at the time I had reading a good deal of work by others while at the same time - as curator and host - hearing a lot of poetry by high school students who were bending their language spoons in any number of pretzel shapes. This was 1995-1999. I had already seen concrete poetry and was familiar with a number of magazines of the period that experimented with typography and lay-out. Stephane Mallarme's A THROW OF THE DICE. The work of
Something Else Press & Dick Higgins. Early hypertext experiments on the Internet. They all flavored my thoughts about how the collection ought to appear.
Not surprisingly, the graphic artist/illustrator Katy Jean knew what to do. She didn't create pages : she made spreads. The poems weren't "black letters on a white paper", they were closer in style to ads in Fast Company or Spin.
Labels: A Throw of the Dice, Dick Higgins, Something Else Press, stephane mallarme
A tangled journey through thickets of time : over a decade ago now - in the midst of writing a series of poems while serving as a curator and host to a number of poetry events across Berks County, PA and environs, I composed one that had a particular immediacy to it that I decided would serve well as a title,
Fast White.
Some of the pieces that more or less cobbled themselves together during this period of time are related in tone and substance to the earlier published
Spontaneous Chili, which itself was an experiment in group writing at the infancy of the Internet and AOL chatrooms. The poems in that collection was cases of "sponting" : spontaneous on-line group poetry writing. As I imagined the future of creation in the electronic future of cyberspace, I concluded that it was be a hybrid one. It would be text WEDDED to image.
