Above: Stevens (left) and O’Hara on the phone (right).

In the vein of Walter De Maria’s seminal 1968-69 show “Art By Telephone” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (full recording at UbuWeb) comes another telephone-based art exhibition by another august Chicago institution: Coudal Partners’ Verse by Voice. Two initial favorites are Wallace Stevens’s “The Snowman” as read by Jim Coudal, and Frank O’Hara’s “Steps” as read by Rosencrans Baldwin. (BTW: Have you noticed that Coudal.com’s patron saint is St John of God, the patron saint of booksellers? Awesome.)

My favorite love poems—for people, for food, for nature, for poetry—seem to come most frequently from the pen of the incredible Robert Hass. A wonderful reader of his own verse, this 2004 reading in his hometown of Berkeley, CA at the Lunch Poems series he hosted for eight years is a special one indeed, and a perfect way to finish the week. Enjoy.

Hot on the heels of my post about pantoums, Peter recommends you listen to the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor, titled “Pantoum.” As one set of program notes explains, “For years it was rather casually assumed that in adopting this title Ravel was merely indulging vague exotic inclinations. But nothing about Ravel’s composing was ever vague, and in 1975 the British scholar Brian Newbould proved that Ravel does in fact adhere closely to the structure outlined above and, what is more, observes a further requirement of the original form—that the poem (or movement) deal with two separate ideas pursued in parallel, in this case, the brittle opening theme on the piano and the subsequent smoother one on strings two octaves apart.” More here [PDF].

Above: A still from Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad. The screenplay was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve talked about pantoums before, but we get the form (and word) from Malaysia, where it is an ancient type of verse, though it was not introduced to English until 1812. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, when two new lines are introduced but not repeated. So writing one is not so much a challenge of rhythm or rhyme but of sequence. The poem has only half as many original lines as it appears to have, but, when these lines reflect or repeat, they can become like a hall of mirrors.

One of my favorite pantoums is Elaine Equi’s masterful “A Date with Robbe-Grillet.”

A Date with Robbe-Grillet

What I remember didn’t happen.
Birds stuttering.
Torches huddled together.
The café empty, with no place to sit.

Birds stuttering.
On our ride in the country
the café empty, with no place to sit.
Your hair was like a doll’s.

On our ride in the country
it was winter.
Your hair was like a doll’s
and when we met it was as children.

It was winter
when it rained
and when we met it was as children.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.

When it rained
the sky turned the color of Pernod.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
Birds strutted.

The sky turned the color of Pernod.
Within the forest
birds strutted
and we came upon a second forest

within the forest
identical to the first.
And we came upon a second forest
where I was alone

identical to the first
only smaller and without music
where I was alone
where I alone could tell the story.

— Elaine Equi

Alain Robbe-Grillet is, of course, the perfect subject to portray with the pantoum’s looping form: the plots of his novels, and, most famously, his screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, all cycle and refract in the most surreal and dreamlike of ways.

Equi’s poem willfully acknowledges the repetition at the core of its own construction. She writes, “and we came upon a second forest / identical to the first.” Each of the lines in this pantoum is a short but mobile declarative statement whose meaning shifts according to whatever statements may adjoin or accompany it. The phrases “It was winter,” “When it rained,” “within the forest,” contain only the simplest bits if information, but in context they begin to have a hypnotizing effect, as the weight of an image shifts from one line to the next. They frame and reframe, nesting one action recursively into another.

These phrases’ dependency, however, is put in conflict by the poem’s conclusion: “… I alone could tell the story.” A dream is a rearrangement of fragments from reality, but it lives inside a single locked subconscious. What is the story here? What is the meaning of this dream? It’s wedded firmly to the structure of Equi’s pantoum itself.

I’ve written two Williams Poems before. “Spraypaint” is my third. I have shown it here in stencil; Williams often used stencils in his work, most prominently in his poem “THE VOY AGE.” In my dreams, “Spraypaint” would be applied using Jürg Lehni’s Hektor in performance. (Hektor is a device I think Williams would’ve really liked.) I have also shown the poem here in two panels, which is another device I have adopted from Williams himself. The poem reads, “A saint I ain’t. I rap in sin. I rain in print. I pray in rap. I rant in pain. An ant I ain’t. I paint.”

Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts! Listen to Lewis Hyde on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm. Or Keith Jarrett on his magical Carnegie Hall Concert (iTunes). Or Robert Haas on NPR’s Poetry Off the Shelf (iTunes). Or even a podcast about Thriller (iTunes)?

