I constructed a new haptic.

It’s difficult to quite fully describe the sounds that emerge from the pipe which is connected to a small speaker that amplifies Brenda’s smallest of touches. Which is to suggest, as as a responder, or participant, with one of my marker pens in hand, it is impossible to know what to expect. Her fingers might thump rhythmically on the side of the pipe, or she might, as she does, make various voicings with her mouth over the pipe’s open end. At times the voice sounds like the primal calls of a small cat that has lost its mother; the character of lament permeates the studio; other times the voice just stretches into vertical reaches before making a contraction into a severe torque, before releasing itself into tightly compressed scratching sounds.

The pen becomes one with the person and one with the sound. As is, perhaps, evident here, the pen rides, turns and takes flight with each accoustic move. Sometimes the resonance of sound, its sustained echo, pushes the pen beyond the immediate sound, amplifying the texture and direction of marks on the page. The various rivet tap, scrape and pull sound of the pen, over the top of the masonite board, also becomes acoustic texture, a weave and counterpoint with the sounds from the pipe. The process, the mark making, becomes an expurgation of whatever is filling studio, body and voice. The sheet of paper is a window - a transparency - in which pulse becomes visual gesture, a trail of marks, each one an implicit conspiracy of mutiple energy charges parsing air and ear.

with a heart felt thanks to Brenda Hutchinson on that pipe!

David Buuck, urban poet explorer/pioneer image & thought maker was working his magic this evening in a basement lecture hall at the San Francisco Public Library. Took the gathered on a “49 mile detour” about the City via Powerpoint with a questioning voice layered over, under and inbetween past, present and futurist metropolitan visions. A work of counter-surveillance, metaphor and broken metaphor; a search for and revelation of sculptural and body manifestations of a body politic in erruption, individual and group injection and struggle with and against template architecture, corporate branding, ‘public art’, civic, military and police imposition. Wonderfully ironic and subversive - like Mr. Magus here - at work to invoke a gestural vocabulary in which momentum and power is restored to the citizen maker/player & actor en communicatus . It was an under the skin - individual and public - kind of night. Wish you had been there. Not to worry, David will variously reappear, no doubt playing on a real or magical keyboard, to manifest more visions and thoughts in the playland of the local real.

Curious the way language may get overwhelmed.
Her modesty, the quiet elegance, the unassuming, robust
matter of factness.

I think she is doing fine. I won’t intrude. Not one bit, one word more.

Such as is, the glimpse - is it a goddess? - at the edge of her pool this morning.

We know him, or think we know him. Back in the 40’s in the Mission, among some, he was the pride of the neighborhood. He ran the street. That meant women, that meant booze. He stayed out of the reefer business. But all that stuff was peripheral. In a word, at least an English word, he had style. The big diameter, leafy brown, extended burning red-lit cigar; the V-fold, white rimmed, black caballero leather hat; the larger than life full-tooth smile, and the clothes: the wing-cut collar on the cross-buttoned mauve coat - yeah, mauve was in back then; the cantilevered, high throated black leather, flat balloon bow-tie. A street magnet, he was; the money, ladies, and the good times swooped. The cops wouldn’t touch him, his side-kicks knew exactly who to pay.

But there was trouble. He did her wrong, or she did, but one day the man was gone!

Who she really was, no one quite really knows. Some say she was a man in female disguise. The wig-white hair with tangerine orange tinted strands - the way it curled around the face - and the thick plastic rimmed glasses gave himor her perfect cover. Whatever quality “she” possessed, it launched him right out of his knee-high, shiny buff brown leather boots; he disappeared for days on end. In his absence, standing on the corners, people would comment on how - and quited disturbingly - the whole street had gone quite totally slack. The magnet had lost his legendary vector. No one was there to come his way.

It does not make sense to describe the murder. It was not her. She was smarter than that. It’s said - for whatever the cause - she called up the man in green. The one who is always found with one hand in the strangest of bags. Some say it’s white shortening, some say it’s stiff, saltless butter. Whatever it is, I say, whatever is in that bag, it is the trigger of trouble.

The dirty son-of-a-bitch took him out with one shot to the back and disappeared. A coward to the core. For weeks the whole street grieved and moaned. From concrete corner to corner, everyone knew exactly who did it. Whatever, they got him, in fact, they nailed them both in a story of vengeance one ought never tell. Never.

At the break of day, both their ghosts appear in the morning rays. Among us all, we are told, it is the way these particular kind of dead stay alive. If you look closely, they carry curled warnings on their lips. Kiss them them if you dare. Shame and madness rambles there. Unless you make a mistake - the warning told - it is best to leave, as I will, this particular story at that.

The Yellow Spot Family - mom, dad and child united here for a rare portrait on Valencia Street - appear to be able to take trash off anybody. Some might say the three take it - dead leaves, cigarette butts, paper et al - from a jaundiced perspective. I suspect not. No matter what, like many of the rest of us, they know Valencia is as dirty as ever, and will remain so. There is even an opinion that suggests most walkers here have grown to accept the varieties of trash that - particularly on a windy day - typically will come up to your ankles. Some will even argue that it’s part of the street aesthetic. No matter the quality and nascent curiousity of many of the shops, many with terrific, eccentric windows, part of Valencia’s je ne sais crois is the experience of wading through flotsam. One suspects, as well, many of locals see the trash as the last defence against the arrival of big money - the kind that will bring franchises, say, the Pottery Barn, and/or the dumb, boring shops that infect the clean streets in the City’s tonier neighborhoods.
Indeed when I stopped to talk to the Yellow Spot Family they were quite up front about their love of the street. “We wouldn’t dress up this way, if we weren’t in love with it.”
Even infested with trash, I think it’s a family that manages to still look pretty good, quite robust and lyric in their spotted yellow spotted red caps, more than holding their own, in fact. (No, I am not sure if they appreciate the little inlays of red lettered graffiti between the spots!)

I don’t know about your neighborhood, but my neighborhood is infested. The ghosts come in, the ghosts go out. This time of year - peering in our windows - they want to let us know, more than ever, what the other world is about. It is only when they drip blood when I think they know something! It is only when they drip blood. It’s the red tipped white wing that makes the witches sing! True!

Earthquake last night. The planet is also shivering and shaking with the occasion. Let it be told!

& the spirt of Helen Adam - a poet witch of witches - is coming back
to town tomorrow night. Poetry Center event in honor of her work: Unitarian Church, Geary at Franklin, 7:30.

If you are in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon, I am giving a poetry reading with Kristin Prevallet at the the SF State University Poetry Center at 3:30. I will be reading from Walking Theory and Ghost Walks. It will be a pleasure to have you there!

If you cannot do either one, my book, Walking Theory has now gone - I am happy to report from the publisher - into a second printing.
Walking Theory Junction Press (84 pages, $12)
For convenient ordering information, go to:
www.junctionpress.com
Order directly from me steph484 @pacbell.net if you want a signed copy!