Archi-Linguist

building atmospheres through words and images : the poetry & musings of Granville Goff

[archilinguist]

I was @ Burke's Bookstore in Memphis today and came across this gem of a book. Who knew that T.S. Eliot and Edward Gorey were the perfect match for a hilarious browse. I mean Wasteland, J Alfred Prufrock, and How to Name Your Cat or Song of the Jellicles. Kicking myself for not buying it!

[austinkleon]

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

T.S. Eliot, “The Sacred Wood.” This is one of the quotes that opens Steal Like An Artist, and I go back to it occassionally to remember that Eliot had it all laid out almost 100 years ago. It’s actually quite different than the “good artists copy, great artists steal” quote that is usually (mis)attributed to Picasso. What Eliot is talking about is transformation — not just taking things out of context, but re-contextualizing them. (Godard put it, “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”) Actually, as Eliot points out, it does matter where you take things from — a good poet borrows from poems “remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” So: steal from the past, steal from another language or culture, or steal from someone who’s writing about another subject.  (via austinkleon)

[archilinguist]

A Poem in Process

It happens to me in the middle Once up preening reposed and shock Of the slump Celadon serpents crook ‘round seasons Swelling out from boundaries drilling Lessons on assumptions

I love the phantoms of wake that still the ubiquity of currents It happens somewhere suddenly Sheets shorn warping grace parts Peeled like bark off saplings A young carpet lingers feather weight Nimbly perched atop vernal blades

[archilinguist]

Echoes On Atlas

And the water was forming…Still like any other plane

When even I kill a roach There is the pang of godliness; Not in the good sense, If sense is a word in any way fitted…l bear reproach from suited and strained guidance depots. Stroking the gross in me Heavy and ton levied marbles ticking the height of me I fall lengths to eyes often laden

By the sea swimming nauts in drowned fashionistas Worn fickle, hollow mouth trailing their gape gape gaping numb fodder plucked eyebrows. They cut me quick, down deeping Hugh! The unnatural “this"of ego placement in the 21st century.

And the water was forming…Still like any other plane

Men!, we are women, gifted unsung and life driven Takes we our own, when our fathers rule past us Come into our thrones when humility cures our nascence We divide structures unnecessarily, shot put the blunt juggernaut to jello made spires Not everything is made to crumble

And it’s all worn out, the time dwindled Struggling our posture to an over-uprightness No godly guilt so heavy as the shoulder that slouches

I seem to say Kill but create more often Forgive but not blindly Station yourself somewhere between “yeah” and “gonna be”

I am a fluid process forming…Still like any other plane

I’m goin to bed. And maybe you will follow curious Hmm … the food I found inherent in my side Echoes the downcast reason for my arrival We win no medals!

[archilinguist]

Self Portrait from Vignette Series In the series I make use of typographic elements, taking them out of their intended context and casting them as motif and design anchors. Just another way in which the living language animates and deconstructs, always in service to those who wield it! You can find more images from this series on Instagram @missillefineart

[archilinguist]

This is a screen shot on my phone! HILARIOUS! Thank you iOS

[archilinguist]

