Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Jurgen Olbrich's Autopoems

Out of Kassel, Germany, Jurgen Olbrich has been a juggernaut in mail art, performance art, and conceptual installation since the early 1980s. Receiving an envelope from him stuffed with postcards and other ephemera always made my day. It's been a delight to reconnect with him this year. Life's long yet a decade's absence abcesses.

In the 1980s, SCORE published several pages of Jurgen's autopoems (see here). Jurgen writes these poems by transcribing the license plates that pass him during a thirty minute period. Below are two recent autopoems, the first composed in Berlin, the second in Frankfurt. Not only conceptual poems (preceding and surpassing the Goldsmith tedium), both also offer up themselves as sound poetry scores.

Quatrain

 

School his will

Between speech he didn’t feel

To speak without gestures

The dead and dying

S'kid'S

MidStream

face deed bed fade beg

Road near the river's bank

trust the man rifts

Two Fragments of A Playbill, London 1980s

 

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

RAT IN THE SKULL

 

 

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

DISCUSSION

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

THREE BEATINGS

 

 ------------------------------------

 

SUSAN’S BREASTS

 

SUSAN’S BREASTS

 

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

 

No Performance

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

SUSAN’S BREASTS

Found Poem from Given by Wendell Berry

We come at last to the dark

We follow the dead to their graves

We hear way off approaching sounds

We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see

What a consolation it is, after

Whatever happens,

What I fear most is despair

When we convene again

Why

Words

I was speechless