And, for Example: "&I.e.G." (qbdp # 107)

Geof Huth, "&I.e.G." (26 Nov 2005)

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

Today is my in-laws' fiftieth wedding anniversary, quite an accomplishment but today's mailing has nothing to do with that. Instead, I created this second of two mailings to remember a multi-voice reading of poems I participated in three weeks ago to the day..

This issue of qbdp consists of a folder (with the image above as its cover), and a visual poem I wrote while on a train going home after the reading. However, I didn't created all the handwritten copies of that poem on the train that night (as I did for the poem in the first mailing). Instead, I wrew them out over the past couple of days.

The recipients of "&I.e.G." (which includes a handwritten copy of the poem) are as follows:

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Ruud Janssen

5. Dan Waber

6. Jennifer Hill-Kaucher

7. Adeena Karasick

8. Steve Dalachinsky

9. Lillian Fellman

10. Bernard Elsmere

11. Alan Semerdjian

12. Holly Crawford

13. Susan Scutti

14. Barbara DeCesare

15. Mick Boyle

16. RF Côté

17. endwar

18. frips

19. Jassy Lupa

20. Ryosuke Cohen

21. Jim Leftwich

22. Ron Silliman

23. Karri Kokko

24. Ross Priddle

25. Gustave Morin

26. qbdp

un violon d'ingres

On Paper Like Felt: "Felt (ifIfElTiT+ieNcIRcled1)" (qbdp # 106)

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

Geof Huth, "Felt

(ifIfElTiT+ieNcIRcled1)"

(qbdp # 106, 25 Nov 2005)

After a day of touring Washington, DC, with my family, I came back to my sister-in-law's house and put together a very simple mailing. I took 10 slightly askew proof copies of a recent broadside of mine put out by Johnny Brewton of X-Ray Book Co. and turned them into postcards.

Those who received copies of "Felt (ifIfElTiT+ieNcIRcled1)" (qbdp # 106) are as follows:

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Dan Waber

5. Reed Altemus

6. Jassy Lupa

7. frips

8. RF Côté

9. Ross Priddle

10. qbdp

ecr. l'inf.

Sounds off the Pages: "WORD page snds AURA" (qbdp # 105)

Geof Huth, "WORD page snds AURA" (24 Nov 2005)

Abbey Oak Drive, Vienna, Virginia

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, and my family and I are at my wife's sister's house with all of her family. While we prepared dinner and watched movies on TV, I finalized this first of two mailings to remember a multi-voice reading of poems I participated in this month.

This issue of qbdp consists of a folder (with the image above as its cover), and a visual poem ("WORD PAGE SNDS AURA") I wrote while on a train going home after the reading. Each mailed copy of the poem was handwritten on that train. The poem above resembles the handwritten poem vaguely, but it is a much different interpretation of the words. I explained the mailing with this text below, which appears on the back cover of the folder.

This mailing memorializes a reading of multi-voice poems performed on November 5th, 2005, at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York, New York, by Dan Waber, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, Andrea Jade Talarico, Holly Crawford, Adeena Karasick, Steve Dalachinsky, Geof Huth, Alan Semerdjian, Jennifer Ley, Barbara DeCesare, Susan Scutti, Lillian Fellmann, and Bernard Elsmere. Geof Huth created this visual poem (and wrote out the copies of it that appear inside this folder) while traveling home by train that night.

The recipients of "WORDS page snds AURA" (which includes a handwritten copy of "WORD PAGE SNDS AURA") are as follows:

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Ruud Janssen

5. Dan Waber

6. Jennifer Hill-Kaucher

7. Adeena Karasick

8. Steve Dalachinsky

9. Lillian Fellman

10. Bernard Elsmere

11. Alan Semerdjian

12. Holly Crawford

13. Susan Scutti

14. Barbara DeCesare

15. Mick Boyle

16. RF Côté

17. endwar

18. frips

19. Ficus strangulensis

20. fat red ant

21. Luc Fierens

22. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

23. Jim Leftwich

24. Jimi Camero

25. Ryosuke Cohen

26. qbdp

un violon d'ingres

The Mail from the Classroom

In October, my wife Nancy Huth taught her annual mailart section of her annual creative writing class, during which she has her students create mailart and mail them to our home. This year there was much good work from these students. If mailartists were "professional" artists, I'd call this professional quality mailart. Wonderful imagination was rampant through these pieces, so I could only show a small sample here (above as a small "collage" and below in the previous seven entries).

