​I made a promise to myself last year at Art Basel Miami: “I am going get to Design Miami as one of the top things on my list.” And it happened! Last year, driving through the alluring Miami streets, the neon lights, the festivity in the air, my lovely partner, Michael, and I spotted an exhibition hall that we missed. We had the most exquisite time at the Convention Center, snaking through the large showroom for the main activities. Yet, by the time it hit Sunday, we were running late and missed the Design Miami exhibition by only a couple of minutes. Bummer! 

Art Basel Miami 2017, did not disappoint. We began with stopping at these two non-descript middle doors to get our really handy press passes. They allowed us to walk right through and skip the fee. The first station that caught our eye was the Victor Hunt exhibit at G11. 

​Hexagonal, opaque, thick plastic screens dawned the front of a speckled lightbulbs in metal frames. It screens were akin to privacy glass. The effect was mesmerizing! When you peeked in the back, it looked like simple LED lights that resembled the dressing room mirrors or the most dazzling stars. Yet, when you stepped back in front of the screen, it looked like 3D spirals and spiraling balls. What barriers can do to change a perspective became my fixation for the remaining exhibition. I began scribbling image text notes of the light pieces down in my handy-dandy tiny journal. I carry these things with my everywhere. It’s the artist in me, what can I say? 

When we think of the world itself, with all of its screens and filters, there is something of such deep simplicity about it. The elongated spiral piece, for example, reminds me of the spinal column. The back can do some many fantastic things. Think of gymnasts. Yet, when you everything is laid bare the intelligence of the design is in the simplicity. This is a metaphor for living. When we removed all of the glitz and glam from living, the core beauty of it can shine through. 

 The piece below is an introductory letter for a 10-poem portfolio for a poetry workshop course at the University of Kansas (KU). 

Upon entering Poetry Workshop at KU, I decided to practice encountering. I wondered what it would be like to hold in suspension past inquiries and open myself to new lines of questioning. I wanted to open to the organic environmental pressures, both internally and externally, that occur when entering unfamiliar territory. A chance-based modality inherent in such an approach is very much a central to how I like to begin a poem. Having a set and definitive idea of how one should end prior to even beginning seems a bit deleterious to me. So, I set about new ways of listening and collecting what I find.
             
​ My classmates’ deep interest in the body intrigued me and has shown up in my work via the treatment of wound. Many of them connected a focus on the body to the distinctive ways in which an artist’s work places him/her in easily locatable regions. One of the discoveries that I made was in connecting the wound to elusiveness space. The body as a system follows an incalculable logic that allows flowering warning signals to surface, often times, in my case, popping up in different places day-to-day. Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America talks about how suffering is illegible. Its exteriority and interiority is ambiguous. Thus, naming and placing scarring is an ephemeral project. Yet, simultaneously, the elusive nature of scarring is still a kind of record. 

The first three poems in my portfolio--Interstitial, Ancestry, Apolothecary—touch on the issue of body and repair. Interstitial, plays with the cartographic and the geography of the relationship. The background square-shaped image onto which the poem is divided into two columns and positioned along the downward left to right diagonal is of a rock formation. It is a black and white photo of plagioclase and olivine with augite. However, it looks like an aerial view of a rural-suburban town. The poems on each corner are connected by lines meant to mimic yarn. The knitting therein represents the complex web of meaning and signaling present in the body, relationships and between poems.
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Ancestry is about wonderment. It seeks to, with the eyes of my Jewish/Hebrew great, (great?) great grandfather, look ahead to the ailing physicality of his descendants and query as to whether he’d still pass on “all of this broken up data.” The aforementioned excerpted line is referencing DNA and the ways in which valuable data can get fragmented or shift form, simply by splitting off. The speaker at the end poem begins to make conjecture regarding the “broken up data”: Is it a recipe? Directions? Promise? Land? 

Hartman suggests that the body ravished is now available for empathy and surrogacy in Scenes of Subjugation. Apolothecary points to how injury succeeds or fails in writing one as apt for sympathetic identification. It locates the body and the simplicity of the sign as a more genuine form of communication than the spindling craft of civility in discourse. The grossness then, it seems, of wound is a celebration of immediacy for both the subject and the viewer in that the subject is admitting frailty and the viewer a desire for compassion.

