Concrete poetry: "In its simplest definition concrete poetry is the creation of verbal artefacts which exploit the possibilities, not only of sound, sense and rhythm—the traditional fields of poetry—but also of space whether it be the flat, two-dimensional space of letters on the printed page, or the three-dimensional space of words in relief and sculptured ideograms." (R. P. Draper)
I seek language that sparkles, swirls, hovers. A language that’s serious about play. That toasts an empty sky. Words that bow, bless, tremble before the light. In wonder of their sublime ability to unmean. Letters inked, pressed, held in your hand; letters as objects. An exchange in which we participate alone and in medleyed sound, featuring father figure on p. 39, mother on chessboard, everything wacked out and bleeding, or shrimp prepared in any delicious sauce. From the hallway, the sound of metal spooling. Most of the time you don't hear what the other one is saying. It isn't about you, it's about me, and it's about you too. We were supposed to like each other. What interests me interests just me, but always working back at the world. Something we came across in the road that stopped us, that we made ready.
The visual language that burns my eyes does much the same. Mostly, it flickers.
At my table in the cafeteria, you'll find two camps eyeing each other suspiciously. On one end of the table, the theorists and critics: Longinus, Saussure, Bakhtin, Poulet, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bernstein, and Perloff. On the other, in various states of altered consciousness and undress, sit Stevens, Paz, Borges, Marquez, Rimbaud, Jack Gilbert, Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Murakami, Jorie Graham, Frank Stanford, Hopkins, James Wright, Richard Hugo, Kundera, McCarthy, Cortazar, and that Beowulf Guy. Right smack in the middle of the table, grinning like the village idiot, Kenneth Goldsmith. He's pointing across the room to another table altogether, where dark shapes hunch over trays of tuna surprise: the outliers, the sound artists and sound poets—-Henri Chopin, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Christian Bok—-who I'm just recently starting to know. (They're not invited to the parties, so they've learned to invent their own games.) American historians monitor the room with whistles.