another thing. wonder about the tactility of making and seeing poems. not necessarily do i mean visp, tho certainly vispo is about the how of language feels as well as looks. today, daniel f. bradley's excellent zine fhole was waiting for me in the mailbox. reading it i notice that some of the texts appear typewritten, rather than composed using word perfect or some other word program. there is a different feel to it, yes. the closest analogy i can think of at the moment is how old film stock looks and sounds, scratchy, warmer, lived-in.

yesterday, talking with richard hansen, publisher of the micro-press poems-for-all, about a recent event he hosted: a day-long making of mimeo pubs using an old mimeo machine. bay area poet and veteran of the mimeo revolution richard krech was one of the featured readers. i don't remember who richard said owned the mimeo press, but the owner did lament the fact that stencils are now hard to come by.

certainly computers can produce pubs very close to mimeo, i suggested. to which richard said yes, but wasn't the point. the main reason is the making of the work. getting hands dirty, manually setting the stencils, ink and rolling out sheets of poetry. it is the tactile that is missing. using the hands in the production of art.

that is one of the reasons i envy painters so. because they can be knee-deep in their medium. they wear their work in their hair, clothes, stained hands. theirs is a physical act in creation that cannot simply be done in writing. language is in the heart, loins and head, but it does not stain the shirt.

so to speak. vispo i think is more akin to the plastic arts so the visual poet does get dirty, wears his/her work on the hands and clothes. but not what i'm doing, such as this, typing directly into our world of digital. that's not a regret or lament, at all. however, now i'm thinking of getting perhaps an old typewriter, if just for the look of the words on the page for some texts. see what i can see.