Karl Young VP Bio Note

. . .

Karl Young Vis Po Bio Notes

Introduction

Bio statements present puzzles. I usually haven't been satisfied with those I've written for myself. I've seldom found those Ive read interesting, and if they've been informative, it has only been because the note pointed me to a title or publisher or gallery I would not otherwise have found. I don't recall writing any of the flippant jokes or parodies bios seem to ask for, though I have asked other people to revise or write mine for me and a few other minor experiments.
The web gives me the opportunities for other experiments. What happens if the bio statement can be a full bio, with examples of other work and/or comments from other people?
Serious bio notes sometimes suggest obituaries to me. The fact that the information ends at the time of publication reinforces this, if it doesn't create it. Bio pages such as those I'm experimenting with can be updated. With notes like this, readers can feel that the bio notes haven't become irrelevant after a few years. Authors can report on reactions to the work in the anthology, magazine, or other publication. And to the publication itself. If they want to tailor the bios to the publication, they can do so. I'm doing that with several publications at present. I may link them to each other. . .
I don't know how much information readers want. Hence I'm going to start out relatively simple. This installment will simply include links to what seems the most relevant work.
I'll write a specific biography for this page when I have a few other deadlines out of the way and can work on several bio pages like this one, but for different types of publication, at the same time.
Presumably, I'll try other approaches to bio pages, and I hope learn a few things while having some fun with the process, and producing something that readers can find useful.

Bringing the Text Back Home
Autobiography and at Least One "Big Arc"

However much my work is built of small parts, starting with letters or photographs or other elementary components, I usually conceive of them as larger projects in advance or shortly after beginning to tinker with them. Most often, a book is my basic unit of composition, and I usually think in terms of books rather than pages, and work toward books soon after beginning a project. These books, even when they are relatively small, tend to generate related essays, and to interconnect with other books and sequences of books. At times, sequences don’t suggest books in any usual sense at all. My lengthy e-mail art collaboration with Reid Wood, for instance, is something I think of in much the same way as I think of sequences of books, even though the works don't resemble books at all, and I doubt that Reid thinks of them in terms of an single extended sequence, even though he published several years worth of images as a CD-ROM, and has frequently exhibited and published images from the project.
Sequences of books, in turn, move toward what I call "big arcs." So far, only one has been completed. I began it in the early 1970s, and my first steps became a short book which I separated from the big arc project which it initiated. The project reached completion in 2011, when Anny Ballardini completed her translation of one of the books that acted as a building block. Márton Koppány, a contributor to the anthology, contributed a translation to the project. These translation are not simply translations in the usual sense, but engagements in the projects by the distant descendents of those who wrote the texts whose fragmentary remains initiated the first two books. The final work makes little sense without the essays that go with it, from the overview to the essay on the Roman Alphabet. From the point of view of the page you’re reading now, the notes on my Marton’s contribution, and our interrelation may be particularly interesting. The "big arc project," can be found at:

Bringing the Text Back Home

Leaf Mosaic
Autobiographical Essays Related to My Work

I have begun several projects which integrate autobiography with literary criticism, art and cultural history, comments on technology (including the nature of language and writing systems), and other genres and issues. As previously noted, in most of my work, I try to create interconnections and exchanges. In the last three decades, there have been times when I have had limited access to source material. This has slowed down or stopped the kinds of projects that were most important to me when I was younger.
One set, Leaf Mosaic, is a series of essays on the methods, evolution, significance, and interrelation of some of my books and major projects. Here is a list of those which appear in draft form on line:

Acoustic Books at the Beginning and End of the World
Minimalism's Expansions
The Valence of Fragments
Vocabularies, Fractals, and Semiconductors
A Middle America Water Table
Chinese Dialogues and Couplets
Five Kwaidan: Ghosts and Sleeve pages
Books Printed by Walter Tisdale
Beginning Milestones

Some Volumes of Poetry
Autobiographical Essays
on Publishing and Related Activities

