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 Wally Keeler's article on 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 Wally Keeler's article on 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
"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:
