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The context
of a poem, its embodiment, its framing, affects
the reading and so changes
the poem. This is a photo of a poem-intervention
I saw pasted to the wall of a building under
demolition in Brussels (I have no idea who
made it) (left).
It reminds me
of some of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s
postcard works, in the way it combines word
and image into a poetic compound. But it eschews
classical gravitas for wallpaper and poster
paints – an improvised, ephemeral statement.
And crucial to its meaning is where it is encountered:
there on the wall of a ruined building it echoes
Brussel’s murals of bandes dessinées,
and grows into a political elegy for shelter
and home.
Drawing and writing
are linked by the line: Coleridge and Klee
both took their lines for walks; Blake’s “firm
and determinate lineaments” controlled
the flow of energy through his words and images.
(right) |
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William
Blake, Title Page for Songs of Innocence, 1789.
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But
with Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the letters begin
to form the lines: the distinction between the written
and the drawn starts to blur. Simultaneous perception of
different linguistic elements becomes a possibility. Spatial
positioning can replace syntax as a way of organising words.
(below)
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Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Petit Auto, 1912-1918 |
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Calligraphers
move writing towards the expressive line. I took this photo
in Beihai Park, Beijing, in August 2005: calligraphy as
public recreation. The practitioners shuffle backwards
with their tapered sponges, leaving a trail of water poetry
that slowly dries and disappears.
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One
of my own ongoing projects is a series of eggbox poems.
These use large catering eggboxes as replacements for
the page that produce new possibilities for reading.
I painted the boxes, and pasted words on the four sides
of every square tower. The towers permit some of the
words to be consecutively visible, whilst occluding others – the
combination changes as you turn the box. I took words
from two source texts (in the example pictured, from
Wallace Stevens’ Sea Surface Full of Clouds and
Coleridge’s This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison), and
created cut-up poems from them. The eggbox’s structure
causes further recombination of the words as your viewpoint
changes.
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Four poems
derived from this eggbox can be found here, but there are
many other options. They can be used as scores for improvised
multi-voiced performance, or for a reading where a few
words are picked out at a time. And if the boxes are contextualised
as art objects (to be circled not handled), reading them
becomes a physical activity - taking a walk for a line.
The second, turquoise eggbox uses Tsunemi Kubodera
and Kyoichi Mori’s paper, First-ever observations
of a live giant squid in the wild, and an essay on Giacometti
by Jacques Dupin, Impossible Reality, as source material.
renscombe.press@yahoo.co.uk www.renscombepress.co.uk |
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