Zend typescape featured in vispo exhibit in Cobourg Ontario: TEXTual ARTivity
The second annual TEXTual ARTivity exhibition organized by poetry in Cob{our}g spaces, (piCs) touched down once again in the Human Bean Coffeehouse in downtown Cobourg, opening reception and open mic poetry reading at the Human Bean, Thursday, April 9 at 7 p.m.
TEXTual ARTivity is the artistic display of language, words, letters, punctuation, all of the tools that a poet utilizes to create poetry. Poets are implicitly orthographic; the evolution of communications technology provided poets with the opportunity to apply their peculiar interests with language to other media manifestations. The walls of the Human Bean were graced with a wide assortment of pieces from poets across Canada including two of Canada’s leading exemplars of TEXTual ARTivity - bill bissett and Robert Zend..
Check out what Wally Keeler had to say about the exhibit in Northumberland Today:
TEXTual ARTivity is the artistic display of language, words, letters, punctuation, all of the tools that a poet utilizes to create poetry. Poets are implicitly orthographic; the evolution of communications technology provided poets with the opportunity to apply their peculiar interests with language to other media manifestations. The walls of the Human Bean were graced with a wide assortment of pieces from poets across Canada including two of Canada’s leading exemplars of TEXTual ARTivity - bill bissett and Robert Zend..
Check out what Wally Keeler had to say about the exhibit in Northumberland Today:
Robert Zend is a Hungarian poet who had fled to Canada as a political refugee after the failed 1956 revolution against Soviet occupation. Zend has been described as a poet without borders and an explorer of imaginary worlds.
World famous mime artist Marcel Marceau had this to say about Zend: “Once Robert Zend told me that I was a poet of gestures. Once I told him that he was a mime with words.”
Robert Zend has created a body of work that is marked with extraordinary wit in either language.
TEXTual ARTivity presents a series of Zend’s ‘typescapes’ using cut-out stencils and a manual typewriter to create overlapping images on a page. Zend’s work is infused with a child’s playfulness with language and image.
In his own words, Zend wrote, “Here is the solution for the problems of the world: We have to learn to play. With worlds, with ideas, with people, with life, with ourselves.” The work of Zend is a liberation of language and imagination in which “freedom is everyone’s homeland.”
- Wally Keeler, Northumberland Today
"Peapoteacock," from Arbormundi: 16 Selected Typescapes (Vancouver: blewointmentpress, 1982), featured at the 2014 exhibit:
Poet Wally Keeler reads Robert Zend's "The Dream-Cycle" (Daymares, Ronsdale Press, 1991), p. 21, at the opening reception on April 1, 2014: