Marcel Marceau on Pinterest. Marcel Marceau, dit le mime Marceau, est un acteur et mime fran. Canadian Literary Cross- Pollination: bp. Nichol, The Four Horsemen,and Jiri Ladocha In the last installment, I began my exploration of Robert Zend. The next two installments will discuss ways in which Zend. Most obviously, both expand their range to include concrete poetry, typewriter art, sound poetry, and multi- genre works. In addition, both weave an intensely social poetic fabric; embrace a processual aesthetic; incorporate metapoetic gestures; exhibit playful, free- spirited qualities; and explore cosmic themes. There are fundamental differences in their work, of course, some of which I will try to address as well. The Process Is the Message Ample evidence points to Zend and Nichol as writers and concrete poets concerned as much with the processual paths leading to thoughts and decisions . Marcel Marceau ou 'le poids de l'ame' A one-man show in 9 parts by the most famous contemporary pantomimist. MARCEL MARCEAU himself does voice-over introductions of his various skits. Fortunately, neither was averse to discussing the process and evolution of their work. In Nichol’s case, we have Meanwhile, a generous selection of essays and interviews edited by Roy Miki. And of course the multi- volume The Martyrology itself, which Nichol describes as a . In Zend’s case, works like “The Key” (a story told in footnotes, arising from a collaboration with Borges) and “Type Scapes: A Mystery Story” (a multi- genre essay recounting the evolution of Zend’s typewriter art) demonstrate such an approach. As well, an examination of the documents in the myriad boxes of the Zend fonds allows the researcher to traces interconnecting strands among works and to understand Zend as a writer and artist fascinated with journey as much as destination. In an interview with Pierre Coupey and others, Nichol addresses what writers sometimes call . Like in The Martyrology, I would bring in names very briefly, or characters very briefly or faces very briefly. Because it felt to me like that was the way you encountered people in real life. You might never meet them again, but for that moment they. So I let all that stuff into the poem, I let in a bunch of maudlin things because it felt to me that it was all part of the process of moving through something. All those things actually collide with your consciousness, so I left them in. But it makes for a very strange poem. In the following example of such . He then jolts the reader into consciousness of the materiality of both life and writing with the auditory reality of a “car slam.” This passage also displays Nichol’s famous self- reflexivity, bringing into the writing the act of writing itself (“that list enters the writing again . The result is a linguistic texture of a life lived, suffused with an awareness of being in the moment, observing details as they happen and jotting them down for later reflecting and shaping (he was not at all averse to revision). Zend also embraced a processual aesthetic, and tells of enjoying drafts and sketches as well as the completed work: He was also acutely aware of the ever more reticulated network of cognitive associations over time that lead his work in different directions. His description of the evolution of his typescapes demonstrates that although his brief but remarkably intense period of creation of this typewriter art may seem to have been “spur of the moment,” For Zend, eastern spiritual traditions wisely de- emphasize originary creation: In his customary highly visual style, Zend observes the continual fluctuation between process and product in the evolution of his typescapes, in which. The triumph of that account, however, is tempered when he describes an inscrutable encounter with his six- year- old daughter and understands that the product is never finished but continues to produce still more threads in the . Although their theoretical approaches diverge, nonetheless they are both swimming in the same avant- garde waters, radically questioning habits and traditions of thought and writing. Another difference is that whereas Nichol found in the poetic journal . For Nichol,the journal is almost always present as an element in the continuous poem. Its partialness, incompleteness, serialness and, yes, processualness, make it a logical model upon which to build formally. Certainly, in my own work, its use of intimate detail, of private reference & temporally tied specificity, has worked as a formal framework for The Martyrology and for part of what The Martyrology attempts. For Nichol, such naming was part of bringing lived experience into the process of writing, as in a journal. He also stresses that . That was their entire function. Here are the first two stanzas: I wrote a poem to A(mbrosios),I read it to B(elinda),Then gave it to A(mbrosios)Who showed it to C(ameleon)Who mentioned it to D(olores). I didn. 1. 