Full Moon The use of gathering and reordering as ways to generate new associations is a hallmark of Simryn Gill’s practice; Naughts (2010) features an array of found objects united by their circular shape, while Garland (1993–2008; a miniature version was completed in 2012) is comprised of pieces of glass, plastic, and ceramic, shells, stones, and wooden items. In these installations, the individual components and their collective significance are accentuated, opening up otherwise ordinary objects to manifold interpretation. Likewise, in Full Moon (2012), Gill disassembles and resequences books from her grandfather’s collection. The contents of Full Moon’s liberated pages range from technical explanations, economic analyses, and sociopolitical commentaries to the fictional, transcendental, and spiritual. Their origins include such seminal tomes as The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom by Edward Burnett Tylor, The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell, and The Crowded World: The Problem and Eugenics in Evolutionary Perspective by Julian Huxley. Foregrounding these texts, Gill inscribes their shuffled leaves with circular designs in ink, gouache, grass pigment, laundry detergent, and correction fluid. These methodical but still lively markings effectively recalibrate the diversity of the pages’ theoretical content, bringing them into unexpected congruence or commensuration. Unmoored from their bindings, they attain a literal and metaphorical lightness characteristic of Gill’s oeuvre, an understated humor that here surfaces in a resistance to the gravity of the texts’ scholarship and cultural importance. A similar critical antagonism is established in 9 Volumes from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (2008). Remodeling each tome into a ball with which viewers may interact, Gill pairs the reverence ascribed by the volume’s provenance with the simple satisfaction of play that is afforded by their new tactile form. Pinned to the wall in a row, the pages of Full Moon appear to frame each other or coalesce into groupings as one moves from work to work, or when viewed at a distance. As their details swim in and out of focus, the certainty of the truths they embody seems also to waver. Attempting to produce this most basic of shapes upon these textual surfaces, Gill’s exercises in understanding present aspirations to perfection that, like the fullness of the moon, are difficult to perceive with the naked eye. -June Yap Happy Blue Moon, compliments of the Guggenheim!

[whimsicalvocabulary]

[archilinguist]

Words for a Madlib heaping (verb-ing) Gregorian (adj) putty (n) nomenclature (n) Pigeon-toed (adj) smacking (verb-ing) annually (adv) Southern (adj) darts (verb) happenstance (n) temperate (adj) carpet (n) SHOW ME YOUR BEST MADLIB INCORPORATING AS MANY OF THESE WORDS AS YOU CAN!

[archilinguist]

I’ve been traveling, not writing, not pressing or composing. I’ve been here and then not; I’ve been hurtling inside a purgatory with wheels and staleness. And I’ve been realizing, perhaps all over again, how much poetry is something that happens in a moment, it’s something revealed, and most important, if not heartbreakingly, it’s something that escapes human language. This sounds gnawingly esoteric, but I mean it literally. That quality that cannot be captured by language is the very feature that pushes us to decontextualize and make play with the limits of our verbiage. It's what entices us to read on. It’s a best effort. We cannot escape that. It’s what makes written art beautiful.

To quote the article “The Living Language” from lionsroar.com Nov 2011

Writing about such deeply participatory forms of experience is always an odd and paradoxical endeavor, and I admit to some frustration at the apparent necessity of affixing these thoughts on the surface of the page. I’m never entirely happy about this—about having to take these visceral experiences, these carnal encounters and hunches and sensorial reflections, these intimacies, and pry them out of the loamy soil of my body in order to flatten them between the pages of a book or magazine. It feels like tearing off pieces of my skin and pasting them to the surface of the paper. I have no wish for these reflections to become stuck here, drying out between these pages like pressed flowers. I don’t want these notions to desiccate and die for lack of water.

[archilinguist]

It Has A Much Wider Synecdoche

1. Acuity of Disspossesion numb in the heart pricked tongue (.a 2. Conifer tips demonstrative of steel fathoms (.a 3. Flint and Paper burning oneself in graphite (.a to crumple survivability (.b 4. Blood Glucose Strips why the hell not (.a adornment (.b 5. Math Tutor for believing in fairytales (.a as offering to humility (.b to circumscribe nowhere (.c 6. Map of Pangea limitations castrated beautiful dizzy water (.a 7. Acquisition of wonderment flocked (.a presumptuous (.b extracellular (.c 8. Press Release no goddamn reason (.a 9. Adhesive stranding ego abruptly (.a 10. Broken Gramophone teasing silence with the memory of sound (.a

-Granville Goff

[archilinguist]

