Joel Chace

Grab

The title of this work, Grab, is more than appropriate.  It reminds me of a carnival grab bag, with throwaway items, ridiculous and cheesy.  But Joel creates his own grab bag; I can smell the sawdust, taste the funnel cakes, ride the Ferris wheel and see the whole drama framed against the beauty of the All American night.  Joel spells all of this with letter strips and fragments, impossible to connect or disconnect.  The colors bash into one another, sometimes brightly shining, sometimes battling for supremacy, sometimes contrasting color with black and white.  The pieces are language charms, word hexes, broken letter prophets.  What’s beautiful here is that the music staves organize the factors of the series, implying both a merry-go-round’s crazy delight and the soaring soprano of some  Mozart opera.

I love these segments, I love how they intersect and create maddening compositions, multiple angles and meanings sliced on a guillotine.  Some of the pieces I really dig:  “of darkness all”, “kingdom of am” (these two lines create bookends, “all” implying universal sadness, “am” suggesting the glow of higher consciousness for us all). Slips of paper reading “fa”, “LIB”, and “ir gr” are open to interpretation, as are most pieces.  You can mix and match fragments, single words, and gorgeous glyphs brought together in  an unexpected random/ not random universe full to bursting, sprawling, spreading out, making one giant uber-multi-referential epic.

A trip to the carnival is dizzying:  cotton candy, house of mirrors, tilt-a-whirl.  For Joel, these things all exist on those music staves.  Reach into his grab bag and you’ll pull out that perfect melody, those massed chords, the words that won’t be words.

I love this stuff, and I love roller coasters.

Bill DiMichele

Grab

                             --Joel Chace

Bill DiMichele

REPOSE AND RECONSTRUCTION

INTRODUCTION

My connection to Bill DiMichele has always been a warm one, although many-gapped, he jittering off in many directions on the west coast, I doing likewise on the east coast.  It goes back to the late eighties when he and I shared space in a number of zines devoted to visual poetry and like matter.  Twice around then my little outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press, published chapbooks of his. 

In his introduction to one of these, Heart on the Right (1992), Dale Jensen summed up Bill as he was then: “ . . . a poet, musician, painter and performance artist. He's a father. He's a member of the obscure but infamous performance group, the Outpatients, and the rock band, The False Gods. He's put out three albums of his own music.  He co-edits Score, the visualpoetry magazine.  He has several other books out besides this one.”  In short, Bill has been, and still is, more everywhere in the arts than just about anyone else.  (And, you will see, more everywhere in each art than just about anyone else.)

Heart on the Right was a collection of poetry containing material like the following, one a complete poem, the next the first stanza of the one after it:

     PHARMACEUTICAL ACROBATICS

          so i'm dedicated to self-indulgence
          burnished during the same period
          i disembodied flower nectar
          from room to room
          into the darkened cinema
          stared down at the maelstrom
          of needles and spires
          lured to that realm.
          a prison this idiotic almost
          venerating by
          irreverance-

          one's a felony, the other
          a cloudburst.


     PRAXITILES DETRITUS

          because i knew a shade
          exhumed from a summertime
          followed the quest down through the radio
          dimmings
          echoes of stone chrysanthemums
          blooming catacombs
          carved sistine beauty
          i rushed to find diagnosis
          or heir.

I think you’ll find echoes of the quest of the persona in the second of these “down through the radio/ dimmings . . . (to) Sistine beauty,” from which he “rushed to find diagnosis or heir” in the works gathered in this collection, in spite of the change from the verbal to the predominantly graphic.  Note in particular, the similarity of the effects he achieves from oppositions like “repose/ reconstruction,” the titles of two collage sequences in the present collection, to what he gets out of “felony/ cloudburst” in the much different kind of art just quoted.  Note, too, how elegantly in the works of the present collection he “works on the cusp of confusion and harmony,” as Laurie Schneider described him in her introduction to the second of the DiMichele books my press put out, Capacity X (1988).  Again, the use of oppositions.  Relatedly, Bill seems in all artistic endeavors to somehow stay close to varieties of design long known to be effective while simultaneously veering away from them amazingly far, as in the side-by-side visual poems I have reproduced below from Capacity X:

Before I let you go to see for yourself how terrific a multi-artist Bill is, I want to spend a few moments with one frame apiece from his already-mentioned, “repose,” and “reconstruction,” each of which is a ten-frame sequence (although each of their frames is a stand-alone, as well).

