this is visual poetry by Joel Chace
11 June 2012 - Filed under Chace, Joel + male + USA
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as 6ix, The Tip of the Knife, Counterexample Poetics, OR, Country Music, Infinity’s Kitchen, and Jacket. He has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections, most recently Sharpsburg, from Cy Gist Press, and Blake’s Tree, from Blue & Yellow Dog Press. Individual pages of this visual poetry sequence have appeared in the following publications: On Barcelona, quarter after, and Word For/Word. The cover image, entitled itsstory 3, originally appeared in Lettere Grosse.
Joel says: “itsstory is a developing sequence of texto-visual poetry that I began a decade or more ago and that has taken on various lives since then. Until this year, all of the versions have been textual only, though all of them have been quite experimental in terms of formatting. It finally occurred to me that the very subject matter of the sequence demanded an even more radical visual presentation. Perhaps radical musicality is just as apt an expression, given my decision to use musical staff paper as background. Once I settled on that, I cut and pasted the primary black text for each page. Then I created a literal grab bag of variations on that primary text by cutting up altered texts printed in several varieties of type sizes and fonts, throwing those fragments into a plastic bag, and then using a flatbed scanner upon which I placed random handfuls of the bag’s fragments arranged in juxtaposition to the primary text on each page. Finally I played with Photoshop in order to sharpen up and 3-dimensionialize the images. I have increasingly come to believe that the most meaningful statements of aesthetics are, in fact, descriptions of processes.”
16 full-color pages. $10 (+ s/h)