The next four pieces--X Marks the Spot, Bio Porn, Place and Roots—are about question, misunderstanding and silence. Stereo. Island. Mosaic by Vincent Toro inspired the X Marks the Spot poem, which plays with the notion of the griot in West African tradition, who was the historian poet of the tribe or village that not only keep the stories of the people but also in times of distress encouraged its people.  According to Professor Dagri, who interviewed for a story on griots in West Africa sponsored by the Goethe Institut, “There’s a Mandingue [Mandingo] proverb that says ‘May God move so that griots never perish in war, on the battle field, but every battle field needs a griot, for without his presence the history of what happened would be forever lost.’” X Marks the Spot was a way to engage deep memory, the all elusive thread, toward re-envisioning the perspective of the griots of the Caribbean when the ships from ​Spain, Britain and France met them. It is a play on the power of utterance and the syllabic. 

Bio Porn began in concept as a running joke between me and my friend Emily de Beer, who is at the University Louisiana-Layfette as well for a PhD in Creative Writing.  We met at SUNY Buffalo. There she was working on a project on new confessional poetry for her Master’s thesis. I was working on a project on the lyric as syllabic guttural utterance, inspired by the Dadaists. Emily knew I deeply appreciated and respected her work immensely. I was struggling, yet and still, personally to be open to neo-confessional poetry—as I was for so long disassociated from my own body and the impact of past traumas. I was limited in my perspective. I had come to see when Emily and I did our joint Master’s thesis show work that the way she conceptualized her project was nuanced. It included a satirical treatment selfie culture and was paired with non-illustrative visual art.

​Further, Emily knew my real contention confessional poetry was that I felt there was a desire from mass audiences to want to hear “bio porn.” What I mean by that is a desire to hear really personal and intimate information about the poet’s life in order to bring some immediate understanding into the abstract moments of a poem. While I do not mind curiosity about my life, I sincerely desire for my work to stand alone and for it to be a conduit to other worlds—rather than be fixated with placing me neatly somewhere or making me—not my poems—more easily digestible. Bio Porn is a bit of inside baseball. 

Roots in its layout is a landscape piece. It was written while sitting in a circle under a sparse yet wonderful canopy of trees behind Spencer Library after we, in Poetry Workshop, wrote questions to one another. The question I received was, “What if we are disconnected—do we have roots still?” I moved still around in the poem for rhythm: “What if we are disconnected—do we still have roots?”  Transferring the poem from notebook to digital file, I started to create a staggering effect on the page to mimic rain fall.  When I got to the middle of the Word document, I was tired of seeing the dashes across the page. I wanted a moment to pause from the choppy letters and let my eyes scan the page entirely from left to right. That helped guide the latter half of the poem as I set that section of the page to full justification from left to right margins with additional spaces insert in between each letter save the last two lines “constituting them.” 

The section in Roots that comes after ‘as foundation” is the page layout move with which I am most satisfied out of all the poems in the portfolio. If it was not immediately apparent, the section is to represent not grass but rock layer. The Dadaist notion of deep memory is something I find really appealing. It is connected to the Dadaist celebration of subconscious and primordial instincts, the celebration of the idiot-genius. This all connects to Roots because in the poem, I make mention that the ground we believe is ground is not; it is actually ancient civilizations and pieces of leaf and sky compacted onto layer after layer. In allowing for the idiot-genius is to access the depth of memory from which we are often blocked.

Lastly, Generative, Nearing Temple, Is It Over?, close out the portfolio. They are the most deeply personal. Generative was written over a week after a good friend of mine passed. However, in the poem, I do not mention it directly. The discussions of Jessica’s angelic qualities are metonymical—so is following every post that passed on social media after I got the news. It represents the difficulty in talking about loss and grief, and how sometimes we talk around some of the most important and humanizing occurrences in our lives. The story of the Daemen College professor in the block paragraph at the end is one way the poem moves toward speaking grief out of its voice. 

