Karl Kempton
Two Reviews
A review of Gabriel Pomerand's Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire
A new poetic radio delivered in Orpheus, from my understanding, was Cocteau’s reference of a French Resistance coded message delivery ploy. He was a pacifist and apolitical, nevertheless, he seems to have made and kept dubious connections during the occupation. It seems Pomerand would not let this stand.
(https://www.karlkempton.net/2022/01/kaldron-19.html)
A review of Joel Lipman's From The ORIGINS OF POETRY
July 2023
Oceano Ca
A review of Gabriel Pomerand's Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire
Gabriel Pomerand
Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire
Translated by Michael Kasper & Bhamati Viswanathan
144 pages
World Poetry, New York, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-954218-13-0
Available through Bookshop.org
Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire
Translated by Michael Kasper & Bhamati Viswanathan
144 pages
World Poetry, New York, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-954218-13-0
Available through Bookshop.org
Post WW2 scarred cityscape for Jean Cocteau, an apolitical resident of once occupied Paris, is a sparely populated underworld stage through which his modern day Orpheus maze wanders seeking his lost beloved. He had been doubly hypnotized. First, by an angel of death and then by her recently captive poet whose voice sirens through a car radio for dictation of a new cryptic abstract poetic. Cinematic surreal lyrical images unfold frame by frame, the cryptic code a phonetic punctuation opens a new poetic scape.
Pomerand’s surreal textual poetic narrates his own post WW2 populated purgatory strolling a dark dream cityscape. The lyrics partly informed as a surviving French resistance fighter against the German occupation. The vision for the entirety of the volume a staking out of the new new for the Lettrist vision of which he cofounded to confound by embracing all art forms into a potential singularity. This Lettrist project perhaps seeded by Henri-Martin Barzun’s Orphism of preWW1. From his introduction, “I started with a written text that I wanted to cover and clothe.”
“I dream of a book of mysteries equal to the arrogance and serenity in faces carved on pharaohs’ mummies.” Text is paired on the opposing page with metagraphics, later evolving into the better know term of hypergraphics, intentionally void of the phonetic. “I’ve tried to replace a debased, dried up symbolism—that of words—with a new symbolism, torn from the flesh of acquired ideas.” Each rich with iconographics of signs, symbols and text to be read and seen individually, grouped & as field. These too can be seen as if composed on celluloid for an animated film while a voice sirens reader/viewer the post surreal text. “I’d like to be able to reflect on each and every word. I’d like not only to give each one a subterranean meaning, but also to break its jaw and thus transform the face it intends to possess forever.”
Let us look at this statement in the bright hindsight light of WW2. Turn to the three opening stanza references Pomerand aims at Cocteau:
Pomerand’s surreal textual poetic narrates his own post WW2 populated purgatory strolling a dark dream cityscape. The lyrics partly informed as a surviving French resistance fighter against the German occupation. The vision for the entirety of the volume a staking out of the new new for the Lettrist vision of which he cofounded to confound by embracing all art forms into a potential singularity. This Lettrist project perhaps seeded by Henri-Martin Barzun’s Orphism of preWW1. From his introduction, “I started with a written text that I wanted to cover and clothe.”
“I dream of a book of mysteries equal to the arrogance and serenity in faces carved on pharaohs’ mummies.” Text is paired on the opposing page with metagraphics, later evolving into the better know term of hypergraphics, intentionally void of the phonetic. “I’ve tried to replace a debased, dried up symbolism—that of words—with a new symbolism, torn from the flesh of acquired ideas.” Each rich with iconographics of signs, symbols and text to be read and seen individually, grouped & as field. These too can be seen as if composed on celluloid for an animated film while a voice sirens reader/viewer the post surreal text. “I’d like to be able to reflect on each and every word. I’d like not only to give each one a subterranean meaning, but also to break its jaw and thus transform the face it intends to possess forever.”
