kaldron / dialogue with Paula Claire
PAULA CLAIRE
The entries in my Archive Catalogue (list sent to KK 18.01.2022) have comments by me assessing its importance. When in 2013 I entered the issues of KALDRON he had sent me 1978-1992 (I don’t know why I have not got nos 16 and 19) I unhesitatingly declared the Magazine as ‘the most important disseminator of international visual poetry in the USA.’ The early issues gave the address of each practitioner that I used to invite them to exchange work with me in my burgeoning collection, formally opened in Oxford by my beloved colleague Mirella Bentivoglio, May 1980 when she stayed with my husband Paul and I for a few days.
I was impressed from the outset that Karl included not only visual poets working in diverse forms and many languages but considered integral the superb patterned calligraphies of the Middle East, see Issue 8 curated by Armando Zarate. This was of particular importance to me because I had been teaching English to Middle Eastern students in Oxford and was invited to stay with their families: I gave a Lecture Performance and display from my Archive at the University of Shiraz, 1976; and stayed in Jeddah in 1977. I love Middle Eastern scripts: they declare the sacred word all over their religious buildings as well as in manuscripts. Later Issues feature patterned language from cultures worldwide.
Of paramount importance in KALDRON is the large-scale format: a broadsheet. Visual poetry needs SPACE. It is infuriating to see practitioners’ work squashed among commentary in books purporting to respect the subject. Double-page spreads started to appear from Issue 9 onwards; visual poems each given the entire page by Issue 10. This asserts the grandeur and significance of visual poetry and its place in the art world.
The Newsletter and Reviews section at the back helped all recipients to keep up to date with international developments: the opening of my Archive was mentioned in Issue 11.
I congratulate Karl on the amount of sheer hard work and consistent commitment to our field he has demonstrated, curating exhibitions and writing articles culminating in his recent online History of our vast field seen in the widest possible context of cultures worldwide. All this running alongside his own creative outpouring of visual poems that continually astonish with their inventiveness, shared online.
(I am not sure why Karl started to send me KALDRON and have no time to search for my diaries that probably throw light on it. Possibly hearing about 2 key events in 1978 drew his attention to my name. Mirella had curated an exhibition with catalogue of 80 female practitioners’ Materializzazione del Linguaggio (now greatly recognised) at the Venice Biennale September1978 in which I exhibited and gave my first outdoor performance, There I met women he included in KALDRON – Amelia Etlinger and Betty Danon. In October I went with Konkrete Canticle to the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival in Toronto, a large gathering from Europe, Canada and USA, a book published to mark the event)
KARL KEMPTON
Paula, thank you for the history. I will try to answer your last uncertainty first. I was in an informal national network of American concrete and visual poets beginning around 1973 when my first typewriter poems were being published. The network expanded as more small magazines published my work. An expanded network came though publishing kaldron. Deciding to shift kaldron to all visual poetry and language art in 1978 created the call for the first visualog exhibition. The mailing list was complied from addresses on hand and those received from William Fox of West Coast Poetry Review, Loris Essary of Interstate, Dick Higgins of Something Else Press and Richard Kostelanetz. From one of these came your name and address.
That you took advantage of addresses in kaldron of its contributors pleases me greatly. You fulfilled one of my intentions as stated in my introduction. I know others did as well.
We share a common appreciation for one of humankind’s great calligraphy traditions, Arabic (script) calligraphy. In 1971 a friend gifted me a copy of the Williams’ concrete anthology from Something Else Press. I was attending graduate school at the University of Utah in economic history emphasizing in Middle Eastern Studies. One of the influential courses was a year series of classes studying the history of economic doctrines. I have used its tools for my study and research for the movement, disappearance and conflation of ideas in other fields. I spent many hours in the Middle Eastern Special Collection slowly turning pages of its calligraphy book collection. My “eye” was thus schooled to an aesthetic beauty so to say before opening the concrete anthology collection where I was immediately focusing on Scheiichi Niikuni, who to my eye eclipsed all others. My inclination and intuition seems tuned to the perennial traditions of humankind.
I soon left academia answering the call of poetry going to work in Salt Lake City cabinet factories. My division of labor until retirement i n 2019 was and remained body for work, mind and spirit for poetry. By 1975 I living in this area having moved from Sacramento after Salt Lake City. There I met and befriended two concrete poets, d.r. wagner and Wally Depew.
I am, though should not have been, the first American visual poet to publish contemporary Arabic calligraphy and word painting from the good fortune of receiving works from Hassan Massoudy. I published him often. Issue 19 (his work on the cover & back cover of 21/22) is a issue devoted to French lettrists, Constantine Xenakis, Arab and Persian word painting/calligraphers and Japanese visual poets. It contains Massoudy’s works and those of Rachid Koraichi and Hossein Zenderoudi.