Nearing Temple, is the most clearly marked Dadaist piece in the portfolio. It is a long poem collage. It begins with the illuminated image of the third poem I had written during the Russo visit. It was inspired by Apollinaire’s sun ray calligrammes. I find there is nothing more satisfying that having the record of the hand on a poem. Do not get me wrong. Word processors are a great invention. Typing allows for a different, I would not say necessarily more fluid, stream of consciousness kind of writing that I enjoy. Corrections are quick, and the keyboard is forgiving to the laboring hand of the poet. Yet, there is nothing like the pen to the page. The ability to switch so deftly between script and print, line and design, size and weight allows image-based thinking to more easily enter into writing. Interestingly now, there are all of these new tablets out that tout their innovative handwriting-like technology with their specialized styluses that have no drag or delay in making line. That feels like an admission to the power of the flowing hand, which is missing from the traditional word processors or even the Hemmingway typewriters populating the European cafes nowadays.

The calligramme-like poem then is followed by, in Section II and IV, a bit of absurdist theater. The entire piece is in five sections. Sections II and IV are marked by em dashes to signal dialogic activity. I am very much a poet. So, what am I doing playing with theater and fiction? I don’t know, which is why this piece in the portfolio is the most Dadaist! I was having fun. As a poet, one ultimately believes that methodology and form are arbitrary and is determined poem by poem. So, why is this my first play with writing drama? I ran into a limitation in poetry. In the foreword Of Words: Anthology of Belizean Poetry edited by Michael D. Phillips, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is quoted, “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals the best words in their best order” (Coleridge 1827). I could not write fiction or theater because I would previously labor over the word choice incessantly. The result was an overly curated piece of work that felt false. Thus, this time, I just let the characters talk. I would let the work sit for a day or two and while putting away items in my drawer, for example, I’d hear a phrase or two from Graysun and Jaxon, picking up from where they left off in conversation. I’d then run to the computer and begin typing, asking myself not to make pains to edit while writing but also encourage pausing while writing so that I could authentically hear their voices, hear what was next. The result is a comical take on the strange ways concern and caring about one another manifests among housemates.

​Discord, at least on the surface, between housemates is not to be feared. Marc Crepón during one of three visits to Steve Miller’s class at the University at Buffalo shared that attachment is necessary; it is what binds us to the community of mortals and that the balance between the force that governs and the force that divides is the inevitability of war. “All wars duplicate this experience,” Crepón writes. The fictional take and composite of various room- and housemate interactions over the last seventeen years, with a couple of stints where I’d be back home or live with a partner, is really my way of compassionately trying to step outside of myself and enter lovingly into the complicated arena of existing side by side.  

Sections III and V are a return to poetry, Section V more traditionally. Section III pulls in part from Robert Duncan’s constellation or field of composition in poetry. In a micro form that is a bit squashed, compact with a lot data, this section is guided by disjunctive narrative while borrowing the caesura to create a sense of line breaks in a rather block paragraph style. The poem travels through summer and fall in preparation for finally making it to a fabled land, Topeka. What moves the speaker in this section is a desire to find a place where she outwardly is accepted. Topeka for the poet is an all-black town, like the actual all-black town founded by the homesteaders in Nicodemus, Kansas. However, it’s the state capital. Of course, there are additional groups other than black people there. For the speaker, she moves toward the notion of acceptance and has the faint idea that once she arrives, she’d be recognized as kin.
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Crepón shares, in talking about Freud and a changing attitude toward death, that “our reaction to change is about how to look” and that very much includes looking at oneself. He continues, “[There’s been an] efficiency in keeping the living obsessed with mortality and its material evidence. We never gave the question a second thought” (Crepón 2016). What he means by the question is whether or not what one is experiencing is war. The speaker feels compelled to go to Topeka because she feels ravaged; she’s come from or is in the midst of a kind of war where her physical markers are evidence of her not-belongingness in the specific setting she has found herself. N. H. Pritchard in Black Bones writes, “times like this / are times when black people / are with each other & the strength flows / back & forth between us like / borrowed breath.” The speaker in the poem was seeking strength. 

