The Visual Pun Revealed in All its Glory, Including in “mn/wv” (qbdp # 27)

Yesterday, I received a small flood of mailart, yet I didn’t find the time to say anything about these cards until today.

Scott McDonald sent me an envelope, inside of which was a postcard and a letter explaining how he had left my street address off the postcard, had received it back from the post office, and then had misplaced it for almost a month. The card is printed on inkjet transparency film, which gives the color more liveliness than paper. Upon this film he prints one of his wild mathemaku (a form of visual poetry created by Bob Grumman).


Scott McDonald, "LEAP!" (10 Aug 2004)
kiyotei had breakfast on Highway 101, and all I got was this schematic diagram that surreptitiously spells out his name! (I can’t decide if the lower half spells out anything, but I have a guess.)


kiyotei, "Breakfast @ the 101" (Sep 2004)
Mick Boyle sends me a beautiful rendering of what I’m now calling the dbqpnacci sequence (that sequence that creates the names for all my publishing projects). I love the Escher-like overlappings of these perfectly balanced letterforms—especially in this typeface.


Mick Boyle, "pdbq" (Sep 2004)
On the obverse of the card, Mick takes my initials and turns them into a self-mirroring quasi-dbqpnacci form.


Mick Boyle, Card to ghhg (9 Sep 2004)
I was amazed by the variety of forms in the mailart, so I created yet another style for these artists and a few other lucky folks. As I sat in the camp at Caroga Lake today, fiddling with rubberstamps, I realized that I could almost-mirror “mn” with “wv” and then make both lines suggest words—suggest something of the place where I was then sitting.

I stamped this small concrete poem, “mn/wv,” on the white sides of some blank sheets of cardboard I found being discarded at work. (After adding the poem to the front, I realized the cards were ¼ of an inch too wide for me to mail it with a postcard stamp, so I trimmed each one by one. Once home, I trimmed all the remaining blank cards.) The reverse of the card is grey, but it served its purpose well, I filled one third with the addresses and stamps. Then I sat on the screen porch in the sun, with a slight cool breeze blowing over my naked toes, and wrote each correspondent a short note of dense green text.


Geof Huth, "mn/wv" (12 Sep 2004)
The following are the recipients of “mn/wv”:

1/12 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/12 Bob Grumman

3/12 Roy Arenella

4/12 kiyotei

5/12 Scott McDonald

6/12 Mick Boyle

7/12 Scott Helmes

8/12 Studio 360, WNYC Radio, 1 Centre Street, 30th Floor, New York, NY 10007 (mailart project)

9/12 Qpidoremix

10/12 Luc Fierens

11/12 Erin Huth

12/12 qbdp

13/12 Dees and Yuriko Stribling

After finishing the series, I decided that I needed to send my friend Dees Stribling one of these cards (since he might fathom and then enjoy the pun), so his card is the thirteenth of a series of twelve—or, as I told him, “the baker’s dozenth of a dozen.”

un violon d’ingres