Dans le musèe du l'absurde

There was a showing of fleck and knife / A vestibule sits statue-less letting the learned shame wither at the full bellow exhibit / Never non no enders pleased to be met roughly like imitation tile / There is sacrilege wincing in clothing / There is a tongue becoming bone cotton in tonal tapestries / A loose affiliation is all anyone budgets for anymore / It’s sad in the way ice cream isn’t memory loss

-Granville Goff

[archilinguist]

Designer Daniel Britton has created a typeface that attempts to create an awareness, for the observer, of what it is like to be dyslexic. In addition to the worthy subject matter, Britton has managed to thoughtfully compose an aesthetically brilliant typeface design and a visual platform for one the most common learning disabilities. This is typography at its finest! It not only succeeds in the design but also in having a purpose. 

-Granville Goff

all images are from danielbritton.info

[archilinguist]

As writers, we are drawn into words; their cadences, dimensionality, malleability, occasion. As writers, we should be equally enamored of the typographic arts.  Typography has the ability to interpret words, sounds, letters, and phrases, in their emotional atmospheres, to the reader/observer.  If the unique and graphic presentation of language doesn't turn you on as a writer, perhaps it's worth considering whether or not your communion with language hasn't become a wrote banality.

These typographic sculptures by Ebon Heath from his series 'Stereo.Type' were influenced primarily by dancers and choreographers. The sculptures serve as a meeting ground for the written and spoken languages with the performed and unspoken body languages.

"I want our typography to jump, scream, whisper, and dance, versus lay flat, dead and dormant, to be used and discarded with no concern for its intricate beauty"

-Granville Goff

Images and quotation taken from designtaxi.com

Read more: http://designtaxi.com/news/355948/Mesmerizing-Typographic-Sculptures-Made-Of-Swirling-Dancing-Words/#ixzz3cSfa64iQ

[archilinguist]

This is the first draft of the intro to my poem “Shearwater” written on the back of the Vashon Bookshop bookmark that lives in my collection of Pablo Neruda that I picked up when I was there. I was at Anini beach one afternoon people watching when this started coming together. The limitations of size coupled with the aesthetic are so much a part of what the writing process is to me. When you NEED to write, whatever paper you have is a boon and if it happens to be small, it presents a physical challenge to you as the writer: to be as precise and intentional with your words as you can be with the space you are granted.

Here is the finished poem “Shearwater”:

Dancing their sex on dead coral Two thread bare lovers clutch buoyant to vignettes of hopeful onlookers. Distant, Reminiscent Voyeurs prostrating razed recollections of heaped clothing sodden by the night’s turning breath. I watch The many eyes hemorrhaging dusty pleas “Oh come In my sight! Invite me to live a while in your breasts. I’ll take only what I need, the smell, the press”

We are an explicit skein One wound up tightly to loose our laxity across the floor moistened with dyes. An irreverence persists in the looming of beauty It arouses synapses like a mountain conducts lightening. All worn and if not undressed then clung showingly like our open legs in a chair. We can see all the teeth in a smile.

But the lovers push these notions into a cheek gently performed at the corner of a grin. Each gaze grazing the youth of curves and firm exalts the thrust of display until finally the afterglow ushers them parallel to the applauding horizon.

With anticipations now saturated, the huddled among sand beaded blankets mop themselves up to shuffling the stony road onward, Night waking to their heels.

Granville Goff copyright 2015

[archilinguist]

