'Graphology' drawing poems, by John Kinsella

Al Filreis

I am pleased to present a selection of Graphology drawing poems by John Kinsella. You can view the selection HERE and HERE. Below is a commentary provided by John. — A.F.

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On Graphology Drawing Poems

by John Kinsella

Concurrent with writing Graphology Poems by hand and in type (typewriter and computer fonts), I have “concretized” poems by photographing them “in situ” — i.e. as printed or written/marked pages set in trees, against flowers, or as scratchings in dirt, as sticks arranged on a firebreak, or photographed by a third party while holding sheets of poems as “protest placards” — and as textual interjections, overlays, and “culture jamming” of preexisting images/texts. I have also, more prevalently, maybe, made “drawings” and “paintings” … in other words, writing as illustration.

Here is a selection of recent “line/colour/shape” poems.

I have been working at my Graphology Poems since the mid-90s in a publishing sense, and much longer in a “drafting” and “creating” sense. I am deeply interested in the correlation between color and language, between shape and speech, and the narrative implications of lines. I am intrigued by angles and curves — arcs, segments. etc. — measured to the precise degree as well as introducing random chance to define the beginning of a pattern. Angles say much about how we view a person, a tree, a mountain, a bird, the sun, the moon, a kangaroo (changing position, hopping, resting), the roof of a house … and the poem comes alive with all of these observational possibilities and realities in mind.

The making of these works is also about the keeping of a journal (which I have done for four decades, on and off — more on than off) — a day-entry that is a poem draft wherein the signs/marks left on the page by impressions made through working on the previous page (the previous day’s drawing poem draft or “written” entry) … creates subtexts and encryptions to the surface narrative. The show-through, the impression, the valleys and crests created by the pressure of the pencil on the page the day or days prior informs the next installment … part of the same narrative and a fragment entire in itself … a poem sequence. This is representational poetry via a theory of lines, curves … writing and shapes … regarding color.

Yes, I actually have a Graphology Kaleidoscope Series (aside from these works — those poems are all handwritten or typed in recognized fonts) and I have always been intrigued by the controlled (and the tension between the random and the finite) “chance” of the kaleidoscope, and I think of Mallarmé so often when I make these poems on writing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and processing. They are empirical works working against materiality, and in their tangibility become quintessential to a project of translating how we interpret signs, and how we must be wary of the impression our signature (so practiced as a child and not finding its form till necessity drives it as we get older) leaves on all the surfaces and what’s “behind” those surfaces as we live our lives.

Making/constructing/“creating” has consequences, and these poems attempt to be “illustrative writings” of that apparent truism. As I move through phases of illustration becoming pictures, I take the letter and overwrite it, I take the font and look to change its facts, its definitions. One thing I am working towards is altering the keys of am manual typewriter to make them no typeface (outside the mass production die-cast), no consistent font beyond the repetition of those physically altered letters which will bring their own consistency, their own pattern, for poems made on that specific machine. The manual machine as anti-machine. Cage’s prepared piano, but even more in that once changed, there’s no going back. There’s nothing temporary about it beyond entropy, which decides things anyway. I have three old typewriters that have their histories of recording, transcribing, and illustrating.

And now I return to the present series of Graphologies and search for reflections, diffractions and absorptions in the colour wheel of handwriting — working within the constraints of packets of twelve, twenty-four, and forty-eight colours … all of them vegan, and some of them recycled … thrown like dice outside games of chance (which I don’t play anymore) onto acid-free, chlorine-free paper in a vegan-friendly and non-old growth forest journal. The materials matter and speak as much as the show-through marks, the gouges in the pages.

And the rulers, protractors (round, semicircle), set squares, compasses, dividers, and the instruments of hand, arm, body, are part of the vocabulary and acts of translating the figurative into the representational and vice versa. These Graphology Drawing Poems are a subset (I am also obsessed with sets) of Graphology Restoration, which builds in my now.

Graphology Restoration 46: balancing act

Universal Vernier Bevel protractor
is the basis of four directional viewing.

On the salmon gum drawing the sun
shines from four points, theatre in the round,

always sun up sun down or mid-morning
mid-afternoon on the arc of growth

never transiting but fixed — daylighting
the world, azimuth of certainties

one illustration as four corners
but no visual trick, no hoodwink.

Oh, and maybe a pertinent aside, “Graphology Salmon Gum” is actually intended to be shown in four different directions/orientations — as per the clock, as per points of the compass, as per times of the day, if you like. The sun in each corner, the salmon gum tree working (with) its allocation of light in different ways. An ongoing day but always conscious of night.

May 21, 2021

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.