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KALDRON / issue number nineteen

on December 30, 2021

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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

BOB GRUMMAN: the way of a poet when denied use of poetic license / by karl kempton

ABOVE: Bob Grumman, mathemaku This essay is a reflection, refracted. It notes the poetic/philosophical influences flowing around Bob Grumman’s life and emanating from karl's response to his death. Like many of the “experimental” poets celebrated in Synapse, Bob struggled for recognition in his lifetime — and in fact the very basis of his poetic work was often challenged. You might say that his poetic licence was revoked by the official language police. And yet he continued unabated, even revelling in his "Outsider-dom". A blessing, because his was an exemplary and generous practice, sharing his vision, encouraging many others. The essay (among the longest we've published in Synapse) then travels on, far beyond Bob the individual who karl knew well, into a wider and deeper oceanic terrain of confluence and influence in visual poetry. It is also a history of many repressions, many outsider-ings, many licenses revoked; the human will to erase is perhaps as strong as the

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

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KALDRON / issue number nineteen

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