Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

10th Anniversary - Best of Tip of the Knife, Issue 34

Top of the Knife, 10 Year Anniversary Issue

Introduction by Crag Hill

I first met Bill DiMichele in 1983 at Graphic Reproduction, located amidst the grit and grime of 6^th and Mission, in San Francisco. The business served local, state, and national architects and engineers, including multinational company Bechtel, who at the time was building a power plant—or something like that—in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was a camera operator in the photo lab, toiling in the red-lit darkrooms in the basement. When Bill was hired as a salesman, I was the one tapped to bring him up to speed on the photo department’s role in the reprographic process.

Some of us in the photo department did not think very highly of the sales force—suit dudes, we called them. One, the turnover in that position was high; we were always being shadowed so that the salespeople could learn about how the products the company sold were made. Two, few of them understood—or were interested in—the photographic process. More than once I had to explain how we could not do—photography could not do—what the customers were asking us to do, but the suit dudes insisted we could and that we should do it as a rush order to boot. There was a class divide for sure.

Though Bill was surely the coolest dressed suit dude in the building—and probably South of Market—daily dashing in a mix of punk and new wave, I did not trust him at first. (Bill, I found out later, did understand the reprographic process and was interested in photography as an artist, even more so than as a salesman). But then we started talking about music (Glenn Branca, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, maybe Sonic Youth), then art (abstract expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg, Survival Research Labs, the mail art I was beginning to engage with).

We both recognized the artistic potential of the detritus of the photolab, found landscapes and mindscapes in half-developed mylar and photostats, cutup/cutoff language and image, as well as in the litter around the neighborhood and up and down nearby Market Street. We started making art of it together after a couple of weeks, collage after collage, conversation after conversation. That’s how quickly that friendship and long-time artistic collaboration ignited.

Then we started talking about poetry. I shared the publications mIEKAL aND and Liz Was were churning out through then Xerox Sutra Editions, their books always a rush of combinatory text and image, slanted, slashed, and blurred by frenetic manipulation on the xerox machine. This work struck a chord with Bill. An artist who saw more in an image than most artists, Bill was on fire, a fire that did not dim for the rest of his life.

For a dozen years, Laurie Schneider and I had the joy of working with Bill on Score, a magazine of concrete and visual poetry. We loved sitting around a table—or more likely on our knees on the floor, Bill’s preferred working posture—shuffling issues together. He knew what he liked and, rapid-fire, he could articulate why and how an individual piece fit not only in the scope of the issue we were envisioning but also how that piece interacted with—energized—other pieces we were considering. I learned from Bill how to grow an issue organically, seeing and marking connections and layering between the pieces, rather than presenting the contributions in alphabetic order according to the artist’s last name or some other arbitrary arrangement. Bill could see and hear and think like no one else I knew and always at a speed I loved to catch up to as soon as I could, even if when I did my eyes were breathless and slightly singed.

10 years ago, May 2010, Bill fired up Tip of the Knife. You can see in the entire run of 33 issues, and in this selection made by Julie DiMichele and Will DiMichele for issue 34, that Bill sought visual poetry from around the world that burned bright and dark, made up of everything under the sun, whatever is necessary to speak to/of the powers we possess that no government entity can ever seize. In this issue, found art (Sacha Archer, Mark Young, Texas Fontanella), digital writing (Jeff Crouch and Diana Magallón-Tanaga, Peter Ciccariello, Karl Kempton, Nico Vassilakis, Marco Giovenale), bookart (Marilyn Rosenberg, Dave Columbus), drawing and ink collaborations (John M. Bennett and Jim Leftwich), collage (Joel Chace, David Felix), text and collage (Mark Russell, mIEKAL aND, Laurie Schneider), collage and rubbing (Francisco Aprile), collage and spraypaint (David Chirot), collage and ink (Bruno Neiva), painting (Kathy Ernst, Trevor Pawlak, Christine Tarantino), conceptual painting (John Barry), telephone pole with staples (Paul Pacak), overwriting (Billy Cancel), font and typography design (Liz Was), mixed-media on newsprint (Martin Rajala,), photography (Leon, Lloyd Dunn), computer imaging and shadow tracing (Crag Hill), digital gesture (Bill Karmel), ink and manipulated found text (Spencer Selby), and other media I can’t describe from the images alone (bárbara mesquita, Josh Buckley, Iker Spozio), Bill and the artists whose work Tip of the Knife championed knew that to make something of art and poetry requires risk (even if/with generative accidents in the artistic process), the selflessness needed to step back from a piece when it has had enough of the artist, and, for Bill, energy energy energy, a solar system’s worth, whenever/wherever possible.

