Emma, Susan, and I moved to Buffao in August of 1990. I did these works in the following Spring, when Emma was turning five. Some of these xerox-generated pieces, an extension of Veil, and many of which focussed on my own hand-written mss and notebooks, were collected in Ray DiPalma's Hot Bird Mfg as Language of Bouquetsin 1991 (9 sheets, stapled at top). This set of work involved overpriting, rather thant overwriting, as in Veil. The two images here are quite different that the others in this series: I overlayed a drawing of Emma's over the printout of "Emma's Nursery Rimes." The poems, from July 1990, were published as part of a collaborative book with Bee, Little Orphan Anagram (New York: Granary Books, 1997) and later collected in Girly Man. Emma always said she wrote them.
At the time I was creating the series Veil (1976 EPC didital edition) [also pdf of Xexoxial Edition], I also made some other Veil-like works. A couple are in the Sackner collection:"I became a consultant to the world outside" (left) and the horizontal veil below. & then there were two Veil postcards, the latter one published by Station Hill Press in 1980. The conceptual key to the Veil works were that they involved overwriting not overprinting: that is, I overwrote my writing as a composition process. They are a form of writing, not design.
In the fall of 1975, while a second-year undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I attempted to enroll in an introduction to poetry writing course being taught by a doctoral student named Hank Lazer. I went to the first class meeting and found some 40-plus eager students hoping to gain a spot in the 15-person workshop. At the front of the room sat our long-haired, handsome, almost beatific instructor, distributing questionnaires meant to assess our interest in the class. What kind of music stirred us? Did we engage with visual art? How? By whom? Who was our favorite philosopher? Why? What foods did we most enjoy?
A 19-year-old from New Jersey, I had never met anyone quite like Hank, fresh from California’s Stanford University, in his Earth Shoes, sipping apple juice. Nor had anyone had ever asked me about myself and my artistic and extra-literary inclinations in quite this way. I’m still not sure how I gained a spot in Hank’s class, though I thank whatever compelled me to erase “Bachmann Turner Overdrive” and replace BTO with Rachmaninoff, whose compositions, brought to life by Arthur Rubenstein, scratched out of the family stereo cabinet throughout my childhood in a way I suddenly felt invited to appreciate.
(109:38): MP3 Among the reel-to-reel tapes in PennSound's Robert Creeley archive, we found a phone log Bob had made of a day in the life, the life being lived at the time in Placitas, New Mexico, in the late 1960s (let's call it 1968, but exact date not known as yet), where Creeley was living his wife Bobbie Louise Hawkins and their children. The log captures everyday life, that great Creeley theme, from a daughter asking permission for sleep-over to a brief conversation about an overdue phone bill to a long chat with Bob's life-long friend photographer Elsa Dorfman. In an age of email, this time capsule gives a sense of the phone conversation as both a space of intimate exchange and quotidian commerce.
Jerome Rothenberg had just published "Our Americas" on his Poems & Poetics site. This is one of the essays from