Nick Laird: It is necessary to spell your poetry correctly

Via the guardian.com Friday March 29th 2013 I spent a few weeks recently reading through 10,000 of the 13,000 entries for the National Poetry Competition. Many were very good; a few hundred were excellent. Of those, I picked my final 50, as did my fellow judges Vicki Feaver and Bill Herbert and, over the course of a long day, we whittled down our combined 150 to a few prize-winning poems, which you can read, and read about, at the National Poetry Competition website. The winning poem, by Patricia McCarthy, which comes at its subject, the Great War, in a tender, oblique fashion, convinced us with its quiet technique and subtle observations. Jane Draycott's runnerup was dense, mysterious, and swept from a London living room across the whole world. John Freeman's third-place entry was neatly constructed, both love poem and elegy. It was heartening to see poetry take a central role in so many people's lives, to read the evidence that thousands of people frequently sit alone for an hour or two, trying to capture or clarify something in words. Still, reading the poems was also, sometimes, depressing. There were poems that weren't good, and they tended to have features in common: a lack of control or occasion, a lack of linguistic felicity or surprise. A judge must be hard-hearted, looking for anything that will let him drop the poem into the No box. He wants to fault the poem. Life works by a process of connotation, an evolving multisensory apprehension of the shifting world. We get impressions of things. They don't have sharp edges: they have atmospheres, and a poem is off to a bad start when the poet has spelled necessary wrong in the first line. (I know: some great poets spelled terribly; Yeats for one. But if the poet can't get their spelling right in a competition entry, it's tricky to hold out much hope for syntax, diction, imagery.) So although poetry doesn't have rules, after 10,000 submissions, one might discern some general principles for the competition entrant. A judge is hopeful for talent, what Whitman termed "personal force". In order to let that force show through, a writer must avoid obvious missteps, demonstrating mastery over his materials and effects. If the title is a ready-made phrase such as A Falling Star, the poet already has a distance to claw back. So scrap the cliches: his breath is not bated, the contrast is not sharp. We want the language of a poem to renew our experience of life, not dull it with rote phraseology. A title can do various work but in a competition a smart move is to be interesting. Think of a poet such as Wallace Stevens, whose titles compel us to read on: "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Plot against the Giant", "Anecdote of the Jar". Even a poem that says upfront what the poem is about (like, say, "The Blue Dress" by Sharon Olds or "My Shoes" by Charles Simic) is immediately intriguing. An abstract cliched phrase isn't going to cut it. Interesting things happen when you try to, in Pound's phrase, make it new. Making it new doesn't, though, include illustrating your poems, unless you're William Blake or Stevie Smith, and putting a border like a frame around your sonnet isn't going to help either. Please don't set your font to eight and please refrain from using dingbats. Nor is your poem aided by jpegs you've pulled off the internet. Don't use an epigraph that's a proverb, or a line from something really well known by, say, Sylvia Plath. Trust the reader (you don't need footnotes such as "the poet I refer to here is John Clare" or "Aung San Suu Kyi is currently held under house arrest in Burma"), but don't trust them too much: don't pick for your epigraph a massive chunk of Heidegger in the original German. And don't just chop up prose. Frank O'Hara puts it nicely: "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is 'yearning'." O'Hara's sarky quotation marks touch on another problem: diction. The register has to be controlled, and preferably not helplessly imitative or archaic. Be careful with words such as whence or din or guffaw or russet. Also, contorted or caress or ochre. Or clad or crave or pale or engorged. Or gossamer. Don't write about things frosted with dew. Don't write about a true gent of the road or heroic fragility. These words, to me, smell of the lamp, are chintzy, "poeticky", Victoriana. They're the sort of words you only find in poems but they're old currency: you can buy nothing with them. As for content, anything goes, though try to avoid walking down paths too well travelled. Also, be careful how you approach that content: don't picture yourself or remember back or recall the sweet smell. And don't just say something nobody could disagree with: yes, war is bad, and it's terrible the ice caps are melting. Poetry has to be capacious enough to surprise or confound. Despite my grouching, reading so many poems is a renewing activity: contra Auden, poetry makes a great deal happen, at least in the mind of the writer and reader. What exactly it does, though, is endlessly different and complex. I like O'Hara's reasoning: "It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time." Nick Laird

[archilinguist]

Waimea Canyon Kauai Kauai is the place I've called home for the last two years. I'm just less than a week from moving back to the mainland and can't help but feel like I'll be leaving behind a vital organ of some variety. I'll be back for that organ though, my guts and axons agree!