MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

If it’s not already obvious from the comics I’ve posted in the past month, I’ve been looking at (and reading about) a lot of Asian ink/brush art lately. In particular a lot of this art has been zen or poetry related. (Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu was also a big influence on a few of [...]

Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”. Issac also commented: It’d [...]

Comics blogger Sean Kleefield was at the con yesterday and has a write-up with screenshots, including one of me presenting: In other news about me, or not about me as the case is here, a couple poets/artists/? released “For Godot” issue 1, a 3785 page PDF that has about that many poems attributed to a [...]

Every task involves constraint, Solve the thing without complaint; There are magic links and chains Forged to loose our rigid brains. Strictures, structures, though they bind, Strangely liberate the mind. James E. Falen. Quoted in Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (p. 272) by Douglas Hofstadter. (Thanks to Stephen [...]

The next two lines [of Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish] are similarly structured: “For love / The leaning grasses and two light above the sea.” That is, “For love,” an abstraction, impossible to grasp, the poet should present something concrete: “The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Although I can’t say precisely how [...]

At the same time that he [the poet] is trying to envisage the poem as a whole, he is trying to relate the individual items to the whole. He cannot assemble them in a merely arbitrary fashion; they must bear some relation to each other. So he develops his sense of the whole, the anticipation [...]

Having finally read one of Metcalf’s works, I went back and reread this interview (from the always brilliant interviews at Dalkey Archive). It is worth the time for a number of interesting takes on prose, novels, structure, organization, etc.: I: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional novel (i.e., plot, and [...]

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Oulipo Factor: the Procedural Poetics of Christan Bök and Caroline Bergvall.” Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 23-45. I rarely delve into poetry here. It’s not a form of literature I am very familiar with. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to really appreciate a lot of poetry, and I’ve always been more into [...]

Roussel, Raymond. New Impressions of Africa (1932). Illustrations by Henri-A. Zo. Translated by Ian Monk. London: Atlas Press, 2004. Raymond Roussel’s influence on French literature of the 20th century is considerable, among his admirers numbered Surrealists (Breton, Aragon, Desnos), ex-Surrealists (Leiris), Oulipians (Queneau, Mathews (ok, he’s not French)), nouveau romanciers (Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel [...]

Bôk, Christian. Eunoia. Toronto: Couch House, 2001. Online version. Reading Eunoia aloud is a singular experience. The repetition of sounds and rhymes, assonance and alliteration all make for a poetic work of prose. I found myself reading it at a steady clip, keeping the rhythm in the forefront. You probably haven’t read anything like this [...]

Untitled Elementary Morality by Paul Fournel Translation by Derik A Badman Glass atelier Plenary meetingPreliminary interview Red velvet Insufficiant education Trifling eventsOutdated sentiments Crazy company Sanguine senior Doctrinal discussionPhotographic advertisement Retired inspector     Golden bobbles Invited to dine by a countess a bit bumbling Golden bobbles she incarnates the spirit of Lenin     [...]

An elementary morality: “Elementary Movements of Undressing” by Jacques Jouet Translation: Derik A Badman last fabric light weavefull sack studied surface assiduous hands buttocks huggedhands in place waist traced pale face unsaddled frontlively descent sibylline zone    barely slowedat the kneesit fallsto the floora foot outsidethe otherfishes for it    tender trace trace drunkbare-assed curt [...]

The Elementary Morality (Morale Élémentaire) is a fixed form of poetry created by Raymond Queneau, first appearing in the last book he published before his death Morale Élémentaire. The name was later applied to the form, from the title of that book, by the members of the Oulipo. He defines the form as follows: “Il [...]

This constraint was illustrated by Raymond Queneau in an essay entitled “La redondance chez Phane Armé” (in La litterature potentielle (Gallimard, 1973) also a section of his essay “Potential Literature” as trans. by Warren Motte in Oulipo: A primer of potential literature (Dalkey Archive, 1998)). He describes a means of reducing a poem to its [...]