Calamus

In making a poster for National Poetry Month, using Wordle word clouds made from my own homoerotic poems, followed up by another version using one of my typewriters, the idea was suggested to make something using Walt Whitman's most well-known homoerotic poems: the "Calamus" section of Leaves of Grass. May is the month of Whitman's birthday, so it seems appropriate to make some art in his honor this month.

So, I've made some Wordle versions of the complete text of "Calamus" from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the most complete and most explicit version of these poems that Whitman ever published. The 1860 edition, it is agreed by many scholars, to be the peak of Whitman's brilliance, the peak of his sexually-explicit writing, and perhaps his best overall edition. After 1860 Whitman began a long process of self-censoring his poems, of rewriting them to be more acceptable to the general reader. He left many poems out, and by the "death bed" edition of 1891-92, he had rewritten many poems to be more mainstream and bowdlerized entire sections of Leaves to be more neutral and less provocative.

You can do your comparisons of the various editions of Leaves by cruising through The Walt Whitman Archive, one of the best, most thorough, and most complete of any poet's archives on the Internet. You can examine the complete texts of every edition, and view and download scans of the actual printed pages, covers, and supplementary materials published by Whitman during and after his lifetime. This is an invaluable, highly useful tool for any Whitman scholar, from the most casual to the most scrupulous.





I note how the word that appears largest in these Calammus word clouds is "love." That's entirely appropriate, as that is the theme of Whitman's Calamus, after all.



And I've made another poster idea, too, based on combining these Calamus word clouds with images from the Whitman Archives. Elements include pages from the Calamus section of the 1860 edition, the distinctive green cover of Leaves of Grass, a portrait of Whitman by artist Thomas Eakins, and also Eakins famous painting The Swimming Hole, which legend has it was inspired by Whitman's poetry.


Click on image for larger version.

So, Happy Birthday, Walt!

A Poster for Poetry Month 2

(Click on images for larger versions.)

A version of the poster I designed for National Poetry Month, used as an element of another design idea. Not the first image I've rolled through one of my vintage typewriters, but this one definitely fits into the poetry/words/type/art theme of the original poster.



This is an idea I've explored before, in which the image emerging from the typewriter is one impossible to have done so: an anachronism, a technological impossibility, yet evoking both the history and the development of printing technology. The contrast and overlap are poetically evocative, for me.



This close-up, tightly-cropped version is my favorite version here, I think. I like the image emerging from the machine, as though it had been typed up. The dominant element is the Poetry Month poster, though, not the typewriter. The balance and composition of elements is important in any poster design, and I think this has a better balance than the overall view.

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Questions were raised in comments on my original presentation of this poster design, from Eshuneutics (who is always worth reading), that are relevant to the poster design and concept on several levels:

. . . Would anyone notice it [the poster] is gay? Now, isn't that the eternal question again: What is gay art/poetry? This intrigues me more and more (because as you wrote in a post, the gay image [in] mid-America is not the same as on the coasts, in other words, we don't belong to the stereotype). If the wordle had SEX, QUEER and the image was a male couple, hey, it would be obvious. Yes, obvious to the gay stereotyping mass. To me, there is an ambience to the poster that says something. . . .

These are really interesting questions. They don't really have answers, at least not definitive answers. Some answers can be found, personally and locally, but these questions will remain open-ended for most writers and artists. I want to return to the question of ambience, or sensibility, later. But first, let's deal with the obvious.

Yes, I could have made the poster more obvious, more openly and overtly homoerotic (gay, LGBT, homosexual, etc.) by including more obvious elements such as gay-tagged words in the Wordle clouds, or a photo of two men embracing (which I do have, from past photo shoots), or two women, or other obvious signs and symbols. (Bang a cymbal to make the symbol more obvious.) It's not hard to make LGBT content explicit: all you have to do is depict same-sex couples together.

Although, let's be realistically honest about same-sex couples nowadays, and avoid one older set of stereotypes: in other words, let's use psychologically-positive and openly-loving images of gay couples. Depictions of gay lovers as innately self-hating and self-destructive, bitchy, unstable, and promiscuous are themselves stereotypes.

There can be purpose to using the stereotypes. With some people it is necessary to make it obvious. With some others, maybe less necessary, but perhaps polite. My intent was indeed to make a poster mining the oft-overlooked wing of poetry that is openly, even proudly, LGBT.