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A Pair of Single

Kelley Imbody, "We all sing the songs of separation" (7 Oct 2005) and Theresa Henry, "And we watch our lives bleed out through our hands" (7 Oct 2005)
(Click on Image for Larger View)

Sometimes the famous Dutch mailartist Ruud Janssen places two envelopes side by side and paints a single painting across the face of both. Kelley Imbody and Theresa Henry appear to have been influenced by Janssen, since they each have designed separate cards that fit together into one. The backside of the card is white and covered with glitter and lyrics from songs of Thursday, a band they like and also one of the themes the class chose for this mailart project. The other sides of the cards match each other quite well but do not form a single image as this side does, making these cards completely of a piece and completely separate (depending on one's literal point of view).

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Your Dry Purple Heart, Rough Like Sandpaper Rubbed Free of Grains

Ashley Oliver, "That Thursday" (Oct 2005)

Maybe Ashley Oliver was born a mailartist. I have no other way to explain the flurry of structural imagination she exhibits in this small card--so many ideas that are practically new to the field. The surface of her card consists of two pieces of canvas glued to either side of a stiff piece of cardboard. But this is not enough. She then sculpts the edge of the card into gentle rolling curves. Finally, she glues a purple hear to the upper edge of the card, allowing it to protrude over the top.

It's a beautiful structure made more beautiful by the maculate painting on the card, dark and blotchy, upon which she writes in curving lines of silver and gold a few words about Thursday.

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Palimpsest Future

Vanessa Rivera, "Do I qualify?" (7 Oct 2005)

The collage that forms the focal point of this mailart card is created out of smsall bits of found text and image snipped out of magazines, scattered across a rough-hewn piece of corrugated cardboard (flaring at its edges), and taped in place with what appears to be packing tape. Much of this is reminiscent of the collage work of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and, in this manner, Vanessa Rivera tells a story of worry: worry about getting into college, worry about paying for college, worry about the future that Fate intends for her.

This card becomes a whole with the addition of its other side. You cannot see it here, so you will have to imagine it. Vanessa has ripped a scrap out of a pulpy sheet of composition of that type used in primary grades to teach children how to write for the first time. This lined paper has three different types of lines, so as to help small children form their letters: a solid blue line at the top, a dotted green line below it, a solid red line below that, then a solid blue line at the bottom which becomes the top line of the next section. Bits of a youngster's writing practice are still visible on this sheet of paper, but they have been erased almost to nothingness. Vanessa appears to be recollecting her childhood, the point at which she first became a student, a bit before the plaint she has written on this scrap ("Do I qualify?") has ever occurred to her.

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Indecisive, so a Plethora

Meghan Marx, "Puzzled from indecisive feelings" (12 Oct 2005)

This card by Meghan Marx is much more complicated in construction than it appears to be at first. The card has separated during transit allowing me the opportunity to open it up and examine its innards. The skeleton of the card consists of a stiff piece of non-corrugated cardboard (and a panda--beside a patch of bamboo and all before a green field--decorate this shiny piece of cardboard). On the back of this card, Meghan has glued a piece of brown paper, but (most fun of all) she has taped a piece of purple plastic bag to the face of the card, cut lines through the bag, and threaded three strips of yellow paper (each with a line of my wife's address) through these slots.

Separately, she has glued together colorful rectangles of paper into a larger rectangle and covered these with strips of paper that spell out a story, a poem, a conversation about Thursday, which is the theme of her mailart card. This entire piece of the card she originally glued to the shiny face of the stiff card, but the glue has dried and released this colorful flap of paper, which now swings on a hinge of cellophane tape away from its other half.

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My Bloodless Valentine

Kevin Duquette, "Drain the blood from this Valentine..." (11 Oct 2005)

When this card arrived in our mailbox it smelled like a dead fire. Kevin Duquette had cut a simple postcard out of a thin but dense piece of cardboard, written a small message and a couple of addresses, and then he drew and wrote a message on the white side of the card. He also burned the card, breaking away one of its edges into a series of scallops, and burning the face of the card (or staining it) but delicately enough so that we could still see the message. With the card so artistically smudged, the single bit of color in the petals of the pink rose rises out of a cloudy sea of brownness.