The last section, Section V, the poem is about two and a half pages long and varies from about an inch to an inch and a half in width from time to time. The speaker in the poem after visiting a city of angels gets to a small roadside gas station before the highway. Although, she has a tank half filled, she cannot make it to leave. Candy, or its promise of sweetness, helps. The poem reads as a section in a longer epic—well, in some sense, given that it is that last section in a five-section poem, it is part of a larger epic! In reflection, I may have been invoking Charles Olson and Projective Verse (1950). In the act of composition, Olson shares that, for a poet, its “the kinetics of the thing.” The inch to inch and a half wide lines of Section V, if breath, mark a shortness of it at the moment on the edge of the highway. “The breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings,” Olson writes, “a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it…by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be…an energy-discharge.” The speaker in Section V takes the reader to the moment before her drive. She brings the reader into the quietness of need, the promise of sweetness for the long road ahead. It is a moment that in all actuality lasted five minutes; yet, it takes up a two and a half pages, single-spaced. Section V is protracted, projective verse.
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In closing, the last poem in the 10-poem portfolio is Is It Over? Interestingly, that was the first poem I wrote for the semester. It feels elegiac in some ways and fitting for a capstone piece. It was inspired by a friend Monica McIntyre’s work as cellist and singer, who is a super tiny, shaven-head black woman carrying around this instrument that is bigger than her—inspired only in name reference and in that she often played at World Café Live in Philadelphia. The remaining poem is another play on absurdist theater and drawn from the recent experiences where people noted a funereal aura about many of us first-year MFA and PhD students as we initially began our trek. I think the weight of what we left in order to seek what is before us created this sense of fog through which many of us are breaking free. 

Looking Ahead
 
While my overall scholarly interests include Dadaism and the relationship between poets, painters and mass culture, my current explorations as it relates to the herein portfolio is about the question of record. The docupoetry collection on which I am currently working is titled, Zephyr: The Windstorm Record of the Flanmigrant. It was prompted by discussions with Joseph Harrington (University of Kansas) on academic labor and non-traditional actors within the university setting, Megan Kaminski (University of Kansas) on the notion of the “flanuese,” the woman flaneur, and visiting poet and scholar Linda Russo (Washington State University) on ecopoetics. To Russo, I queried, “If the poet is the archivist and the poem the archive, how is the work of the tree in archiving rainfall any different than the work of the poet?” Zephyr is an attempt to begin answering that question from the perspective of the “flanmigrant,” the queer woman, migrant flaneur. It is an attempt to archive the wind. Listening differently in nature, not using it to express an anthropomorphized quality but in order to eavesdrop on the mind of Earth, has at the moment prompted an interest in reconceptualizations of the traditional archive, in how listening is materially held. 

Introduction
 
                The paper is an investigation into the central techniques Blake employs in designing a world of redemptive promise. Its focus is on three world-making techniques he utilizes: metaphorical operation, apostrophic address and lyrical lamentation. Similar to the aim of Northrop Frye in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, a secondary goal of this paper is to directly “contend with resistance to the normality of Blake’s mind” (Frye 6). A focus on technicity assists in moving through his layered writings; for, one then is able to navigate each of Blake’s careful constructions as an example of a truth claim or deployment of literary device rather than getting entangled by hermeneutics. In doing so, my hope would be to join the cadre of scholars within literary criticism seeking to normalize Blake’s mind and poetry. Blake is a skilled practitioner of literary tradition whose technical ability in poésis served a higher purpose. Blake was able to bring “an almost superhuman energy and technical ingenuity to his desire to give concrete expression to his visions” (Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books 8). While admittedly, Blake’s writings are oblique even for scholars of his work, it cannot be overstated enough that Blake was writing during a time where radical sympathizers and critics of the British and French empire were examined as potential traitors or confined as lunatics[1]. Blake—who condemned the materialism of the church and the economic oppression of children and slaves—felt very much in danger; and, thus, felt the need to code his texts.

               Blake’s deployment of metaphor and myth was to construct a world of his imagination that would inspire readers to construct their own worlds. In that construction process the existence of a new order functions both as creating heaven on earth and a condemnation of the present condition.

