Alphaseltzer (or The Rubricator): Work in Progress

Posted June 2020

When I began learning about visual poetry as an undergraduate student from 2006-2009 I was incredibly taken with the medium. Seeing writers using text fragments, words, and letters in ways so divergent from all the previous uses of text that I’d seen seemed to open an amazingly vast array of possibilities for meaning and aesthetics both. For me this was a very exciting time, when my enthusiasm about poetry and visual poetry felt boundless—I wanted to read everything and try everything and embrace the euphoria of creating. Out of this enthusiasm grew the semi-completed project Alphaseltzer. The project was, largely, an aesthetic adventure into visual poetry, though one video component of the project does make some forays into using this aesthetic to generate a specific meaning.

The completed component of the project comprises fifty-five watercolour pencil visual poems and three title/end pages. Using stencils, I traced sets of alphabets and punctuation marks, and coloured them in extremely heavily, then spraying the pages with water so the pigment would run down the page. Creating this project I was thinking about some of the aesthetic and theoretical assumptions about visual poetry that I’d been introduced to as a student. Though I’d read about visual poetry as challenging notions of the letter and text, letters also often seemed whole and mechanical in visual poetry, especially in the use of black and white throughout the work of many visual poets. Using stencils certainly preserves this mechanical element—the letters aren’t hand-drawn as I’d later go on to do in Magyarázni—but instead of letting those letters remain whole in this project their forms are melted. The visual poems are a journey through these aesthetic ideas and assumptions. The project begins with black and red letters only—the colours commonly found on typewriters and in rubricated (but not illuminated) European medieval manuscripts. The letters are presented in a fairly expected way—their usual orientation preserved, and the melting flowing down. Slowly, more colours begin appearing in the project, with stranger shapes. Then, at a tipping point in the middle, a cluster of black and red punctuation marks scatters with the drips flowing downward, followed by a multicoloured page of those same punctuation marks tumbling head over heels, plunging into the page with the drips flowing up rather than down. From there each letter of the alphabet gets its own plunging page, concluding with a multicoloured ampersand plunging into the page, and then a black and red ampersand dripping down.

The work (despite being a decade old!) is still one I consider to be in process, as I’ve always thought it’d be nice to have a set of written poems to accompany the visuals. When working on it, however, I find myself wondering if it might be done all on its own. That uncertainty, I suppose, makes it feel unfinished even if it isn’t.

The one piece of written poetry completed is a poem called “The Rubricator.” While the visual poetry was mainly conceived of an produced in a state of creative enthusiasm, focused on colour and shape, the project engages somewhat with the history of writing by characterizing rubrication—the process by which red letters were added to otherwise completed black ink manuscripts—as a type of visual poetry. The poem “The Rubricator” was published on the Chaudiere Books blog in 2014.