But what makes a poem gay? Subject matter? Sexual content? Explicit statements in the body of the poem, along the lines of those explicit signs already mentioned? The fact that a love poem written to a man by another man might logically be considered gay in intent and subject? (Not overlooking the truth that a poem written from a persona or character viewpoint isn't necessarily portraying the author's character or viewpoint, even in a so-called confessional lyric.)

While I have been explicitly homoerotic, even sexual, in some poems and art, I also find myself wanting to be subtle and indirect about as often: an oblique approach to the subject matter, that evokes rather than bludgeons the audience. Perhaps this is Midwestern reserve; at times it probably is. In other instances, it may be because I am less interested in reportage and more interested in metaphor and parataxis. No-one writes the same poem in the same way all the time, or ought to.

It can also be a desire, in my case as an artist and writer, to depict love and desire, rather than simple fucking. To present eros as itself, in its aspect as life-force, the power under all life, that moves us to unite as two solitudes meeting, on an energetic/psychological/spiritual as well as physical level. I am more interested in eros and Tantra, in my own art, than I am in producing work that others might view as purely pornographic. I am interested in transcendence—which does not exclude the physical, the raunchy, and the explicit, but rather embraces it—since the essential practice of Tantra is to take the power of the raw, base emotions and convert them into fuel for attaining enlightenment.

There are ways to subvert artistic stereotypes, just as there are ways to subvert clichés in poetry, by turning them on their edges. One tactic is to overdo the stereotype to the point of absurdity or irony. (An overused tactic of postmodernism, one I don't like very much.) Another is to make substitutions that are near to the stereotype, without exactly repeating it; the audience will perceive a conceptual echo of the stereotype, but be thrown off because it's not an exact replay.

I find myself, in a poster design such as this one, as well as in art and poems from time to time, preferring the oblique approach. I want to evoke, not bludgeon. I don't want to fall into stereotype, precisely because I want to give a fresh take on Poetry Month, from a different direction. There is also a connection between Wordle word clouds and both traditional concrete poetry and contemporary VisPo (visual poetry), although the latter has (like much post-avant-garde poetry of the present moment) more theory than practice supporting it.

It is possible to evoke LGBT literary and artistic history, I also believe, by using the old, pre-Stonewall, pre-Gay Liberation tactic of the "coded text." It was common, in much LGBT art and literature prior to the modern LGBT rights movement(s), to hide or "code" the queer content by using tropes familiar to subcultural insiders that outsiders would not know about, and therefore completely miss. Signs and symbols, turns or phrase, images, coded words: these were all used to evoke "the love that dared not speak its name" to those already "in the know" while excluding those ignorant of the code.

For this poster, using coded texts seemed an appropriate way to give the poster a gay sensibility without being stereotypical or blatant. In this case that meant using some of my own poems that are homoerotic without being sexually explicit as source texts for Wordle. It also meant using a male nude from a previous photo shoot, although the nudity is mostly hidden by the text itself. For one version of the poster it also meant using pink as the dominant color, which is a color associated with gay rights via the historical pink triangle used by the Nazis in World War II concentration camps for homosexuals, and reclaimed since as a positive gay rights emblem. Although personally I prefer the blue version of the poster, on purely aesthetic grounds, an art director might use the pink version precisely because of what it evokes. Again, how direct do we want to be?

To return at last to the question of ambiance or sensibility, the question arises again and again regarding if one is able to locate or identify a "gay sensibility" in artwork and poetry. Is there indeed a gay sensibility produced in his art by an artist who happens to be gay, even if the content of the artwork is not overtly (blatantly, stereotypically) gay, sexual, or homoerotic?

Although I do have an opinion here, at the moment I want to point out that discovering a gay sensibility in an artist's work is often a sub rosa attempt to identify the artist's biography with their artwork (the authorial fallacy), under the assumption that any gay artist must produce gay art even if they don't overtly want to. This assumption is itself a sub rosa (perhaps unconscious) attempt to categorize an artist's work based on their "innate" character or sexuality—which is itself a subtle form of homophobia. (Even liberated gay artists sometimes find subtle forms of internalized homophobia in themselves and their work; it can be a major opus to root it out.)

Homophobia? Indeed. You almost never see straight (non-LGBT) artists' sensibilities discussed in this same way, as though their sexuality was the dominant and deterministic factor in their artistic sensibility. The fact that it matters at all if there is or is not a "gay sensibility" can be taken as covert homophobia, and in practice it often is just that. For many straight critics discussing LGBT art, discovering a gay sensibility can be a road towards critical dismissal, a way of saying that this art doesn't matter to normal people. Indeed, for many mainstream critics this is a common and typical road towards critical dismissal of any and all "genre" art, from LGBT content to science fiction—and thus are enforced the critical and psychological standards of normative social and sexual expression. Normative critiques against non-normative stereotypes can be a direct, if subtle, forum for reinforcing what is considered normative: dismissing the margins keeps the center in power.

