Karl Young
died in September, 2017, after
years of ill health, several major operations and many bed-ridden months. He
remained high spirited and productive despite harsh challenges. He volunteered
to take the poetry magazine Kaldron digital in 1996 in order to extend its reach and continue its
policy of trying to publish quality works. It went on-line Bastille
Day, 1997, signifying independence from all schools and isms.
His skillful writing and critical eye added many critical writings on visual poetry in the Kaldron pages. http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kaldron.htm
Karl helped edit the book that has inspired this blogsite -- a history of text art and visual poetry, by karl kempton. An essay by Karl Young is also to be found elsewhere on the blog.
His skillful writing and critical eye added many critical writings on visual poetry in the Kaldron pages. http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kaldron.htm
Karl helped edit the book that has inspired this blogsite -- a history of text art and visual poetry, by karl kempton. An essay by Karl Young is also to be found elsewhere on the blog.
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| Detail: Tian-Wen Single Bird |
Works
exhibited here reflect a very small sample of his visually eloquent Chinese
translations. He constantly returned to the Chinese over the decades adding to
this domain of many domains of exploration, treasure-find and visual rendering.
Make some investment time to peruse his web site and home-page to discover
visual text art and lexical poetry works based on the Middle East, Mesoamerica,
Japanese, more Chinese, and Anglo-Saxon. The
below quote from our friend, Harry Polkinhorn, provides a suggestion of Karl’s
range of interests and works.
Young's work
as a poet, book artist, critic, and publisher (Membrane Press) have kept him
long in the forefront of developments in the vast small-press network.
Production experiments in typography, layout, support, and overall book design
have enabled him to explore graphic/physical potentialities of the book medium.
These have varied, for example, from his paper screenfold, calligraphy-like
renderings of Wang Wei and Tu Fu, entitled Clouds Over Fortjade, to his
performance book for The Four Horsemen, with pages made of unfinished
two-by-fours. As I have indicated above, such experiments cannot easily be
dismissed, since as Benjamin has said, ". . . it as magical experiments
with words, not as artistic babbling, that we must understand the passionate
phonetic and graphical transformational games that have run through the whole
literature of the avant-garde. . ." and ". . . nowhere do these two
metaphor and image collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in
politics." Adorno concurs: ".
. . creative artists are compelled by force of circumstance to
experiment," and "art today is virtually impossible unless it is
engaged in experimentation." It is precisely in the nexus comprised of
extreme graphic and oral disjunction that the avant-garde's critical challenge
of politics resides. http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/hpsp12.htm
In Karl’s own words: Some Volumes of Poetry:
A Retrospective of Publication Work by Karl Young http://www.bigbridge.org/young/ky-intro.htm
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/young/ky-bio.htm
On Karl Young by Jerome Rothenberg
https://jacket2.org/commentary/karl-young-toward-ideal-anthology-part-one https://jacket2.org/commentary/karl-young-toward-ideal-anthology-reflections-light-and-dust-web-anthology-part-two
Karl Kempton
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