If explicit content is removed from a poem, what remains? Just as with early atonality (where harmony was broken but everything else musical survived) perhaps word-play, the gesture of rhyme, and above all the sensation of dramatic tension and release over the course of the poem--perhaps these may be explored in a new way.
I do not know if these poems ought to be read out-loud, or indeed how they would be. The poems speak to a different reading, where two orthogonal modes of apprehending ar
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If explicit content is removed from a poem, what remains? Just as with early atonality (where harmony was broken but everything else musical survived) perhaps word-play, the gesture of rhyme, and above all the sensation of dramatic tension and release over the course of the poem--perhaps these may be explored in a new way.
I do not know if these poems ought to be read out-loud, or indeed how they would be. The poems speak to a different reading, where two orthogonal modes of apprehending are engaged: VISUAL (words or letters put into relation purely by their pictorial image); AURAL (the set of sounds played in our inner hearing when we look at an unfamiliar word or a non-existent word).
Many of the early poems are meditations on the alphabetic make-up of a word, a name, a phrase. Some arrive at new words that try to operate as such within the poem. Some use simple tools of spelling-reversal.
The later poems move toward what my friend and literary critic Eugene Vydrin has termed seismotypography. This is the moment when letters begin to rotate, as, for example, the letter "u" will resemble the letter "n" under a rotation of ninety degrees.
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