Let us look at this statement in the bright hindsight light of WW2. Turn to the three opening stanza references Pomerand aims at Cocteau:
1) Saint germain des prés is a ghetto. All there wear yellow stars on their hearts. It’s Cocteau’s star, which is a cocktail of stars. Saint germain des prés holds a mirror to heaven. 2) Everyone finds there a star capsized within their souls. What’s more, Cocteau’s cocktail is sour, like essence of castor. It stinks from his patchouli around here, Cocteau, vintage nineteen hundred. Tonight, a pederast offered me a cocktail, proposing that we chat man to man. I refused, considering 3) that, with him, one could hardly converse man to woman. I’m distressed to be discussing such absurdities, but there are these psychoanalytical burps in my subconscious that drift about and express themselves, sometimes, in the guise of bad wordplay.
A new poetic radio delivered in Orpheus, from my understanding, was Cocteau’s reference of a French Resistance coded message delivery ploy. He was a pacifist and apolitical, nevertheless, he seems to have made and kept dubious connections during the occupation. It seems Pomerand would not let this stand.
The book itself beautifully rendered. A delight to hold to slowly digest each paired page set bouncing back and forth between text and facing metagraphics unravelling where word and image meet, fold, or disappear often because word cannot dive in or rise to. “This mask I’ve given myself in eternity’s comedy, it alone will earn me gasps from spectators as I advance enfolded in my cape of ink and night.”
Though they differ, I see Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire as a partner, for want of another term, with Kenneth Patchen’s Sleepers Awake! The former pairs facing text and metagraphics while the latter integrates image and text. Both draw on the post WW2 surreal and pre WW2 avant-garde roots. Both preconcrete. Both filled with text and visual puns, comedy and the furious seriousness. And, both are visual poets whose visual poetics forecasted concrete poetry and contemporary visual poetry, the latter first published in 1948, the former in 1950, year of Cocteau’s film, Orpheus. Both are unmentioned in concrete commentaries.
In 1985 I published the four above Pomerand metagraphic pages, provided by Roland Sabatier, in Kaldron. This was a special issue that included other Lettrists whose works were also provided by Sabatier.
Though they differ, I see Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire as a partner, for want of another term, with Kenneth Patchen’s Sleepers Awake! The former pairs facing text and metagraphics while the latter integrates image and text. Both draw on the post WW2 surreal and pre WW2 avant-garde roots. Both preconcrete. Both filled with text and visual puns, comedy and the furious seriousness. And, both are visual poets whose visual poetics forecasted concrete poetry and contemporary visual poetry, the latter first published in 1948, the former in 1950, year of Cocteau’s film, Orpheus. Both are unmentioned in concrete commentaries.
In 1985 I published the four above Pomerand metagraphic pages, provided by Roland Sabatier, in Kaldron. This was a special issue that included other Lettrists whose works were also provided by Sabatier.
(https://www.karlkempton.net/2022/01/kaldron-19.html)
A review of Joel Lipman's From The ORIGINS OF POETRY
Joel Lipman
From The ORIGINS OF POETRY
40 pages
c'est mon dada
Red Fox Press
http://www.redfoxpress.com/dada-lipman.html
From The ORIGINS OF POETRY
40 pages
c'est mon dada
Red Fox Press
http://www.redfoxpress.com/dada-lipman.html
There are no coincidences only instances, some synchronistic. Joel Lipman’s From The “ORIGINS OF POETRY” arrived while editing the following paragraph for a perhaps project. What was a surprise was not the accomplished works of this composed series, but offering backdrop support to the question I was delving.
The definition for our word poetry roots into the Greek “to make” and thus poem defines “thing made.” This is a poor definition. It is hair rootless unable to draw substance or in reverse arrow point from fields wider, deeper and above to higher realms. Over the years this has remained troubling. Over the years comparative definitions with other languages and spiritual practice types added to the problem. I am not alone. Reading the Roberts — Graves and Bly — first opened alternatives. Graves on Keltic traditions discusses rune, a mystery, a poem or part of a poem, a puzzle, not just a written or carved character. Bly nods to the Spanish duende, a quality of inspiration and passion derived from the word spirit, an apparition. Spanish is forty percent Arabic. The Arabic root ties poem to hair. A true poem for Arabic speakers raises hair on the back of the neck. For the Aztecs the closest translation seems to be “flowers and songs.” As for the Chinese, Bill Porter, aka RedPine, quotes Zheng, “In the heart, it’s what a person holds dear. Expressed in language, it’s poetry.” Of interest here is that in Chinese mind and heart have the same ideogram. Like traditional peoples around the globe, essentially one thinks and feels with the heart, contrary to Eurocentric hard edge divisions of mind and heart.
