Square Composition

The typewriter not only provided space for recording breathings, it has also been an instrument for pattern making.

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/juvenilia/juv16.htm

                        COILED STANZAS



                             Resistance

         Home                            Heart

               Ohm is where the Art is

       Heart                           Home

                  Resist Stances

A "corner" poem from my Juvenilia similar in structure to Ronald Johnson's "Puss-in-the-Corner" except his is more spare.

                       PUSS-IN-THE-CORNER


        Whisker                         Paw

                       sqweek


        Claw                            Pounce

in Sports and Divertissments ([Ian Hamilton Finlay's] Wild Hawthorn Press, 1965)

Almost like recognizing a kindred spirit. Most like.

And so for day 2247
06.02.2013

Patterns, Rhythms,

First the injunction:

The structural theme must be conceived dynamically, as a pattern of forces, not an arrangement of static shapes.

Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order

From force to actant:

In 1968, Barthes pointed out that the Proustian narrator is not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but rather he who is going to write.

Jean Frémon "Delta" in Proustiennes translated by Brian Evenson. "Delta" is the final section of Proustiennes.

The opening conclusion, appeal to the reader:

[The concluding sentences to "Delta" and to the book recall the chapter/section on calculating à la Leibniz the ultimate finite number of books and then the necessity of repetition.]

In dreams, in books, in pieces of music, in paintings, in the beings what we love, as on hiking trails, there are sometimes, scattered, signs of gratitude such as compose the traveler's joy. They are fleeting, like sand, unstable, like sand can be, innumerable… They attest to the presence of something else, as do the shadows that reveal what's in the light, as do the efforts of the dead who haunt the living.

[Before this is] "The Traveler's Joy the English call the climbing viburnum because its presence on the hedges lining a road signals that you are approaching a hamlet."

For "hamlet" read "home". Always approaching. Hear hameau. Always approached. Approach.

And so for day 2006
10.06.2012

Praising the Quilter Through the Quilt

It is the description of the objects that underwrites the discrediting of the discrediting. We are reminded of the opening lines phrased as a pointed question in Marge Piercy's "Looking at Quilts": Who decided what is useful in its beauty / means less than what has no function besides beauty / (except its weight in money)?

The patchwork quilts are rightly celebrated as objects of great beauty. Made from thousands of pieces of shaped and coloured fabric, sewn into elaborate and intricate patterns, they produced rich colouristic effects and contained symbolic meanings. They were given a variety of suggestive titles, 'Mariner's Compass', 'Jacob's Ladder', 'Star of Bethlehem' and 'Sunburst', the last superbly conveying the effect of the radiating beams of the sun and the beneficence of its golden light. But some of these names, rather than being specific titles of quilts, refer instead to categories of basic methods of putting the fabrics together. This has often, erroneously, led to a dismissal of quilt-making as mere repetitious use of pattern. But, individual quilt-makers used the basic patterns to dramatically different effect by choice of colours, size of pieces, optical illusion and intended meaning.

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock.

And so for day 1905
01.03.2012