Discovering a gay sensibility in art, however, can also be taken as an attempt by gay artists to reclaim a formerly negative label as a positive emblem, in exactly the same way that the pink triangle was reclaimed. But to be taken this way, it seems important to know that the reclaiming is being done by other gay artists, rather than non-LGBT critics. This brings us back, full circle, to the insider's coded text. The distinction between insider and outsider, regarding discovering a gay sensibility in art by a gay artist, therefore, may be as simple as knowing whether the motivation behind the discovery is homophobia or reclaiming.

My own opinion is that there is indeed some kind of gay sensibility in art—the word "ambiance" is apt—although pinning it down can be elusive. It must vary from artist to artist, so it may be more useful to discuss gay sensibilities (plural). Different aspects appear at different time, in different ways. The subtle line between overt and coded. Can I tell you exactly what gay sensibility is? No; and I doubt anyone else can, either. In my own art, I can say that I do think that because I am a gay man who makes art, some aspect of my own sensibility, which is that of a gay man, gets into all my art, whether or not that art is openly, blatantly gay in content or not. It can be very subtle.

I do believe that one fundamental aspect of my own sensibility, which is a gay sensibility, and which might be shared by other gay artists, is empathy: the ability to walk a mile in the Other's shoes. To use imagination to create unity between disparate people. The use empathy to feel the suffering and joy of others. To be very aware, having grown up as an often-attacked Other within my own culture, of how the Other thinks and feels. Sympathetic thinking is after all one road to genuine empathy. if you can understand how someone Other has felt like a victim or a victor, you can walk a mile in their shoes. And thus all of my poetry, all of my art, I believe, contains the certain use of imagination and empathy to make those connections. I build a lot of bridges. Parataxis and collage are useful artistic tools that I use all the time.

All this discussion from a simple throwaway poster design made on a whim, for an annual designated national month about poetry that no-one except poets really cares about or will pay attention to!

A Poster for Poetry Month

Every April in the USA is National Poetry Month. Nobody really cares about this, or even notices it, except poets, academics, and English teachers. There is usually a flurry of commemorations, both analytic and creative. it's not uncommon to see poetry workshops challenge their participants to write a poem a day for the duration of Poetry Month. Some public consciousness of poetry is indeed raised during the annual festivities, but then it sinks back below the public consciousness once the month is over. After all, April contains other, more urgent annual events, such as the day every year by which one must file one's income tax return. Poets struggle hard during April to raise the public consciousness of poetry, and the discourse around poetry. Overeager poetry literary-critical cheerleading spouted by poets during the month ranges from bland analysis to hysterical hand-wringing about the state of poetry nowadays. It must be said, one feels, that it's only because poetry is suffering public indifference and disinterest, most of the time, that it needs an annual bout of boosterism.

I am not big on boosterism. However, just for fun, last night I made a couple of flyers or posters, incorporating word-clouds made using Wordle, that are celebrations and/or announcements regarding National Poetry Month. These were design ideas that were sparked by running across various celebratory boosts in the literary world. I thought about all the earnestness, and decided one needs to also encounter some playfulness.

I find myself getting into trouble, again, for not obeying the rules that many poets impose on their own practice, and would like me to follow as well. I find myself once again indifferent to the definitional boundaries between poem, prose-poem, and poetic prose. I frequently pass across those boundaries, within a single piece, without taking any notice. This offends poets who wish to keep the definitions and boundaries intact and pure.

One of the reasons I like Wordle is that it makes words into visual art. There are rhythms within the visual forms that Wordle creates from your poem, essay, or random journal entry. This takes poems into a realm in which a poem's meaning can get decentered, while at the same time creating something like an illustrated poem, a haiga, an illuminated manuscript. The words lose context and syntax, although how they become juxtaposed can create fresh linkages between words. I appreciate how a word-cloud can then become part of a larger collaged image, adding layers of experiential communication to to a ohoto or illustration. Words and image can sometimes synergize into a greater whole.

In other words: Design and illustration wherein word-clouds are just another visual element, although naturally some linguistic meaning will accrue.

So, just for fun, I made a couple of versions of a poster or flyer for National Poetry Month, using my photography and poems.

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Let's start with the poetry element. Here are three word-clouds based on my poem Needles.





