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15 May 2005: Arnold Skemer, otherstream novelist and champion of "marginal literature," including visual poetry, even though he doesn't compose it himself (although he's taken a few vizpo devices into his novels), has long published a stapled-together newsletter/zine called ZYX that is worthy of note for his commentaries on the literary scene and gift of space to a wide range of poets and other artists, few with even my celebrity. One such, whom I don't think I've heard of, is R. W. Watkins, of Newfoundland, who had six pieces in the July 2005 issue of ZYX. The two below particularly took my fancy:
Canadian visual poets, for some reason, are even more attracted to the haiku than American visual poets, or so it seems to me. Since both solitextual haiku and visual poems tend to strive for a minimal amount of words, it's not surprising that visual poets would like haiku most of all the conventional forms of poetry. Still, I wonder that Canadian visual poets seem so much more attracted to it than visual poets to the south. Perhaps because bp Nichol was? In any case, these two are top-drawer. The second seems little but a visual onomatopoeia, with the additional drawback of being about what may be haiku's most hackneyed topic, a graveyard. Until the final line, which makes it.
The other seems absolutely splendid to me although the smallest of steps beyond so many vispo pictures of poetic forms--because of the corners. My immediate reaction to them was, "Wow." I'm not sure why the bending of the lines has so powerful an effect on me. I think the shared angle makes them seem more alike than three straight lines do. The lines are also an amusing variation on poetic lines, or a deviation from them. But they suggest layering, too--parts of three sheets of paper in a pile. The change from asymmetric set to symmetric set seems meaningful to me, as well. In the second, the third line seems larger than the first--although it's the same size--which is appropriate for a haiku's third line. The reference to the illumagery of Frank Stella is sharp. In short, Watkins is someone to keep a watch on.
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