{"id":279,"date":"2013-11-05T16:33:44","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T00:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=279"},"modified":"2013-11-05T16:45:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T00:45:02","slug":"waverock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=279","title":{"rendered":"Wave\/Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m jealous of Scottish visual poet Ian Hamilton Finlay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last Sunday morning I walked on the cliffs at Chapman Point, just south of Mendocino. Tony, who does the graphics for Mendocino Coast Writers Conference<\/a>, was taking photographs that might become next year\u2019s program cover or a display ad in Poets & Writers magazine <\/a>. I contemplated spume lifting from waves as they rolled in steady rhythm against the rocks, and thought about words I might use to convey the sense of transience that pervades this dramatic boundary between earth and sea.<\/p>\n

Back home, I started making a list: undercut, backwash, swirl, surge, strata, submerge, carve, crevice, recede, collapse, uplift, unrest, rockfall, bull kelp, blueness, sheer<\/em> \u2026 A few lines started to appear:<\/p>\n

In the curve of the undercut
\nat the cliff\u2019s base
\nthe shape of wave<\/em><\/p>\n

I decided to let the lines sit for a while and turned to another project. My friend Mary Marcia Casoly<\/a> had recently sent a link to an anthology, Shadows of the Future: An Otherstream Anthology<\/a> containing two of her poems. \u201cVispo,\u201d she called them, visual poetry. Not a form I knew much about, so I Googled it and found a number of sites that had definitions and examples. Visual poetry, I learned, is \u201cpoetry that cannot suffer any translation into alternative visual or typographic form without sacrificing some of its meaning and integrity\u2026 The ‘quality of presence’ we get from the work depends on visual means, such as typefaces, format, spatial distribution on the page, or the physical form of the book or book object.\u201d (Johanna Drucker<\/a>)<\/p>\n

I opened an example at random. Immediately my entire afternoon at my desk was washed out to sea. Before me was Ian Hamilton Finlay\u2019s \u201cWave\/Rock<\/a>\u201d from Aspen #7. Just two words repeated: the brown rockrockrock<\/em> stacked on top of each other so that the near-vertical strata are visible; the blue wave<\/em> words spread and broken as they crash against the rocks.
\n

\"\"<\/a>

Wave\/Rock by Tony Eppstein<\/p><\/div>I had no need to write my poem. I looked instead at Tony\u2019s images of waves and rocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m jealous of Scottish visual poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Last Sunday morning I walked on the cliffs at Chapman Point, just south of Mendocino. Tony, who does the graphics for Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, was taking photographs that might become next year\u2019s program cover or a display ad in Poets & Writers magazine . I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,8,7,58,103],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}