As I worked on Leaf Mosaic, it occurred to me that I could use an autobiographical thread not only to elucidate and expand my own writing, but that if I did something similar with books I had printed or otherwise published; editorial projects I had conducted; Art Centers, events, shows, and other entities and projects I had created or founded, instigated, or participated in, I could simultaneously write about nearly everything involved in contemporary art and literature, and do so in a way that would further my desire to integrate and interrelate arts and what goes into them. Few critics and commentators have discussed the printing of books, even though one of the many meanings of the popular phrase "material text" and the left-wing political background of many poets neglect the material production of books or the labor that goes into producing books. Likewise, many critics have not commented on the way that poets read or perform their work. Some of the interaction between artists makes good gossip, and I don't avoid that completely, but more practical and less sexy or flamboyant situations may be more important. A literary and cultural history of the milieu from which poems and related forms of art come enhances and makes accessible the work and expands the interactions between individual works, movements, and broader arcs of development and change than most criticism involves. With these factors in mind, I began a series called Some Volumes of Poetry. What’s on line so far begins at:
This Index Page at Big Bridge Magazine
The introduction you go to when you click the image, goes into some detail about the purpose and method of the project, as well as "triangulation," one of the conceptions that has been important to me in criticism and publishing. In my publishing efforts, I tend to concentrate on the people I publish. That usually means I publish more than one book by each writer or artist, and often reinforce, elucidate, and expand its potentials by writing criticism my self, generating criticism from other people, at times commissioning the authors and artists to write or edit criticism themselves, set up readings, produce audio tapes, and do anything else to make the work fuller and more accessible. This has meant publishing fewer people (which sometimes causes resentments) but my basic feeling is that presenting the work of a few people in depth helps build audiences, and expanding audiences is more important than producing a few little nearly meaningless and highly forgettable tokens for a larger number of writers. By the 1980s, I was working more or less in tandem with Karl Kempton on visual poetry – his Kaldron magazine published a few examples of a much larger selection of visual poets. Our efforts complimented each other. (Later, we combined approaches on the web.) In the 1970s, I published some of my own visual poetry, and did a few solo books of visual poetry by other people. But my main effort in publishing visual poetry was concentration on bpNichol and Jackson Mac Low. It was important to me that both were profoundly engaged in sound poetry and performance art, profoundly integrated wwith visual poetry. I also published work by people who did no visual poetry.
The first part of the on line Volumes of Poetry was titled 1970s Outreaches. It included comment on:
solo books by Carol Bergé, Hilary Ayer, Kathleen Wiegner, Nathaniel Tarn, and an essential project which started with Robert Filliou’s 14 chansons et 1 charade, conventional translations into German by Dieter Roth and into English by George Brecht; then homoliguistic translations by Dick Higgins, bpNichol, and Steve McCaffery.
Books by bpNichol, and a collection of performance scores by him and the other members of the Four Horsemen performance group.
Books by Jackson Mac Low.
Books by John Taggart.
An account of how Pat Wagner and I created The Water Street Arts Center, parent organization to the still functioning Woodland Pattern Book Center.
My Margins Symposium series. This began in Margins magazine, and continued in other publications after Margins folded. I edited some myself, co-edited others, and commissioned others without participation or interference from me. This spread of editorial involvements was part of my experiments with different editorial approaches, the triangulation process, and, in some instances, the sense that the guest editor was as important as the subject. Most of these have lasted in one way or another, and parts of them are still in use. Most comments on Rochelle Owens written in the last decade and a half have cited contributions to my symposium on her, often those I reproduced on the web. Ron Silliman’s symposium gets cited often – this includes Silliman himself saying it did more than anything else to convince him of the importance of being able to write about contemporary work; the iconic study of alternate publishing during the period, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, it is listed as one of the half dozen most important publications of 1977. For visual poets, the symposium on Tom Phillips, Ian Tyson, and Joe Tilson would probably be most important.
Books by Martin J. Rosenblum, John Kingsley Shannon, and Toby Olson.
The first two magazines I worked on.
The second part is oriented toward mail art, and hence particularly important to visual poets and those interested in it. The sections include an essay on how d.a.levy introduced me to Lettrisme and mail art I produced from processes that made use of specific and characteristic properties of the offset printing press I used to produce books in the 1970s and 1980s. Samples from an exchange of e-mail art between Reid Wood and me over a fourteen year period. Commentary on stamp art by Rafael Jesus Martinez and anthology contributor Joel Lipman. Time and the Mail Art Network — detailed chapter from a book of extended commentary. Correspondence Art Solos and Choruses — commentary on solo and collaborative work by David Cole and anthology contributors, K.S. Ernst and Marilyn R. Rosenberg. Survey of International Shadows Project: a major mail art sub-genre that went on for at least a decade.
The third part deals with books by Michael McClure and anthology contributors Michael Basinski and Karl Kempton.
The fourth part deals with unusual circumstances and problems: Elder Books — as projects for elders, and as documentation. A description and promotional essay I wrote for a program for troubled inner city teens, using the prestige books still had before the days of print on demand. Art and real estate: how artists gentrify neighborhoods — particularly important for everyone in 2010, and particularly for me, though I didn’t go into it, when I was losing my home in part as a result of someone I’d hired for an organization I created spending years covering my contribution up. Writing job recommendations as a literary genre — using a recommendation for anthology contributor Joel Lipman as an example. Link to web memorial to my father.
After the fourth installment, I moved this project to Light and Dust. Bringing the Text Back Home was the first part of the series at the new location.

Part 2:
Community Discussion:
Selections from published books
from Glooskap's Children
1972

from When Gloucester Was Gloucester
1973

from Maximus to Gloucester
1992

Return to Light and Dust
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry

..