A long hiatus of no contact with Arab and Persian word painters beginning in 1992 ended in 2013 when I, at the urging of my mathematical poet friend, Kaz Malslanka, joined facebook. In the reconnection I discovered what I term a new golden age of Islamic painted word art, the Arab and Persian word painters. The renewed contact that sparked my deeper study of the traditions is summed in my a history of visual text art (free pdf on my web site) I will conclude with two paragraphs on page 287:
Generally, Eurocentric, non-Islamic practitioners of visual text art view words, letters, and other language elements as physical materials to manipulate seriously or whimsically without regard to a valued set of cultural traditions and aesthetics, either non-existent or in such constant flux as to have become meaningless and thus eclipsed by the style or cliché of the moment. Such fragmentation can be interpreted as the reflection of the broken mirror of poetic and artistic vision working towards not a higher utopian idealism but surrendering to dystopian forces infecting the arts. Another interpretation of such fragmentation, generally, can be that of rendering an inability to lyrically articulate from the higher regions of consciousness. Within recent pan-Islamic visual text art, individuals influenced by the Sufi way know that each element of the Arabic alphabet maintains its own vibratory character holding its particular energetic force that flows from its specific essence. Each letter holds within its soft permeable boundary a unique personality or individuality expressing multiple layers of meaning that extend from the mundane to the sacred inner regions of heightened consciousness where some have filled their hearts full with the Absolute’s golden light.
Add to the individual contemporary stress and conflict the conscious use of opposites and other aspects of the Sufi Science of Letters, which opens to “translating” an encounter with an aspect of the unspeakable. Add as well an implied Pythagorean rotation of spheres forming a visual music. Woven throughout one sees Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, and “Neoplatonic” idealism found from the soft borders of India through Persia, west Asia, Egypt to Greece, and upward into Byzantium before fragmenting into weaker influences throughout Eurocentric culture, while remaining intact among Sufi schools. The Science of Letters with the implied philosophical, mystical, and transcendental spirituality of each character and the various associated fields are fully integrated, creating vibrations seen and felt in works. These heartfelt vibrations are enhanced through contemplation or meditation. It is not an exaggeration to describe the experience as receiving a heart-energy charge. Suggestive musicality (implied music of the spheres with its ancient Pythagorean and contemporary usages) in many works moves members of audience/viewers elsewhere, both lifting above and diving deep into hidden layered meanings beyond the usual global utilitarian linguistic theorems where a letter is merely a symbol signifying a sound not heard. Neither the Latin nor Cyrillic alphabets had or has a deep mystical science of letters with which to refute the mundane utilitarian language ideas.
PAULA CLAIRE
The entries in my Archive Catalogue (list sent to KK 18.01.2022) have comments by me assessing its importance. When in 2013 I entered the issues of KALDRON he had sent me 1978-1992 (I don’t know why I have not got nos 16 and 19) I unhesitatingly declared the Magazine as ‘the most important disseminator of international visual poetry in the USA.’ The early issues gave the address of each practitioner that I used to invite them to exchange work with me in my burgeoning collection, formally opened in Oxford by my beloved colleague Mirella Bentivoglio, May 1980 when she stayed with my husband Paul and I for a few days.
I was impressed from the outset that Karl included not only visual poets working in diverse forms and many languages but considered integral the superb patterned calligraphies of the Middle East, see Issue 8 curated by Armando Zarate. This was of particular importance to me because I had been teaching English to Middle Eastern students in Oxford and was invited to stay with their families: I gave a Lecture Performance and display from my Archive at the University of Shiraz, 1976; and stayed in Jeddah in 1977. I love Middle Eastern scripts: they declare the sacred word all over their religious buildings as well as in manuscripts. Later Issues feature patterned language from cultures worldwide.
Of paramount importance in KALDRON is the large-scale format: a broadsheet. Visual poetry needs SPACE. It is infuriating to see practitioners’ work squashed among commentary in books purporting to respect the subject. Double-page spreads started to appear from Issue 9 onwards; visual poems each given the entire page by Issue 10. This asserts the grandeur and significance of visual poetry and its place in the art world.
The Newsletter and Reviews section at the back helped all recipients to keep up to date with international developments: the opening of my Archive was mentioned in Issue 11.
I congratulate Karl on the amount of sheer hard work and consistent commitment to our field he has demonstrated, curating exhibitions and writing articles culminating in his recent online History of our vast field seen in the widest possible context of cultures worldwide. All this running alongside his own creative outpouring of visual poems that continually astonish with their inventiveness, shared online.