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[1] (Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books 9): Referencing the group of prophetic books by Blake such as The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los (1795), and the Prophecies America and Europe, “The overwhelming note is of conflict, human despair and suffering, and the effects of malign power; the rhetoric is of disjunction – between text and design, between different authorial voices, and between matter and spirit. Some at least were clearly written and etched as news was breaking of the Terror and (almost as shocking to Blake) of Robespierre’s reinstatement of the cult of the ‘Supreme Being’ in France, and of the repression of radical sympathisers at home. There is no doubt that Blake felt in personal danger in this period; people who held similar views were examined as potential traitors, or were confined as lunatics like Richard Brothers.”

Openings are, in themselves, cause for celebration. They herald good fortune and tap into our excitement for innovation. Interestingly, the grand opening of Danny Simmons’ new gallery, Rush Arts Philly, on September 10th had a more nuanced impact: It heralded (1) a resurgence of cosmopolitan people of color patronizing major art exhibitions in Philadelphia and (2) an expansion of gallery spaces with non-profit ambitions.

September is further witness to a historic grand opening: The unveiling of the newly constructed Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. tomorrow, September 24th.  The museum's founding director, Lonnie Bunch, said "At last the National Museum of African American History and Culture is open for every American and the world to better understand the African American journey and how it shaped America” (United Press International, September 14th, 2016).

Rush Arts Philly (RAP), according to a September 9th article on the opening by The Philadelphia Tribune, is “modeled after the New York City nonprofit organization, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation (RPAF), that Simmons and his brothers (Russell and Joseph "Rev. Run" Simmons) founded in 1995…[It] aims to support emerging artists [via] providing space for exhibitions and varied cultural programs for underserved communities.”
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According to Peter Bürger, it was not until the advent of avant garde—which he locates as a specific historic moment from the early 1900s until WWII—that art freed itself from the bourgeoisie class. After this period, Horowitz writes “more art was being seen and discussed by wider audiences than ever previously—there was little doubting which public much of it actually served: an upwardly mobile elite with money to burn” (Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, 2011). 

​One of the ways that Danny has challenged the exclusionary practices in the art world is advocating for communities of color to collect art. Danny’s recent arrival to Philadelphia after leaving his Brownstone in Brooklyn began over four years ago with a poetry reading at the African-American Museum of Philadelphia and art gallery conversation, titled "The Role of the Artist in the Urban Setting". There, Danny says, “We need to own our images, be better gatekeepers. We need to collect more of our art. It is about building wealth for our communities,” (Vivant Art Collection, 2012). Highlighted here is Danny’s passion and continued mission to build sustainable institutions that work to further art appreciation. (Full transcription of Danny's 2012 talk found here.)

When Vivant Art Collection, the last black art gallery on Gallery Row in historic Old City, Philadelphia, closed in 2014, a gap of available space for emerging artists to exhibit was created. During Vivant’s tenure, former gallery owner, Florcy Morisset, worked to bridge the access divide to gallery space for African Diasporic artists in addition to constructing a channel for novice art buyers to purchase and own art.
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There was a gap of spaces for marginalized artists to exhibit—emphasis on was—until now. Danny Simmons’ new gallery, Rush Arts Philly, in the Logan section of Philadelphia, has fast become a hotbed for emerging artists and is responding to a gulf in access to arts institutions.  As Danny shares in the above Philadelphia Tribune article, “[The Logan section] needs a gallery – or a cultural identity point –as there is little in that area by way of the arts.”

Although, Saturday, September 10th was the grand opening of Rush Arts Philly, the weekend’s activities began that Friday night when Danny debuted new and classic pieces at Art Sanctuary's Gallery on 16th and Bainbridge. It was a reunion of old and new faces! Danny has tapped into how contemporary art transgresses linguistic and cultural barriers and becomes “ a veritable social glue” (Horowitz, 2011). Further, he is tapping into an old era of galleries that had “more intimate community bonds and tended to run their [spaces] as small, seemingly nonprofit enterprises…[They were] motivated by love of art, not money” (ibid).
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One of the initiatives of Rush Arts Philly is Gallery in the Schools, which “will bring local artists into local schools and create a gallery in the classroom with students taking individual roles – curators, docents, writers and artists…[Additionally, another initiative] involves kids creating their own graphic novel about new superheroes with true special powers—powers used to change the world or change their neighborhood” (Philadelphia Tribune, 2016). 

