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barbs / Arif Khan

on March 27, 2020

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SYNAPSE ESSAY THE NINTH: The Enigma of / Henri-Martin Barzun / by karl kempton

The Enigma of / Henri-Martin Barzun is that he is and remains an enigma. An enigma inhabiting, as a shadowy figure, if at all, visual text history. Despite his acknowledged status in avant-garde Paris, despite being written about in English and American poetry magazines before WWI. His works appeared in journals and anthologies after WWI into the 1950s — he's everywhere I look and yet he is somehow without trace. He exists as he exits — called upon by name, but rarely meaningfully discussed. What we witness from Barzun is a scale of visual poetry composed by typewriter (or typographic) neither reached for nor achieved by anyone I know of, to date. His epic L ’ Orhéide is a visual kinetic work full of, “choruses, dialog, songs and unisons; also soliloquies, fragments of prose, pure sounds and even noises (from his son, discussed later, who typed it).” Nor is there another original visual poetry /lyrical narrative epic of comparable scale. Large scale wor

Bin Qulander

Bin Qulander is a younger member of contemporary generations of Islamic calligraphers who are in a moment of an expansive creativity. Vibrant and multi-layered, inspired and influenced by numerous sources including sacred texts (legible in the paintings and obviously highly skilled in presentation), various music, Sufi dance, nature and more all woven with local, regional and pan Islamic color, patterns and symbols, Bin Qulander’s calligraphy for me offers one of the more spectacular and accomplished examples of the renewal. This may be a renaissance equivalent to or about to exceed in dimension and quality an earlier creative period generated by the introduction of paper. The current era’s new materials and approaches imported and blended with local and wider Islamic cultural traditions is but one function powering this flourishing activity. Another cause is the sharing of works on global electronic social media networks and websites, where I first sa

SYNAPSE ESSAY THE ELEVENTH: Cleveland Concrete / by karl kempton

This article brings to light a group of individuals in Cleveland, Ohio out of which came the first American anthology of concrete poetry, cleveland concrete , 1966.(1) By American I mean American-published and American-only concrete poets. All other American-published anthologies of that period were internationally-edited and thus international concrete poets dominated all the collections. Only the Bory anthology from New Directions contained more than the usuals. Of the Cleveland concrete poets, d.a.levy is best known and in some circles a major figure whose story in concrete poetics remains to be fully researched and illuminated. This stature and thus the long cast of his shadow has hidden the others of Cleveland, lexical and concrete poets, in varying degrees and for various reasons, none of which are excusable. One of several omissions in this gap-toothed history clearly shows that d.a.levy published many individuals’ first book of concrete poetry, most prior to 1967. His vol

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barbs / Arif Khan

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