I just spent two hours digging around in the vast (and slightly unruly) Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry’s site. Some web designer should take their database and make it more elegant and accessible: the material within is invaluable for poets, typographers, and visual artists alike. Try sorting by images and you’ll find gems like Vito Acconci’s Four Book from 1969 and much more.

I’ve been thinking about Emmett Williams a lot lately, even more since coming back from Amsterdam with a copy of his poem Sweethearts in hand. I’ve been thinking about the kind of verse that crops up in Sweethearts, where the word and its letters in their order become an engine to generate this whole world, and it saddens me that Williams was the only one exploring this particular form as deeply as he was. Like the sestina or the pantoum, two other highly structural and underused poetic forms, Williams’s form generates a tone and type of poetry all its own. I’ve explored the form just a bit already in a poem called Wastebasket. This is a longer and I think more successful attempt, written at the request of a friend doing a collaborative project whose submissions are acquired by way of a gift circle among contributors. When the circle turned toward me, I found myself looking at a short, silent film of a man standing on a windy bridge in the snow. I was asked to use the film in my response. Doing this poem was such an intense and quietly rewarding experience, and I hope to make many more of them as time goes on. I would like to see Williams’s form alive and flourishing, even in just a small way. The poem reads: “No owls as we wake now. As flakes fake snow, we fake OKs. So now we owe. Lakes soak. Oaks flake. No snow owls. No snow as we wake.” —RG

My friend Cindy Heller, wonderful designer of Bidoun magazine and a building mate here at 195 Chrystie Street is doing a great project called Wanderbag. Wanderbag is “a collaborative art project through which artists and small businesses promote greater environmental responsibility.” Cindy’s asked a handful of friends, artists, and other inspiring folks to design the fronts of cotton tote bags so we’ve got a fashionable way to use the same bag to go from bookstore to grocery store and back again.

My contribution is an homage to the groundbreaking Concrete poet and Fluxus chronicler Emmett Williams, who passed away this February as Cindy had started asking for submissions. My WASTEBASKET poem (above) works in almost exactly the same way as Emmett’s famous poem SWEETHEARTS (the introduction to which was written by none other than Richard Hamilton.).

My poem reads, “weak webs / a teak base / seas east west / wake bake / take wastebasket.” For further reading on Williams’s work, try starting with this interview from Hans Ulrich Obrist. Designers may also find it interesting that one of his poems comes up prominently at the end of this interview with Experimental Jetset [PDF]. Williams’s work has been very influential for me, and I’m sure for many more. He will be missed.

Wanderbags, Cindy tells me, will be available early next year. Stay tuned.

Above: Justin Beal, “RE: The Un/happy Ending of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway.”

Last summer I contacted a bunch of friends and asked them to give me the materials for a 16-page pamphlet. The pamphlet could be about anything they wanted, and I would design it for them. In my email introducing the project, I wrote,

The content for these pamphlets will be provided by you, edited by me, and about anything you would like. You can use these 16 black-and-white pages to promote a polical platform or republish your favorite short story. You can showcase your portfolio or the photos from your vacation. The pamphlet may be thematic and unified or intuitive and random. I will take whatever you decide give me.

In exchange for your participation, each of you will get a complete set of the 10 pamphlets I create, along with 10 additional copies of your own pamphlet to share with your friends and family. It would be impossible to replace any one of you in the group, so I hope you all decide to take part.

The idea for the project came out of my reading of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, and much of this thinking was channeled into a subsequent article I wrote called “Form-giving.” But I also wanted there to be some kind of creative expression beyond that essay, a reaction I’d make to Hyde’s book as a working designer. A project with friends seemed like the thing to do here, both because friends are people we enjoy giving gifts to, and because as a designer my friends sometimes hit me up for things I don’t particularly want to do—business cards, etc.—and this seemed like a more even exchange, a way for me to enjoy their talents just as much as they were hopefully enjoying mine.

The project wasn’t entirely successful, however. The open-endedness of my request threw some folks, others just had trouble pulling their thoughts together by the deadline I’d given at the end of the summer. Of course, I got busy, too, and despite my best hopes to crank out 10 stellar pamphlets, so far I have only had time to crank out one.

I’m quite happy with that one pamphlet, though, for my friend Justin Beal, an artist living in Los Angeles. Justin had the idea of simply documenting a body of his work: several recent sculptures that engage ideas about furniture, fruit, industrial building materials, and much, much more. He presented me with a fascinating array of materials to draw from, and it’s a great start to what I hope will be a series that includes a few more pamphlets for friends.

More images from the pamphlet and a PDF are below.

Download a high-resolution PDF of Justin’s pamphlet here.

For some other great small-scale pamphlet projects of late, check out Harsh Patel’s portfolio and Nieves for starters.