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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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Ubu Web
Reviewed by Tom Hartman
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If you have an opinion at all about concrete/visual poetry, you're either of the mind that 1) it's a legitimate mode of poetic expression, or 2) you think it's sort of gimmicky, a rather long-in-the-tooth modernist practice that's more a curiosity than anything else. One way or the other, there's no denying that plenty of modern poets have been attracted to the idea of poetry as a visual or graphic art. Witness Apollinaire's Calligrammes (arguably the first example of modern visual poetry), or even William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheel Barrow" (check the shape of the poem's short stanzas). More recently, poets like Eugen Gomringer, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Susan Howe and a host of others have made visual poems a regular part of their poetic repetoire. In fact, it's fairly surprising that there aren't more publications featuring this sort of poetry – especially electronic ones. The Web rather neatly solves those nasty typesetting/desk-top publishing issues that normally come with concrete/visual poetry: just save the text as a .gif or .jpg, and voila! |
 Ubu Web Editors: Various editor@ubuweb.com |
Alas, Ubu Web is pretty much the only game in town – at least it's the only electronic publication I've found that devotes itself entirely to concrete/visual and other marginal (or is that marginalized?) poetic forms, like found poetry. Each "issue" features a new batch of carefully curated material (Ubu web doesn't accept unsolicited submissions), ranging from critical essays (generally fairly heady), to historical material, to new poems from a range of contemporary artist-poets. Recently, UW has featured work by Bruce Andrews, Connie Beckley and Susan Bee among others.
Particularly strong is the "sound" portion of the site, which features high-quality audio clips of readings by a veritable who's-who of the 20th-century avant garde, including Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Brion Gysin, and members of the Fluxus group.
If this stuff is your particular cup of tea, Ubu Web is not to be missed. If it's not, at least check out the "Found/Insane" department – a real mondo bizarro of hilariously macabre fliers (see "Ling Ling"), unabashedly capitalistic personal ads (The "Jack Ads"), and generally wacko scraps of paper found in the street, some of which will remind fans of The Fall of the manic lyric-sheet scribblings of Mark E. Smith. Really, anything goes here, and it's a quite a lot of fun to peruse the various pieces – even if you don't subscribe to the anti-Art, anti-Lit., resolutely-modernist impulse guiding it all.
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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.