Thursday on Elmwood Avenue, I went to Poster Art to check on an invisible frame order and noticed that 1045 Gallery had its sign out. It was nearing 4pm, and I was not sure it was still open. I’d been meaning to stop in to thank gallery owner, Don Zinteck. Back in June, he kept the space open a little longer so I could grab an oil painting of the most enchanting sky blue and the lake’s horizon. The piece was titled “Erie.” I was headed downstate and then further mid-Atlantic to meet up with my friend Florcy Morisset—as she had just recently graduated from the Leadership & Design Program at Johns Hopkins. It was a gift. She owned and operated Vivant Art Collection on Gallery Row in Old City, Philadelphia for over seven years—and helped to curate a space for cultural and intellectual engagement. So, as you can see--I was buying art for a former gallery owner. I was really nervous about the gift. 

Don stayed over, wrapped it and tossed in some added info about the Western New York artist and 1045 Gallery. I was off, on my way downstate with a wave and a thank you. At the stairs of the gallery, he heard me creak the foyer door open and started out to greet me—kindly so, as he was entertaining other guests. I walked around, this time lightly opening the jar tops of the ceramic gourds and pears and looking at earrings. Don came over after the guests departed to ask how things were going. I shared with him that my friend adored the painting, especially learning that was also a gift from the region.
 
We walked up the stairs with Don sharing that the show where the “Erie” painting was featured had come down and that there was a new show hung for Saturday: a show featuring freestyle calligraphy.
 
One walking up the stairs is immediately arrested by the sleeking and careening Arabic, English and Bangla letters. It almost is as if your eyes drag over the characters like the brush pens that first inked them.  The midnight blue diptych circled into an iris; the letters looked like flushing music notes and then “m’s” and “s’s”, “h’s” and “n’s.”

​The rose-pink monochrome hung like a Turkish rug, dripping red into pink into the slivery lettering. “Zaman, created this piece after the Syrian crisis broke out—from what he imagined was at the border crossings,” said Don. The pale and grayed characters moved about the sliding pinkish hue, in visual effect, as if a haunting had taken them over. 
 
Zaman situates himself at the forefront of modern Arabic calligraphy and practices a form of the craft akin to eL-Seed's "calligraffi." Zaman calls his method “freestyle calligraphy,” which is particularly recognizable due to its multilingual base—hybrid crossings between different languages. On his website, zamanarts.com, he recounts growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, studying classical Arabic texts and then moving to Western New York at 12 years old. All the while, he shares that he was dreaming of what it would mean to “have my own style.”
 
 Zaman, now draws his inspiration from street artists like eL-Seed, who is a French-Tunisian and whose works “incorporate traditional Arabic calligraphy, a style he calls calligraffi.” Zaman lives in Buffalo and has as an aim to “create pieces which inspire people, especially new aspiring artists, “ to create pieces which are meaningful expressions of freedom. 

Tonight’s showing is not an East meets West affair. Zaman’s work is more nuanced than that. It actually is an East subverts West by returning to the materiality, the image basis of the singular letter and its multiple meanings and tones. Calligraphy, by its existence, problematizes Western/capitalistic rationality that subscribes only one meaning to a letter or use function. Zaman’s work explores the plurality of what can happen in meditative moments with the word, the letter and the way it directs the hand. 

​Zahin Zaman is featuring works guided by, a process he terms, freestyle calligraphy at an opening reception today, Saturday, July 23rd, 6pm – 9pm at 1045 Gallery on 1045 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. The show includes works on canvas and ceramic. 

​What follows is the first manifesto iteration by Plurality Press advocating for a heightened awareness to the current state of hybrid text. The aim is to reframe the notion of, for example, visual poetry as a challenge to the policing of genre boundaries and distinctions.
 
The manifesto is constructed by the underlining of short phrases—reading notes—from Kenneth Goldsmith’s essay, “Make It New: Post-Digital Concrete Poetry in the 21st Century” from the collection, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (2015).

