— Derek Beaulieu
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I received some great new books from Paul Hawkins and his Hesterglock Press recently. Among the books was this raw calligraphic gem Durch/Through by Thomas Havlik. "Dada calligraphy" was my first impression upon digging through the pages of the book. Then once I ventured farther in, the gestures in the work seemed to exorcise out the art spirit(s) dwelling on the paginal cave walls. The lines of writing at first come across as simple childlike gestures, but then they give way into a powerful compendium of rough soul scripts. I like that this book of calligraphic writing allows me to find something new or forgotten along the journey as I travel among the leaves. The asemic or asemantic writing of Durch/Through gives the illusion of change but remains static as a foundation for thoughts and creativity, and only evolves in the reader's mind as intuitive glances into the totality of human experience/trauma. This book returns to the origins of writing, but it also successfully dwells in early 21st century Internet scribbling culture currently everywhere on and offline. Letters are teeth that we use to eat life; in Durch/Through the slightly legible letters and coarse lines are masticating thousands of years of human literary endeavor and leaving nothing but honey.
durch / through
Thomas Havlik
13 x 20 paperback 2019
ISBN: 9780368359965
156 pages
Purchase Durch/Through here at Blurb.
Thomas Havlik's works of abstract calligraphy are impossible to describe with words, so here are some sample pages from Durch/Through:
Thomas Havlik, born 1978, in Scheibbs, Lower AustriaCurrently living and working in Vienna. Autor, works on the boarders of sound- visual and performance-poetry. Many Publications in Literaturemagazines, in Text and Audioanthologies and on Radio. On stage he´s combining voice live-processings with prepared micropieces of letters, alphabetic strings, phonems and textsnippets. co-editor of the vienna based online soundpoetrymagazin “huellkurven”, dedicated to sound poetry, poésie sonore, lautpoesie, noise poetry, sound-text composition, audiditve poesie etc.Employment with the Dadaists, Surrealists, Futurists. Confrontation with the Vienna Group and its view of language as a material. I was subsequently fascinated by the artistic possibilities of electro-acoustic processing of speech. Henri Chopin, Jaap Blonk and Lettrists. Since then I have attempted for my own approach that connects the poetics of space, light and movement. Emphasis on sound poetry, performance and radio work in contrast to the conventional writing...