Wordle's sorting algorithm for creating word-clouds from texts sorts frequency against size. Thus, the more often a word appears in a text, the larger it is in the cloud. Position is randomized, disconnecting meanings.

Here's a couple more word-clouds, made from my poem Letter to ____.




And here's a word-cloud made from my poem Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across North America.



These examples give, I hope, an idea of the range that Wordle has within its operational parameters.

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That last Whitman-based word-cloud ends up in the poster I designed:


(Click on image for larger view.)

And here is a different version of the poster, in which the most obvious design change is the background color.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I'm also thinking of re-photographing these poetry posters in conjunction with one of my antique typewriters, to add another layer of writerly and design interest.

My own spin on a poster for National Poetry Month was to take a marginalized poetic subculture rarely represented during the annual celebration, and foreground it. A poetic subculture, I might add, that I care deeply about personally, but which the poetic mainstream rarely has time for. I'm referring to openly gay and lesbian poetry.

So I chose a photograph of mine, with a nude model at the Pacific Ocean. The word-clouds are made from two or three of my own poems with homoerotic themes, including the Whitman poem mentioned above.

I wonder if anyone would notice, if I didn't point it out.

They'd certainly see Whitman's name in there—but then, Whitman is considered a universal poet nowadays; a lot of Whitman criticism outright ignores the homoerotic aspects of the sexualities presented in his poetry. Unless one deliberately foregrounds the "Calamus" poems from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, plenty of scholarly critics and poets are happy to overlook Whitman's open homoeroticism. The usual argument goes: "After all, we're trying to raise the public consciousness of poetry, here, so we don't want to muddy the waters by emphasizing controversial subject matter!" Exclusion of such "controversial" subject matter is merely the most subtly pernicious form of censorship by the poetry mainstream. Whatever makes them squirm is to be avoided—which is paradoxical, since the deliberate obscurity, disjunction, and obliqueness that is currently fashionable in much contemporary poetry is exactly what makes many general (no-poetry-specialist) readers squirm.

I might revisit this poster design concept later, perhaps, using the "Calamus" poems as my source texts. That could make for an interesting take on this poster concept, particularly if I also include in the collage a portrait or two of Whitman, and more of my own homoerotic photography. Maybe later.

Green Man 2

In the Greening, the Great God Pan, the Green Man rises again, come Spring, come Summer.

deer, woods, dusk

deer, woods, dusk

In the indigoed light, it’s snowing again, thick mists fogging the distant treetops. Flakes begin to stick to the wet ground, which was covered with water and sleet, and will soon, in the chill evening, be covered with ice and snow.

deer move in the woods,
stepping high, noses down—
snow falling hard, now

The watershed deer herd were mincing through the woods to the south of the house, exposed by the lack of leaves on the trees, the air dark blue with evening. One doe started to move into the yard. I picked up my laser pointer, and put the red dot on the crumbled snow at the her feet, and much to my pleased surprise, she nosed at it, the way a cat or dog will do. I moved the dot around a few times, and the doe followed closely, then I moved the dot off into the woods, and the deer bounded away. Who knew? I guess I’ve discovered a new way to herd winter deer.

ruminant hooves pace
silent among fallen oak:
winter tree-spirits

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Start with a poem. Then we make iterations of the poem, gradually working towards words-as-art, or visual poetry. At what point does the poem's linguistic information stop being comprehensible? At what point do we reach the frontier between (verbal) meaning and (visual) meaning. At what point does the art cease being an illustration, and become integral? When do the words become an integral element of the art? One element among others, which can be parsed for verbal meaning, in gestalt, but is also part of the greater gestalt (in which the verbal meaning might be nested) of visual/poetry.







At some point all the elements must synergize into something archetypal, symbolic, mythopoetic: the goal and result of much of my creative work. At some point the elements must become more than what they individually are, to take on a numinous, liminal life of their own; to become shamanic; to become an experience of threshold. This has long been known to me, as the artist, as the goal of much of my art-making: to depict and recreate, visually, aurally, even verbally, experiences of the threshold and the liminal, that I have myself experienced, and which I have no better way to re-create for others to witness.

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In the past, I've treated words this same, as an element of composition, in experimental musical settings. I've made several text-sound pieces on tape (and later digitally) using layered readings of my poetry, and cyclic loops of texts that are a form of gradual-process music. For example: Light, in which the words finally become part of a multi-layered texture that has musical shape and form: the words as elements of composed music, rather than purely linguistic conveyors. At what point does the (verbal) meaning go away, and the sound of the speaking voice become a musical texture?

Using word-clouds as an element in a visual composition is equivalent, I think, to using spoken words as an element of musical composition. There is still (verbal) meaning to be found on the small, fractal scale: individual words and phrases come to the foreground of attention. But, hopefully, the overall effect is gestalt and non-linear, rather like non-verbal cinema. The (verbal) meaning of the words is not as important as the textures created with them; although there are meanings to be found (assembled, perceived, created) therein, the meanings are additive; right-brain-perceived as a gestalt, rather than left-brain linear-logical. A lot of this is about liberating poetry from the straight-jacket of fixed meaning—not of meaning itself, since the idea of "liberating" words from meaning entirely is absurd, as words will always be signifiers for memory, experience, and conception; but rather, of liberating words from assumed fixed positions of meaning. To soften the edges of hard linear logical, rational discourse. To make poetry from language that all-too-often is wielded as a blunt instrument of deterministic meaning, and by softening that bluntness, to allow a bit of Mystery to creep in. Which is what poetry is all about: making words do more with less; making words invest themselves with meaning beyond the ordinary; with opening the doors and windows for Mystery to seep in, if it will.

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And all of this because deer have been continuously and forcefully coming into my perception, in various recurrent and forceful ways, for the past several weeks. When ghost-deer walk into your mind, sit down in the grass and listen to what they have to say. When you find a perfect antler discarded on the lawn right under the window where you do most of your writing, pay attention. When deer emerge from the fog and blowing snow and darkness, every dusk of every day for a long week of driving, listen to what they're pointing you towards.

And then respond by making art about the encounters. Because poetry and art and music are praise: are celebration, and commemoration: are the journal and notes made from encounters with the liminal, on the threshold, and you had best pay attention, or ignore them at your peril.

A Brief Pause for Some Word Clouds

Wordle is a Javascript tool for making "word clouds" out of texts. It's fun to play with periodically A nice way to take a break from Deep Thoughts, or just waste an hour.


a representation of this page of this website

It's also a quietly subversive way of crossing those usual boundaries between poetry and art, passing back and forth at will. The idea of making clouds out of the words of a poem, in which the words which appear most often are the most prominent in the cloud, is beyond clever. It points out how the visual arts can include the verbal and linguistic arts. At times it can approach visual poetry, something more than just a typographic layout, or hybrid. Furthermore, the ability to be surprised, by using the Randomize function, allows one to play with the aleatoric arrangement of typographic and verbal layout.


a compilation of all the poems I wrote in 2009


from a poem, Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across America


from a poem, The Deer Antler

If we consider text as art, what I have sometimes called matrix poetry, what some others call cleave poetry, you can still read a poem arranged this way as a text. The arrangement on the page leads us to read the poem in several ways, several directions, each of them generating a facet of experience of the poem. (For example, "Blanco" by Octavio Paz, or sections of "The Little Mariner" by Odysseas Elytis.) We can read it in any direction, we can start in the middle, and read outwards, we can go where our eye is drawn. For example, our eye might focus on the most prominent words in this example, and leap between them; gradually our perception of the poem unfolds to include the smaller words, till the poem as a gestalt fills our mind. This presents several new ways to read poetry, when poetry is presented as a visual art. And there are possibilities that come to mind, when combining this sort of visual text with an actual image, as juxtaposed or complimentary collage.

For example, the poem above, about deer, might be conjoined with these images of deer at dusk, from Capitol Reef National Park, in Utah:

Word Pictures

Poet Beth Vieira directed me towards Wordle.net, which is an online Java applet that uses texts to create images. This is about the interface between word and image, poetry and art.

The Wordle documentation says this: Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I took some of my recent poems, and a Robinson Jeffers poem, and ran them through Wordle. The results that are generated by the applet are randomized, but one can then adjust several of the settings, including layout, style, font, and other algorithmic functions.

The results remind me of nothing so much as the chance-operation derived typography John Cage in works such as 62 Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham. The possibilities for audio performance, reading or music or both, or a Wordle-derived image/text also seem related to Cage's piece (for example as performed by Jack Bruce). There are several possibilities for cross-media artmaking and performance.

I encourage you to experiment with your own poems as converted to imagery, as I have done below. And thank the creator, Jonathan Feinberg, while you're at it.


from my haibun Basin & Range


from my poem Kenosis


from my poem Katabasis


from my poem the dreams of roads (This is my favorite Wordle so far of one of my own poems.)


from Hurt Hawks, by Robinson Jeffers