  

Wonderful as they are here, they are, in context with the other frames in both sequences, they are another order of magnitude greater than “wonderful.”  The upper image, and the nine others in “repose,” could not more effectively express the serenity of “repose”—which here is definitely shown as a triumph achieved, not something subdued to.  At least to me, a person who finds happy lyricism in almost every artwork. Beach; the commotion of words almost vanished; the commotion of loud colors, too, just about absent; a simplicity of rectangles somehow organically right . . . 

I may be the only one to make a positive reading of “purchases,” one of the few words one can make out in “repose,” and “You won it. Now make it yours,” given the unfashionability of buying things, but I take these texts to speak of a holiday, or even a retirement, bought and entered, in spite of the tone of the advertisement slogan.

The frame for “reconstruction” is going the other way, loud wrong colors everywhere, torn fragments, a sense (for me) of things boarded up—but large-lettered ambition, possible stories rising to be told, and a buoyant confidence of a major synthesis under way.

Others will have different readings, which—finally—is the greatest virtue of Bill’s works, their multi-interpretability.  I think few will find ways to read them without exhilaration, though.

                                                                                         Bob Grumman, 3 September 2012

Repose

Reconstruction

Bill DiMichele

Crag Hill

Digivis Poems 2005-2010


Crag Hill’s work inspires all who experience it.  I use the word ‘experience’, not ‘see’ or ‘read’, because that is exactly what it is, a personal encounter that changes us on the inside, gives us a new understanding of language, letter, syllable and word.  A single sentence or image cluster can speak in multiple ways; he gives us the freedom to interpret, and leads us into an alternate reality forged with fire and glowing iron.

Crag and I worked together all through the 1980s, both professionally and artistically.  We used Crag’s knowledge of cameras and photographic techniques to create our shared oeuvre.  I still remember discussing visual poetry in a cramped cluttered dirty little room underneath Mission Street, south of Market, San Francisco.  Directly over our heads, while we babbled at one another, there were the sounds of walking feet, car tires, bus exhaust, camera vacuum and everything else you would find in a throbbing metropolitan center.  It was all totally electric.

So, on to this series:  diversity in unity, unity in diversity.  This work makes me go up and down on my computer screen, stopping here and there to contemplate, even to laugh with giddy delight.  What’s it made of?  Primordial stew.  Tomorrow’s neural nets.  Conscious bacteria.  Flaming future alphabets. Beautiful tendrils.  New death.  Everything flowing, reaching, sprouting. ‘Shih shih wu ai’- between things no obstructions.  One of my favorite pieces is #14 Maw.  White becomes the major focus, drawing your eyes, bursting over the space/tan background.  The black, with just the right amount of visual weight, serves to ground it all.  There’s rain, there are creatures raising their chins in both defiance and joy.

That’s Crag- defiance and joy.  You see the defiance in his work, how he refuses to follow any fad or fashion, how he bends his materials to his own end, how he makes them laugh and cry.   You see the joy in- well, everything.  So check this out; all will become clear, and you will be the better for it.        

   

Bill DiMichele

Narrative

# 1 Dumb Pastoral  

# 2 God Would Have Managed

# 3 Prime Ordinal

# 4 Fact 

# 5 Host the Pit

# 6 Union

# 7 Last Words

# 8 Woman Smoking

# 9 Guttural

 # 10 Sonnet 

 # 11 Self-Portrait Bling

 # 12 writer

 # 13 Alphabet Wheel, Graveyard Shift

 # 14 Maw

 # 15 Sprawl

Some of these poems first appeared in Bee's Wax, Word/ For Word, Mad Hatter's Review, Whitewalls, Poet's Corner, and in exhibits in the United States and Mexico. 

Watch for The Last Vispo, a sprawling anthology, a Herculean effort, a mighty collection of postmodern visual poets from editors Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis, out the chute November, 2012.