2Despite the alphabetic naming, which tends to generalize persons almost to the point of anonymity (or at least fictiveness), I view such instances in Zend more as an apparatus of story- telling than a postmodern attack on notions of individual biography. I can’t comment on the Hungarian but only admire the ingenuity of the shapes and guess as to the kinds of characteristics they suggest. Meta The excerpt from Nichol. Such transparency will not absorb ink, will not draw attention to itself as a writing surface to bring into awareness its own material presence; nor will it allow language to reveal its own incompleteness and semantic slipperiness. As Nichol says in ABC: The Aleph Beth Book,For Nichol, the autonomous poem, oblivious to itself as created artifact, constitutes an artificial separation of poem and poet, whereas the “artifice” of self- reflection liberates and breathes life into the poem. Zend. Whereas Nichol critiques language as a transparent conveyor of signification and incorporates the act of writing into the poetry, Zend dramatizes the illusion of the writing subject as autonomous, intentional author, by imagining the poet taking the role of the writing implement, and some other force wielding him to write the poem. In this respect, Zend’s metapoetics seems more related to Spicer’s notion of the poet not as a consciously created self with an autonomous voice, but instead a conduit for language channeled from some other source. Zend’s most significant metapoetic exploration, of course, is O. We can see a similar kind of metanarrative at work as in the short poem above: the otherness of the writing subject, unaware (at least in the beginning) that he may be being written by another. In the excerpt below from O. Nichol continually shatters the mimetic illusion in a convergence of writing and life, and a blending of poetry and critical theory. Zend’s fundamentally metanarrative premise in O. The multi- layered drama of O. Nonetheless, I find it instructive to compare the self- reflexivity of these major multi- genre works by Zend and Nichol . In the end, he produced more handwritten concrete poetry than typewriter art. Zend, on the other hand, produced about as much concrete poetry as typewriter art, the latter during an extremely concentrated period of feverish creation. It’s interesting to recount Nichol’s and Zend’s stories of coming to their visual work without much influence from predecessors, as well as to note the many points of similarity in their work in each genre. Nichol relates that he came to concrete poetry and typewriter art with few examples and no clear idea of the history of such work.
In the early 6. 0s, he was studying the Dadaists and the visual poetry of Kenneth Patchen. Addressing this relative isolation, he states that Similarly, Zend tells that he came to typewriter art with no knowledge of precedents. By 1. 97. 8, he had already produced a body of work in the category of concrete poetry, and was approached by John Jessop to contribute to the International Anthology of Concrete Poetry he was editing. Jessop selected forty, some of which needed to be re- typed or translated from the Hungarian original. Zend, famously a procrastinator, didn. At first, he typed lines of repeated words onto paper, cut them into shapes, and glued them onto paper on which he had typed another word repeated in lines . Then he had an idea: He found that this method . Through a series of trial and error, he finally succeeded in creating polished and complex works. The differing weights of the question marks forming the overlaid shape suggest that he varied the pressure applied to certain typed characters to give the effect of shading. Nichol relates that his typewriter art evolved from visual and verbal puns, such as the following minimalist poem: Nichol dubbed “warbled” and other more visually complex poems such as “ASEA” (fig. At a certain point, Nichol decided not to continue with typewriter art, preferring to draw his concrete poetry by hand, citing the However, some of the work that he did produce in this genre shows him and Zend thinking in a similar vein about overlapping forms, as a comparison of Nichol’s “precarious poem” and Zend’s Peapoteacock reveals (figs. Nichol created a number of such concrete poems in which the letters and words more or less mimetically reproduce some feature of the object they spell out. Zend created (quite literally) hundreds of them to illustrate the play- learning of Oa. Judith” (fig. 1. 1) (see also “Vera,” fig. In most of these concrete poems, the words and letters are as important as the shapes in contributing to the effectiveness of the portrayal. In such portraits, Zend’s concrete poetry has a social component, whereas most of Nichol’s work in this genre tends to be (as far as I can tell) almost exclusively metapoetic, conceptual or representational. Zend’s concrete poetry that he created as a result of his friendship with mime artist Marcel Marceau, as well as that which created under the influence of Japanese traditions, will be explored in later installations on international influences and affinities. Zend’s most prolific and sustained contribution to concrete poetry is contained within the two volumes of O.
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