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Not Paying Your Postage Dues

Zeke Mishanec, "...thought the" (10 Oct 2005)

This card, produced for my wife's mailart lesson in her creative writing class, never made it into our mailbox. Instead, Nancy received a postage due notice for $3.62. Since every piece of mailart sent by the class was a postcard and Nancy had given each student a postcard stamp, she assumed this card was actually a package of some kind and she never picked it up. Eventually, the post office returned the card to Zeke Mishanec, and he took it to class. Then everything became clear: on the front of the card, he had taken a "priority mail" sticker and cut it into jagged shards that he placed on the card--and the post office saw the sticker and assigned this the standard priority mail rate, rather than the postcard rate.

The postage due sticker obscured part of the face of the card, including a little note that now consists of nothing more than "thought the / were stupid." The obverse of the card remains a beautifully simple design. On the back of the card, which is a single sheet of stiff red plastic cut out of a larger piece of the same, he has painted a ragged set of colors. He has obviously laid the plastic down upon bits of wet paint, but there is something else going on here. A few partial portraits of letters appear--almost totally disguised and usually as negative spaces--upon the card: the rising incline of an M, an e almost transformed into a theta, and other bits, scattered about like a discouraged thought giving up its goal.

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The Center of the Plane

Breenah Rowden, "Life is hard" (11 Oct 2005)

This entry is the first of seven I am posting on the mailart from my wife Nancy's creative writing class. There was so much good stuff that I could only pick a few to present here.

The back face of Breenah Rowden's card is akin to a handdrawn collage. She has divided the surface into a grid of nine rectangles, with the three larger rectangles occupying the middle column. The four rectangles at the corners include various images from life: the torso of a pregnant woman, a tae kwon do certificate, the face of a girl, and a phrase. The other four rectangles along the edge of the card are flags of various nations. And the center rectangle is the moral of this piece, a simple call to take life on its own terms and not give up. What I like most about this card, though, is how the soft colors and textures of the colored pencils give the piece a hazy cast, as if the whole card were shot in soft focus.

un violon d'ingres

A Limited Syllabary: "The map of my alphabet" (qbdp # 104)

Hampton Inn--Manhattan, Room 201, New York, NY

Just before I headed out for meetings this morning--why always the morning? because I have so much email and writing to do at night--I made these five cards, which were originally six until I messed one up royally. They carry on their faces a simple fidgetglyph created during a meeting last week.


Geof Huth, "The map of my alphabet" (qbdp 104, 15 Nov 2005)
The following people received a copy of this card:

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Dan Waber

5. qbdp

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The Art of Translation (A Call for Submissions)

For its 25th anniversary, the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas opens a call for mail art on the theme of "The Art of Translation." All media are welcome, including collage, concrete poetry, and art with moving parts. Snail mail only. No works will be returned. Documentation to all who provide address. Selected works to become part of an exhibition on the same theme. Send work to

Center for Translation Studies
The University of Texas at Dallas
P. O. Box 830688
MS JO 51
Richardson TX, 75083

Deadline: 31 December 2005

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Mississippi Page-Turner: "page" (qbdp # 103)

The Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel, Room 507, Poughkeepsie, New York

Strangely, I found myself in Poughkeepsie only as a way station on a trip to New York City. On the morning I left Poughkeepsie, I somehow found the time to put together this set of thirteen cards. I created this little five-line fidgetglyph (more poemlike than most fidgets) during some meeting sometime recently, so it was easy enough to transfer it onto a set of cards I picked up for free at a Mississippi travel center this summer.


Geof Huth, "page" (qbdp 103, 2 Nov 2005)
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The baker's dozen who received this card were

1. Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2. Bob Grumman

3. Roy Arenella

4. Ruud Janssen

5. ViZine!

6. fat red ant

7. Jim Leftwich

8. Ross Priddle

9. Gianni Simone

10. Tim Gaze

11. Dan Waber

12. Karri Kokko

13. qbdp

un violon d'ingres