​Helvetica (2007) • ideological battles • the classic typeface • younger designers • reject the face as embodying • evils of the industrial-military complex • politically • aesthetically • square • correctness • expressive • hand-drawn • funky • fonts and the way they are used are a political battlefield • ‘good design’ • self-assured • Helvetica • born of the Cold War • expressing its binaries • black and white • equally romantic • stuff Dwell magazine might try to hawk you • same practitioners • advocated • Helvetica • this little movement • late 1970s • concrete poetry collapses into a smouldering heap • digital phoenix • predicting the ways we would interact with language in the twenty-first century • creating a universal picture language • a poetry that could be read by all • letters would double as carriers of semantic content • as powerful visual elements in their own right • often the poems • written in just about every language • imaginable • came with a key so that • even if you didn’t know, for example, Japanese • could get the gist of what a handful • kanji compellingly • strewn across a page added up • Esperanto • ultimately dissolve linguistic—and thereby political • barriers between nations • Poundian imagism • Joycean wordplay • advertising slogans • logos • signage • shredding all vestiges • Noigandres • ‘serious’ 1950s intellectuals • never smiling • crisp white shirts • skinny black ties • Stravinsky peering • double-breasted tweed suits • the journal was typeset entirely in the Future font • and the poems • ist poems and manifestos • poster-poem • meant to be pasted upon city walls • ‘renewed forms of sensibility’ • urbano-industrial environment • a new society • meant to invoke all the senses • Klangfarbenmelodie •(sound-colour-melody) • phanopoeia • melopoeia • logopoeia • (the play of image • music and meaning) • verbivocovisual • for a few • short years, their revolution was a reality • the 1964 coup • overthrew President Joāo Goulart • imperial capitalism • savage •  and predatory • bureaucratic state, repressive • uniforming • poetry was drained of its utopian function • ‘post-utopian’ • strict adherence • rigors of modernism • produced mostly with type and paper • massive architecturally-based sculptures • loosening • their hair • unkempt • aviator sunglasses • ‘dirty concrete’ • ‘noise’ of the typewriter • evidence of the machine’s presence • the writing of the poem • typewriter  • changed the look of concrete poetry • the typewriter’s democratization imbued the poems with increased political awareness • cleanliness was thought to indicate a lack of political engagement • language and representation •makes nothing concrete, because it is not active • the street • which belongs to us, to carry the word elsewhere than the printing press  • concrete poetry • remained • intellectual matter • Chopin’s clarion call for a less bourgeois poetry • ‘mimeo and Xerox machines •  linguistic nonlinearity and illegibility’ • anti-aesthetic bled into punk zines and grunge culture • Situationist-inspired • graffiti doubled as poetry across the city’s walls • concurrently, small press culture arose • with its vast horizontal networks and voluminous production • concrete poetry became a mere trickle of the torrent it once was, rendered nearly invisible • as minor note in a greatly expanded field • vinyl • fetishized for its physicality • to be browsed than to be read • fact, many of concrete poetry’s ideas • about language’s materiality • being mirrored in our computational systems and processes • when  we click on a link, we literally press down • on a word • Photoshop, every time we work with text—stretching and sizing  • we are treating language materially • internet  • comprised of language posing as code • of concrete poetry by poets such as Henri Chopin have become embedded • into our everyday activities • icons • emoticons • emojis • post-digital concretism • there’s something different about • them that responds to the digital in ways they’re produced • constructed • distributed • books are more • beautiful than they were before the digital age • expressive graphism • of the handwritten • so unique • that they can’t be made by a computer • landscape • expressive hieroglyphs • the content of post-digital concrete • network • remixed language • while concrete poetry has always been a fast poetry—purposely resistant • to close reading • snappy one-liners • young gallery-based artists are self-identifying not as “text artists” • but as “visual poets” • Zurich, Poetry Will Be Made By All • 25 creating visual poetry in the gallery space • plastering • word decals • poster-sized broadsides • concrete poetry’s great gift was to demonstrate the multidimensionality • of language • showing us that words are more than just • language is exploding around us • it’s taken the Web to make us see just how prescient concrete poetics was in predicting its own lively reincarnation in the twenty-first century •