With obvious playfulness, focused Lipman treks and maps precognitive time and space, ideal suggestive moments of inspiration igniting creative sparks. These light the fire out of which flames what we call poem. For some these may be heard as whispers by the muse through her countless masks, the dark tragic to the transcendent. Some modern and postmodern avenues of expression narrow poem to object, particularly one’s flat, unpermitted reference outside their imposed illusionary binding frame. Reference only aloud inside to itself reduces poem, then, to thing made barren without roots/routes from and to elsewhere. Other limitations being variations, plays and reductions, based on the Williams’ call for the poem, “no ideas but in things.” But here, in American poetics, opens a divide with a reach for the transcendent and wisdom and the opposite to mere object. Lipman’s maps ain’t flat nor fenced, nor just thing made. His depth of field may be dried ink thicknesses and spatial scale small page small. But, contrasting fonts jump a specific eyed perspective with a read that guides textual echoes emanating out of the background field. He compacts the energies into minimalist poems that Lorine Niedecker, another fourth coast poet of the condensed poem, would smile upon and with.
I had been aware of Lipman’s works through his well known poeMvelopes, rubber stamped envelope beauties in my mail during the era of mail art from the 70s into the early 90s, and later the survey of him in e-kaldron in which he mentions the series, but in passing.
He embarked on his journey in 1976, with the purchase of a Justrite Office Rubberstamp set and a single black ink pad, eventually becoming a master of the water-based ink rubber stamp visual poem. Soon he expanded the pallet to color. He saved books from discard bins behind bookstores from which a harvested page became a canvas field free of copyright hassle and the moral issues of theft. The chosen medium and page size focuses his attention on a variety of short minimal poem types that he calls “a range of visual and spatial poems.” Pulling reader/viewer into a page offers additional poetic readings/lookings behind and through its essence, the stamped poem.
To name a few influences in the background are two master Ohioan visual poets, Kenneth Patchen and d.a. levy; his friend and powerhouse of the found poem, Bern Porter of Maine; and his university teacher, the concise and cryptic poet, Robert Creely. Lipman’s body of work shines alongside his influencers and stand with other minimalist poets.
This big little book is a selection from about 100 composed over decades. Some pages were recently displayed, moving from 5x7 inches to 3x4 foot quality prints. Its delight cannot but lift reader/viewer to smile if not smirk or laugh. His “such a dot” poem (above) offers a cosmological jump out of and back to our planet. Three words add up to more than the sum of its parts.
The facing page, the joy of Hansel and Gretel dance on our little dot adds to the more than the sum. The dropped broom suggests a family of sounds flashing open insights out of which are born ch’an/zen poems, well known condensed commentaries on the more than.
This collection of rubber stamped and treated text visual poems I read and see pointing to the missing hair roots of our truncated definition of poem, a successful project undoing a mere “to make.” These multimedia creations are a dialog with the viewer/reader filling in the blank fields for our word poem.
Early on in my efforts of visual poetry in the 70s I called for the visual poet to offer up true visionary work, works that positively nourish, add to and lift a reader/viewer’s life to grand vistas. That is to offer up the light not the shadow. Lipman, like his influencers, I suggest, with ease works with and in such visionary light, hollowness filled with hallow.