. . .	Karl Young Vis Po Bio Notes Introduction Bio statements present puzzles. I usually haven't been satisfied with those I've written for myself. I've seldom found those Ive read interesting, and if they've been informative, it has only been because the note pointed me to a title or publisher or gallery I would not otherwise have found. I don't recall writing any of the flippant jokes or parodies bios seem to ask for, though I have asked other people to revise or write mine for me and a few other minor experiments. The web gives me the opportunities for other experiments. What happens if the bio statement can be a full bio, with examples of other work and/or comments from other people? Serious bio notes sometimes suggest obituaries to me. The fact that the information ends at the time of publication reinforces this, if it doesn't create it. Bio pages such as those I'm experimenting with can be updated. With notes like this, readers can feel that the bio notes haven't become irrelevant after a few years. Authors can report on reactions to the work in the anthology, magazine, or other publication. And to the publication itself. If they want to tailor the bios to the publication, they can do so. I'm doing that with several publications at present. I may link them to each other. . . I don't know how much information readers want. Hence I'm going to start out relatively simple. This installment will simply include links to what seems the most relevant work. I'll write a specific biography for this page when I have a few other deadlines out of the way and can work on several bio pages like this one, but for different types of publication, at the same time. Presumably, I'll try other approaches to bio pages, and I hope learn a few things while having some fun with the process, and producing something that readers can find useful. Bringing the Text Back Home Autobiography and at Least One "Big Arc" However much my work is built of small parts, starting with letters or photographs or other elementary components, I usually conceive of them as larger projects in advance or shortly after beginning to tinker with them. Most often, a book is my basic unit of composition, and I usually think in terms of books rather than pages, and work toward books soon after beginning a project. These books, even when they are relatively small, tend to generate related essays, and to interconnect with other books and sequences of books. At times, sequences don’t suggest books in any usual sense at all. My lengthy e-mail art collaboration with Reid Wood, for instance, is something I think of in much the same way as I think of sequences of books, even though the works don't resemble books at all, and I doubt that Reid thinks of them in terms of an single extended sequence, even though he published several years worth of images as a CD-ROM, and has frequently exhibited and published images from the project. Sequences of books, in turn, move toward what I call "big arcs." So far, only one has been completed. I began it in the early 1970s, and my first steps became a short book which I separated from the big arc project which it initiated. The project reached completion in 2011, when Anny Ballardini completed her translation of one of the books that acted as a building block. Márton Koppány, a contributor to the anthology, contributed a translation to the project. These translation are not simply translations in the usual sense, but engagements in the projects by the distant descendents of those who wrote the texts whose fragmentary remains initiated the first two books. The final work makes little sense without the essays that go with it, from the overview to the essay on the Roman Alphabet. From the point of view of the page you’re reading now, the notes on my Marton’s contribution, and our interrelation may be particularly interesting. The "big arc project," can be found at: Bringing the Text Back Home Leaf Mosaic Autobiographical Essays Related to My Work I have begun several projects which integrate autobiography with literary criticism, art and cultural history, comments on technology (including the nature of language and writing systems), and other genres and issues. As previously noted, in most of my work, I try to create interconnections and exchanges. In the last three decades, there have been times when I have had limited access to source material. This has slowed down or stopped the kinds of projects that were most important to me when I was younger. One set, Leaf Mosaic, is a series of essays on the methods, evolution, significance, and interrelation of some of my books and major projects. Here is a list of those which appear in draft form on line: Acoustic Books at the Beginning and End of the World Minimalism's Expansions The Valence of Fragments Vocabularies, Fractals, and Semiconductors A Middle America Water Table Chinese Dialogues and Couplets Five Kwaidan: Ghosts and Sleeve pages Books Printed by Walter Tisdale Beginning Milestones Some Volumes of Poetry Autobiographical Essays on Publishing and Related Activities As I worked on Leaf Mosaic, it occurred to me that I could use an autobiographical thread not only to elucidate and expand my own writing, but that if I did something similar with books I had printed or otherwise published; editorial projects I had conducted; Art Centers, events, shows, and other entities and projects I had created or founded, instigated, or participated in, I could simultaneously write about nearly everything involved in contemporary art and literature, and do so in a way that would further my desire to integrate and interrelate arts and what goes into them. Few critics and commentators have discussed the printing of books, even though one of the many meanings of the popular phrase "material text" and the left-wing political background of many poets neglect the material production of books or the labor that goes into producing books. Likewise, many critics have not commented on the way that poets read or perform their work. Some of the interaction between artists makes good gossip, and I don't avoid that completely, but more practical and less sexy or flamboyant situations may be more important. A literary and cultural history of