(I am not sure why Karl started to send me KALDRON and have no time to search for my diaries that probably throw light on it. Possibly hearing about 2 key events in 1978 drew his attention to my name. Mirella had curated an exhibition with catalogue of 80 female practitioners’ Materializzazione del Linguaggio (now greatly recognised) at the Venice Biennale September1978 in which I exhibited and gave my first outdoor performance, There I met women he included in KALDRON – Amelia Etlinger and Betty Danon. In October I went with Konkrete Canticle to the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival in Toronto, a large gathering from Europe, Canada and USA, a book published to mark the event)
KARL KEMPTON
Paula, thank you for the history. I will try to answer your last uncertainty first. I was in an informal national network of American concrete and visual poets beginning around 1973 when my first typewriter poems were being published. The network expanded as more small magazines published my work. An expanded network came though publishing kaldron. Deciding to shift kaldron to all visual poetry and language art in 1978 created the call for the first visualog exhibition. The mailing list was complied from addresses on hand and those received from William Fox of West Coast Poetry Review, Loris Essary of Interstate, Dick Higgins of Something Else Press and Richard Kostelanetz. From one of these came your name and address.
That you took advantage of addresses in kaldron of its contributors pleases me greatly. You fulfilled one of my intentions as stated in my introduction. I know others did as well.
We share a common appreciation for one of humankind’s great calligraphy traditions, Arabic (script) calligraphy. In 1971 a friend gifted me a copy of the Williams’ concrete anthology from Something Else Press. I was attending graduate school at the University of Utah in economic history emphasizing in Middle Eastern Studies. One of the influential courses was a year series of classes studying the history of economic doctrines. I have used its tools for my study and research for the movement, disappearance and conflation of ideas in other fields. I spent many hours in the Middle Eastern Special Collection slowly turning pages of its calligraphy book collection. My “eye” was thus schooled to an aesthetic beauty so to say before opening the concrete anthology collection where I was immediately focusing on Scheiichi Niikuni, who to my eye eclipsed all others. My inclination and intuition seems tuned to the perennial traditions of humankind.
I soon left academia answering the call of poetry going to work in Salt Lake City cabinet factories. My division of labor until retirement i n 2019 was and remained body for work, mind and spirit for poetry. By 1975 I living in this area having moved from Sacramento after Salt Lake City. There I met and befriended two concrete poets, d.r. wagner and Wally Depew.
I am, though should not have been, the first American visual poet to publish contemporary Arabic calligraphy and word painting from the good fortune of receiving works from Hassan Massoudy. I published him often. Issue 19 (his work on the cover & back cover of 21/22) is a issue devoted to French lettrists, Constantine Xenakis, Arab and Persian word painting/calligraphers and Japanese visual poets. It contains Massoudy’s works and those of Rachid Koraichi and Hossein Zenderoudi.
A long hiatus of no contact with Arab and Persian word painters beginning in 1992 ended in 2013 when I, at the urging of my mathematical poet friend, Kaz Malslanka, joined facebook. In the reconnection I discovered what I term a new golden age of Islamic painted word art, the Arab and Persian word painters. The renewed contact that sparked my deeper study of the traditions is summed in my a history of visual text art (free pdf on my web site) I will conclude with two paragraphs on page 287:
Generally, Eurocentric, non-Islamic practitioners of visual text art view words, letters, and other language elements as physical materials to manipulate seriously or whimsically without regard to a valued set of cultural traditions and aesthetics, either non-existent or in such constant flux as to have become meaningless and thus eclipsed by the style or cliché of the moment. Such fragmentation can be interpreted as the reflection of the broken mirror of poetic and artistic vision working towards not a higher utopian idealism but surrendering to dystopian forces infecting the arts. Another interpretation of such fragmentation, generally, can be that of rendering an inability to lyrically articulate from the higher regions of consciousness. Within recent pan-Islamic visual text art, individuals influenced by the Sufi way know that each element of the Arabic alphabet maintains its own vibratory character holding its particular energetic force that flows from its specific essence. Each letter holds within its soft permeable boundary a unique personality or individuality expressing multiple layers of meaning that extend from the mundane to the sacred inner regions of heightened consciousness where some have filled their hearts full with the Absolute’s golden light.
Add to the individual contemporary stress and conflict the conscious use of opposites and other aspects of the Sufi Science of Letters, which opens to “translating” an encounter with an aspect of the unspeakable. Add as well an implied Pythagorean rotation of spheres forming a visual music. Woven throughout one sees Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, and “Neoplatonic” idealism found from the soft borders of India through Persia, west Asia, Egypt to Greece, and upward into Byzantium before fragmenting into weaker influences throughout Eurocentric culture, while remaining intact among Sufi schools. The Science of Letters with the implied philosophical, mystical, and transcendental spirituality of each character and the various associated fields are fully integrated, creating vibrations seen and felt in works. These heartfelt vibrations are enhanced through contemplation or meditation. It is not an exaggeration to describe the experience as receiving a heart-energy charge. Suggestive musicality (implied music of the spheres with its ancient Pythagorean and contemporary usages) in many works moves members of audience/viewers elsewhere, both lifting above and diving deep into hidden layered meanings beyond the usual global utilitarian linguistic theorems where a letter is merely a symbol signifying a sound not heard. Neither the Latin nor Cyrillic alphabets had or has a deep mystical science of letters with which to refute the mundane utilitarian language ideas.
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