The definition for our word poetry roots into the Greek “to make” and thus poem defines “thing made.” This is a poor definition. It is hair rootless unable to draw substance or in reverse arrow point from fields wider, deeper and above to higher realms. Over the years this has remained troubling. Over the years comparative definitions with other languages and spiritual practice types added to the problem. I am not alone. Reading the Roberts — Graves and Bly — first opened alternatives. Graves on Keltic traditions discusses rune, a mystery, a poem or part of a poem, a puzzle, not just a written or carved character. Bly nods to the Spanish duende, a quality of inspiration and passion derived from the word spirit, an apparition. Spanish is forty percent Arabic. The Arabic root ties poem to hair. A true poem for Arabic speakers raises hair on the back of the neck. For the Aztecs the closest translation seems to be “flowers and songs.” As for the Chinese, Bill Porter, aka RedPine, quotes Zheng, “In the heart, it’s what a person holds dear. Expressed in language, it’s poetry.” Of interest here is that in Chinese mind and heart have the same ideogram. Like traditional peoples around the globe, essentially one thinks and feels with the heart, contrary to Eurocentric hard edge divisions of mind and heart.
With obvious playfulness, focused Lipman treks and maps precognitive time and space, ideal suggestive moments of inspiration igniting creative sparks. These light the fire out of which flames what we call poem. For some these may be heard as whispers by the muse through her countless masks, the dark tragic to the transcendent. Some modern and postmodern avenues of expression narrow poem to object, particularly one’s flat, unpermitted reference outside their imposed illusionary binding frame. Reference only aloud inside to itself reduces poem, then, to thing made barren without roots/routes from and to elsewhere. Other limitations being variations, plays and reductions, based on the Williams’ call for the poem, “no ideas but in things.” But here, in American poetics, opens a divide with a reach for the transcendent and wisdom and the opposite to mere object. Lipman’s maps ain’t flat nor fenced, nor just thing made. His depth of field may be dried ink thicknesses and spatial scale small page small. But, contrasting fonts jump a specific eyed perspective with a read that guides textual echoes emanating out of the background field. He compacts the energies into minimalist poems that Lorine Niedecker, another fourth coast poet of the condensed poem, would smile upon and with.
I had been aware of Lipman’s works through his well known poeMvelopes, rubber stamped envelope beauties in my mail during the era of mail art from the 70s into the early 90s, and later the survey of him in e-kaldron in which he mentions the series, but in passing.
He embarked on his journey in 1976, with the purchase of a Justrite Office Rubberstamp set and a single black ink pad, eventually becoming a master of the water-based ink rubber stamp visual poem. Soon he expanded the pallet to color. He saved books from discard bins behind bookstores from which a harvested page became a canvas field free of copyright hassle and the moral issues of theft. The chosen medium and page size focuses his attention on a variety of short minimal poem types that he calls “a range of visual and spatial poems.” Pulling reader/viewer into a page offers additional poetic readings/lookings behind and through its essence, the stamped poem.
To name a few influences in the background are two master Ohioan visual poets, Kenneth Patchen and d.a. levy; his friend and powerhouse of the found poem, Bern Porter of Maine; and his university teacher, the concise and cryptic poet, Robert Creely. Lipman’s body of work shines alongside his influencers and stand with other minimalist poets.
This big little book is a selection from about 100 composed over decades. Some pages were recently displayed, moving from 5x7 inches to 3x4 foot quality prints. Its delight cannot but lift reader/viewer to smile if not smirk or laugh. His “such a dot” poem (above) offers a cosmological jump out of and back to our planet. Three words add up to more than the sum of its parts.
The facing page, the joy of Hansel and Gretel dance on our little dot adds to the more than the sum. The dropped broom suggests a family of sounds flashing open insights out of which are born ch’an/zen poems, well known condensed commentaries on the more than.
This collection of rubber stamped and treated text visual poems I read and see pointing to the missing hair roots of our truncated definition of poem, a successful project undoing a mere “to make.” These multimedia creations are a dialog with the viewer/reader filling in the blank fields for our word poem.
Early on in my efforts of visual poetry in the 70s I called for the visual poet to offer up true visionary work, works that positively nourish, add to and lift a reader/viewer’s life to grand vistas. That is to offer up the light not the shadow. Lipman, like his influencers, I suggest, with ease works with and in such visionary light, hollowness filled with hallow.
July 2023
Oceano Ca
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