the milieu from which poems and related forms of art come enhances and makes accessible the work and expands the interactions between individual works, movements, and broader arcs of development and change than most criticism involves. With these factors in mind, I began a series called Some Volumes of Poetry. What’s on line so far begins at: This Index Page at Big Bridge Magazine The introduction you go to when you click the image, goes into some detail about the purpose and method of the project, as well as "triangulation," one of the conceptions that has been important to me in criticism and publishing. In my publishing efforts, I tend to concentrate on the people I publish. That usually means I publish more than one book by each writer or artist, and often reinforce, elucidate, and expand its potentials by writing criticism my self, generating criticism from other people, at times commissioning the authors and artists to write or edit criticism themselves, set up readings, produce audio tapes, and do anything else to make the work fuller and more accessible. This has meant publishing fewer people (which sometimes causes resentments) but my basic feeling is that presenting the work of a few people in depth helps build audiences, and expanding audiences is more important than producing a few little nearly meaningless and highly forgettable tokens for a larger number of writers. By the 1980s, I was working more or less in tandem with Karl Kempton on visual poetry – his Kaldron magazine published a few examples of a much larger selection of visual poets. Our efforts complimented each other. (Later, we combined approaches on the web.) In the 1970s, I published some of my own visual poetry, and did a few solo books of visual poetry by other people. But my main effort in publishing visual poetry was concentration on bpNichol and Jackson Mac Low. It was important to me that both were profoundly engaged in sound poetry and performance art, profoundly integrated wwith visual poetry. I also published work by people who did no visual poetry. The first part of the on line Volumes of Poetry was titled 1970s Outreaches. It included comment on: solo books by Carol Bergé, Hilary Ayer, Kathleen Wiegner, Nathaniel Tarn, and an essential project which started with Robert Filliou’s 14 chansons et 1 charade, conventional translations into German by Dieter Roth and into English by George Brecht; then homoliguistic translations by Dick Higgins, bpNichol, and Steve McCaffery. Books by bpNichol, and a collection of performance scores by him and the other members of the Four Horsemen performance group. Books by Jackson Mac Low. Books by John Taggart. An account of how Pat Wagner and I created The Water Street Arts Center, parent organization to the still functioning Woodland Pattern Book Center. My Margins Symposium series. This began in Margins magazine, and continued in other publications after Margins folded. I edited some myself, co-edited others, and commissioned others without participation or interference from me. This spread of editorial involvements was part of my experiments with different editorial approaches, the triangulation process, and, in some instances, the sense that the guest editor was as important as the subject. Most of these have lasted in one way or another, and parts of them are still in use. Most comments on Rochelle Owens written in the last decade and a half have cited contributions to my symposium on her, often those I reproduced on the web. Ron Silliman’s symposium gets cited often – this includes Silliman himself saying it did more than anything else to convince him of the importance of being able to write about contemporary work; the iconic study of alternate publishing during the period, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, it is listed as one of the half dozen most important publications of 1977. For visual poets, the symposium on Tom Phillips, Ian Tyson, and Joe Tilson would probably be most important. Books by Martin J. Rosenblum, John Kingsley Shannon, and Toby Olson. The first two magazines I worked on. The second part is oriented toward mail art, and hence particularly important to visual poets and those interested in it. The sections include an essay on how d.a.levy introduced me to Lettrisme and mail art I produced from processes that made use of specific and characteristic properties of the offset printing press I used to produce books in the 1970s and 1980s. Samples from an exchange of e-mail art between Reid Wood and me over a fourteen year period. Commentary on stamp art by Rafael Jesus Martinez and anthology contributor Joel Lipman. Time and the Mail Art Network — detailed chapter from a book of extended commentary. Correspondence Art Solos and Choruses — commentary on solo and collaborative work by David Cole and anthology contributors, K.S. Ernst and Marilyn R. Rosenberg. Survey of International Shadows Project: a major mail art sub-genre that went on for at least a decade. The third part deals with books by Michael McClure and anthology contributors Michael Basinski and Karl Kempton. The fourth part deals with unusual circumstances and problems: Elder Books — as projects for elders, and as documentation. A description and promotional essay I wrote for a program for troubled inner city teens, using the prestige books still had before the days of print on demand. Art and real estate: how artists gentrify neighborhoods — particularly important for everyone in 2010, and particularly for me, though I didn’t go into it, when I was losing my home in part as a result of someone I’d hired for an organization I created spending years covering my contribution up. Writing job recommendations as a literary genre — using a recommendation for anthology contributor Joel Lipman as an example. Link to web memorial to my father. After the fourth installment, I moved this project to Light and Dust. Bringing the Text Back Home was the first part of the series at the new location. Part 2: Community Discussion: Selections from published books from Glooskap's Children 1972 from When Gloucester Was Gloucester 1973 from Maximus to Gloucester 1992 Return to Light and Dust Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry	..