See the work now for yourself. Stare at each piece. Breathe them all in. Let them spread behind your eyes and beneath your skin even if you begin to smolder, smoke, and flare. Don’t call for or answer the sirens. Bill knew, live in the process and be the transformation. No one can ever take that away from you.

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Day ? of Covid-19 Quarantine

We, fortunately, have a place we can go where we don't think about the present and future of a covid-19 world. This place is nearby but also very far away. Closer to Mars than anywhere else. Saw this bird flying across the land that is a sky, immense grains of sky. The name of the bird was on the tip of my tongue, though in that place I have no tips and don't need any. When I know the name of this bird, when the name of this bird knows me, I will share.

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Brainstorm, Or

brai sotrm

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spur prise

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Before the Word

Before the word there was the image.

Behind the word there is the image.

Between and within the words are images; between and within the images now are words.

Before the word there was one image. The one image expanded and accelerated and formed many images. Images were teeming and seething with images. Time and space were born and became one.

Before the word many images contracted and formed images of worlds and worlds of images. Time and space were teeming and seething with images.

Before the word there were worlds of images. The worlds expanded and accelerated and concretized. Images begat the world.

In the flux before the word, in a world of image, consciousness was born but it did not know it was born and did not know for eons.

Before the word the knowing began with image. Consciousness looked and imbibed the world of images and the images of world and knowing expanded and accelerated and concretized. A word was born and the knowing that it was also was born.

Within the maelstrom of images words were born and words died. Words were born and words died and words were born. Words were born and attained maturity and diversified and died while images remained constant (never fixed in knowing but always with substance, with a weight born of words). With each word, each life and death of a word, the knowing grew.

As the knowing grew it began to connect word with image and image with word and as the knowing connected image with word knowing spread and words spread in and out across images. Singular words coupled with recurring images expanded and accelerated and concretized into constellations.

The knowing guided these constellations and these constellations guided knowing. Words gained their own time and space (never fixed in the knowing but always with substance, with a weight born of image) and gave images roots and trunks and branches as images gave words veins and blood and bodies.

For the knowing images and words became inseparable but not yet impermeable. For the knowing this was the source of energy necessary to create more knowing.

In the knowing words flourished, became writ in stone and on scrolls and on as many pages as there were stars marking time and space. Images flourished, became wrought in stone and on walls and on as many canvases and pages as there were stars shaping time and space.

Knowing moved out along branches and veins and became many knowings. Words were born and words died and words survived in one knowing that another knowing could not comprehend but this was not incapacitating. Across and around the world words were born and words died and words expedited knowing.

But soon knowing forgot words were images and words were privileged. Knowing came to rely more on word than image. Disconnect was born and thrived and words were born and words died and words impeded knowing. Words intensified and calcified and choked out other words.

Words learned how to grow anger and unrest and war. Words left tattered images in their wake. Words planned revolution and dissolution against other words, one knowing pitted against another. Words died and were not reborn. Words died and their meaning lost in time and space. Knowing doubted and starved and diminished and more words died and were never reborn.

Yet while knowing had come to disdain image, image never atrophied, never faltered. In this chaos and entropy of word there grew up a small yet widespread and vibrant knowing that believed in image and forged knowing rooted in image.

While knowing contracted image persisted within and without and at the edges of knowing scored by words being born and words fighting and dying.

When knowing finally looked beyond word within and without knowing, spurred on by the knowing that believed in image, small yet widespread and vibrant, knowing saw beyond the ruins of words that image existed. Image never atrophied, never faltered.

For the knowing liberated of the tyranny of word doubt subsided. Words were born rooted in image and were reborn. Balance of image and word and word and image was restored and replenished.

Before the word was the image. Behind the word there is the image.

Between and within the words are images; between and within the images now are words. A small yet widespread and vibrant knowing that believes in image grows.