“‘How can the poet reach and touch you physically as say the sculptor does by caressing you with objects you caress?’ [bp Nichols] asks, and then answers: ‘only if he drops the barriers.’” Image: Adaptation of photo of bp Nichol’s ‘Journeying and Returns,’ with permission from Coach House Books and the Poetry Foundation.
The haptic poem occurs at an extremity of communication. It arrives in the fleeting moment of contact between language, body, and object as they route their way along the skin and through the nervous system. Unlike the related expanded practices of visual poetry and sound poetry, which engage the ocular and cochlear realms of experience, the haptic poem is a more holistic engagement of body and bodily processes.
In A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Mladen Dolar describes listening as a submissive act: “Listening entails obeying; there is a strong etymological link between the two in many languages.” Dolar continues further, fortifying this etymological link and states that “the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.” Dolar’s comments may benefit from distinguishing between two modes of sonic stimulation to characterize hearing (as passive, as what he describes in this passage) and listening (as active, as an intent to bring the world's sounds inside). That being said, Dolar has framed the act of listening here as a loss of agency since, as he suggests, we often cannot select what it is that we hear or overhear.
In A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Mladen Dolar describes listening as a submissive act: “Listening entails obeying; there is a strong etymological link between the two in many languages.”[1] Dolar continues further, fortifying this etymological link, and states that “the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.”[2] Dolar’s comments may benefit from distinguishing between two modes of sonic sti
Barney and Betty Rubble go to the Grand Canyon and send a postcard back to Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Fred and Wilma aren’t too impressed by the canyon but think the notion of a ‘postcard’ is a pretty neat idea. (I read this in a poem long ago. Unfortunately I can’t find the source. Send me a postcard if you know.)
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Over the years, the typewriter has been important for visual poetry. For example, Dom Sylvester Houédard’s typestracts. Or Steve McCaffery’s monumental Carnival.
Coda
Listening and self-care in Shazia Hafiz Ramji's 'Port of Being' (2018)
In A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Mladen Dolar describes listening as a submissive act: “Listening entails obeying; there is a strong etymological link between the two in many languages.” Dolar continues further, fortifying this etymological link and states that “the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.” Dolar’s comments may benefit from distinguishing between two modes of sonic stimulation to characterize hearing (as passive, as what he describes in this passage) and listening (as active, as an intent to bring the world's sounds inside). That being said, Dolar has framed the act of listening here as a loss of agency since, as he suggests, we often cannot select what it is that we hear or overhear.
In A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Mladen Dolar describes listening as a submissive act: “Listening entails obeying; there is a strong etymological link between the two in many languages.”[1] Dolar continues further, fortifying this etymological link, and states that “the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.”[2] Dolar’s comments may benefit from distinguishing between two modes of sonic sti