> God help us if we can no longer laugh at ourselves.
>
> What I said about vispo is absolutely true--it seems that every mother's
> son is grinding the stuff out and demanding that they be taken seriously
> for the mostly--miserable--effort.  (I'm thinking here mainly of the
> Spidertanglers--Huth and Co., who take themselves awfully seriously.)
> What do I mean by miserable?--they lack any visual sense and yet they do
> what they do.  In my book intentions--however theoretical--never make up
> for rotten execution.

I first came across Geof Huth's work in 1987 when he published
regularly with Seattle visual poetry publications by Joe Keppler and
Trudy Mercer. Even then, his work stood out, to me, via both 'visual
sense' and commitment to a notion of poetry with words. And, today, I
can pick his work out of 'a crowd'; he has a distinctive visual style
that informs not only the look of his work but its syntactic/semantic
possibilities. And he still has that commitment to visual poetry with
words.

So you are simply mistaken in thinking his work lacks "any visual
sense", Jesse. It may not be a visual sense that you understand or
approve, but I assure you he has quite a well-developed "visual
sense". And it is wedded indisoluably to his writerly sense. Part of
what that means is his visual sense is not in conformity to a lot of
standard notions of visual art. He isn't unaware of this and he is
also aware of, say, the visual sense of the lettrists, who tend to be
more engaged with styles and approaches to visual art that exude a  
more recognizable sense of, say, beauty. But Huth is not a lettrist.  
He is more committed to the word, the sentence, the  paragraph, and so  
on, in his visual work, than the lettrists.

I have a lot of respect for Geof Huth and his work. He is a serious
man and a serious artist. And I mean that in the best sense.

These days, he is doing with the blog what I have tried to do with the  
site. I have tried to develop my personal web site vispo.com as my  
main (though usually not the only) publication of my work. Geof's  
dbqp.blogspot.com is something I visit fairly regularly.

I am not a member of spidertangle and never have been, so I cannot
comment on spidertangle.

> On top of that we have the conceptual scribblers--the Asemic writers and
> the "Haptic" makers who scribble without an iota of Twombly's
> intelligence and verve.

Visual poetry, like mail art, has, for the most part, remained outside  
'acceptable' 'visual art' and 'literature'. Yet it keeps on keeping  
on. This is a complex issue. It isn't simply that all the  
practitioners lack all sense of the visual--though many writers do  
indeed lack all visual sense. It goes deeper than that. It is a matter  
of committment to language, on the one hand, and sheer visuality, on  
the other. It also involves notions of committment to the economy and  
infrastructure of visual art. Galleries. Commodification. Publication  
versus installation. And much else. Rich daddies, and so on.

But visual poetry keeps on keeping on, nonetheless. Particularly now  
that the digital tools of writing are also visual tools, and the  
digital tools of visual art can also involve text. The digital, in  
this sense, is the triumph of the avant garde and its historically  
long-lived involvement in synthesis of arts and media.

I am traveling today and the next couple of days, so will not have  
much opportunity for email. But I will respond to the below eventually.

> What Jim does is ok--I knew Ms. Uribe years ago--and for preserving and
> publishing her work alone he gets a million gold good guy stars.  My
> opinion as far as the programming part of Jim's work is that Disney and
> all the other corporations--could do it quicker and better--and have
> done it in computer games and other variations which will be cranked out
> in future.  In short, Jim's already old and out-dated almost as soon as
> he begins.  My advice for Jim is that he hook up with Apple, Microsoft,
> Google, or the other companies on the cutting edge of things.  He needs
> a team and big bucks in order to create something worthwhile, otherwise
> he's already an antique on the highway to the corporate future.
>
> Although Jim doesn't want to be an English major--I would suggest that
> he give "poetry"--the real stuff, a chance.  It doesn't get old, it
> engages the deepest levels of who we are, and it does and will endure.
>
> Yes, of course Dirac the "poet" and Heisenberg the "poet" and anybody
> you want to call a poet a "poet"--but give the real stuff a real
> chance, Jim.  You don't have to be an English major--you just have to
> have patience and be literate.
>
> What do I do at night Rupert?  Count the earthquakes and worry about
> radiation levels. Work on my projects--many of them Vispo.  I'm almost
> 57 years old here.  Laugh a lot.   Puts it all in perspective as the
> moon goes down in the land of the rising sun.
>
> Every best wish,
>
> Jess
>