Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Two Letters from Roy Arenella Received Yesterday

Roy Arenella sees correspondence as art. Roy Arenella makes art out of correspondence. A couple of examples from yesterday. (I have fallen a bit behind on my entries, adding illustrations to the last few entries onlytoday.)

A (# 356XL+E)

A few years ago, jwcurry, the great Canadian micropublisher and visual poet released a huge hand-stamped issue of his microzine, Industrial Sabotage, each sheet of which was a used envelope that curry carefully unfolded into a new printing surface.

This letter of Roy's reminds me of that publication, for Roy has written it on pieces of found paper. He wrote this letter where he had a spare moment (on the subway, in a waiting room) on whatever paper was handy (a used envelope, a page torn out of a magazine). Each page is a new being, and he corrals all four of these together in a single envelope.

Below, Roy explains the image I could not identify, the image that is so clear to me now!


Roy Arenella, Correspondence, 19 Aug 2004, page 3

B (# 356(A)XL+E

Roy follows up his last letter almost immediately with this addendum: A small sheet discussing Hamish Fulton (an artist whose art is walking) and my dbqp entry on hiking into the woords. Fulton claims that walking is the center of his art, but what he does is document his walks in expressive ways. Below is a scan of part of one documentation of one walk.


Hamish Fulton, from "A Seventeen Day Walk in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta" (Autumn 1984)

This piece is a revelation to me, pure lyrical concrete poetry. And it resembles, to some degree, my own works: my "forkèd lake" (a series of pwoermds published by Anchorite Press) and an earlier textual poem of mine that concludes as a gridded series of four-letter words.

un violon d'ingres

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