P-Queue and Eyechart Poems at dbqp: visualizing poetics

P-Queue and Eyechart Poems at dbqp: visualizing poetics

A wonderful series of images and remarks from Geof Huth at his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics.


After hearing the word 'lettrist' in a seminar a few years ago, I went (naturally) to google for more info, and one of Geof's posts, along with its embedded links, became my introduction to the field. Since then, his daily writings have been a go-to resource for my own questions as to the intersections, multiplications, super-positions (etc. etc.) of the visual and the textual.

So when vol. 6 turned out to think 'space,' Geof was someone I knew I needed to contact for the issue. Thankfully, Geof offered P-Queue a fantastic piece thinking visual poetry and his own practices of it, as well as a series of 'fidgetglyphs' (you'll have to check them out to see what, exactly, these are!), and a manuscript of 'eyechart poems' that the press put out in chapbook form.

As I wrote to Geof a short while ago, these eyechart poems especially have added to my thinking about the work of lettrism--in Geof's sequence of poems, tools of medicalized normativity (i.e. the eyechart) are twisted into their opposite: no longer a standard by which one is measured, but rather a horizon of possibility. Interaction with these pieces gives one much to think about, and a timely, wry twist to all the anxiety that seems to be in the air these days about a "public" health option...


Thanks, Geof!