Hi friends,
I spent the weekend reading Sonnet(s) by Mexican Artist Ulises Carrion, which was recently re-published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Then I decided to write a newsletter about his Language poetry, which is really very visual and probably frustrating to just hear about without being able to see it. But we’ll see—maybe this further abstraction of language would be approved by Carrion. In any case I made this Are.na channel too in case you want to use it to follow along for a highly sophisticated audio-visual experience.
This isn’t in the reading, but it is in the channel: going further down the Carrion rabbit hole led me to this Madeline Gins Reader, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words, which I had been meaning to read. Gins, who was also an architect, wrote and thought of books in a similar way as Carrion, in that she considered the spatial dynamics of language and created what Carrion called “structures in motion.” I think you could easily relate what both of these artists do to concrete poetry, but what both distinguishes them from others and connects them to each other, for me, is their focus is not just the page but the book as a whole, as a “total work of art.” In Gin’s “Word Rain,” for example, which I could and might spend a whole separate newsletter talking about, some of the pages include photographed hands holding the edges of the book, as if reminding the reader that the book is an object, and the text is only animated by reader.
Anyways, one line that really stood out to me in “Word Rain” relates the reader to mist: “I appear on a page which would otherwise be blank. I, the mist, the agent…I was picking up the meaning without stopping to accumulate words. Speed. I loved it. Soon it would be over. The words stuck to the mist, I to the meaning.” It made me think of this exchange, which feels very misty to me, in a good way.
Thanks for being my mist,
Meg
p.s. as always I’d love for you to send me an audio response if you feel like it!
