Our Long Walks by Anastassiia Botchkareva

(click on the poem to read)

Context-Form-Medium III

(1) Check out: ErasmusPC. Generally, the site is about globalization, city-spaces, messing with the city, etc. The link connects you to a great on-going collection of city-poems: "the only demand is that the poems are published in the public space – “the city is the carrier of the poem”... Applied poetry gives meaning to places in the city, to the relationship between citizens and their city and in the sense of communication between citizens and their government. It triggers communication about and for the city, endogenous and exogenous." (from the site). The point: the city is a canvass with incredible expressive resources and political potential.

(2) One of Erasmus' great examples of the city-poem: water-writing. "Giant calligraphy written by Chinese on the ground at the Temple of Heaven. The elderly frequently dip their brushes into a water bucket. Then they carefully draw their characters in vertical symmetry on the concrete ground. Some write classic poetry, others compose their own works." (from the site, slightly edited). This kind of city-poem is gestural, material-dependent (based on its transience - as each character fades from the square it makes room for a new character, a new expression) and - I'm not exactly sure what to call it - space-tagging or scene-creating (meaning: the more people create in this space the more the space becomes known for this kind of creation) (self-perpetuating).

(3) Most of the work in ErasmusPC is on a large scale; luckily, we have the Itinerant Librarian to help us keep track of what isn't:


"The Itinerant Poetry Librarian travels the world with a library of ‘Lost and Forgotten’ Poetry, installing the library & librarian and recording the sounds, poems and poetry of the cities, peoples and countries she meets" (from the site). What a wonderful and brave thing for someone to be doing: couch-surfing the world trying to coax, hunt and arrange the poetry of many cities.

(4) As I see it, there are three major directions to head towards when one destroys the concept of paper as the primary medium of poetry. The first direction (a) is towards the highly produced singular object: e.g. a calligraphy poem sculpture, an enormous stained glass poem-window, etc. The second direction (b) is towards public space (what ErasmusPC is an example of): e.g. city poems, t-shirt poems, etc. The third direction (c) is towards gesture and ephemera (Itinerant Poetry Librarian): e.g. found-poems, letter poems, etc. (a) seems to recollect a pre-industrial craftsman or palace-culture ideal (high art), while (b) seems to aim for a formally post-modern political engagement or sense of play and (c) seems somewhat both (concerned with material, preservation, archive (a), or about art in, or using, time (b)). Nonetheless, these are soft-boundaries: an extremely highly designed (& expensive) sequence of henna-tattoo poems (meaning on, let's say, 100 people) combines different ideas from (a), (b) & (c).

(Re)constructing our Conversations by Anastassiia Botchkareva

(click on the poem to read)

Context-Medium-Form II

(1) What about tattoo? Creating a poem that had to specifically fit (a) the contours of the body, or even (b) the contours of an individual's body (the most personal poem possible), or even again (c) the contours of two people's body (lovers: the tattoo is only complete when they're skin to skin). What about the fact that the poem is hidden, that the body becomes a vehicle for intimate poetic information? Not anyone can download it off the net, nor find it in a book; one has to intimately encounter the person.

(2) This brings us to the idea of poem as gesture, rather than Art (in the sense of a timeless perfect work, in the sense of "Old Masters"). I think that it is much more playful, and possibly more authentic, to work with the materials at hand (to work with the shape of a city - graffiti poem, the shape of someone's body - tattoo poem, the shape of current politics - poetry political posters - not just the shape of the theme, but the shape of the form), to work in time (as it were), rather than to aim for some kind of everlasting, complete or canonical work. Bring composition down the the level of material circumstances. Rework those materials (a highly political act). Do that which cannot be done on paper (which cannot be made dead, by paper).

Context-Form-Medium I

NOTES ON CONTEXT-FORM-MEDIUM

(1) Poetry has many more contextual (& context-creational) possibilities other than sitting on a piece of a paper with a viewer passively receiving it. E.g.

(2) Political Posters.


You can take it several ways: cheeky, scary or both at once irony. Regardless, this is a perfect medium for poetry - for abrupt, assault your reader work. For work that says: "YOU READER: GOOD GERMAN" (etc., etc., etc.). You could have the broad stroke - large text that forms a short poem w/small text that forms an inter-poem fleshing out the details / point.

(3) Landscapes / Environments. Check Out: Foundland. It's (a) a conversation among authors and readers, and (b) excerpts of the author's work (c) localized in specific locations within a map, which (d) has snippets of text (which almost seem like poetry) appearing and disappearing as one navigates between different sites. The project brings up a lot of excellent questions, the most basic of which is: in what ways can one embed poetry within real or virtual environments such that those environments are integral to the structure and meaning of those texts? E.g. Let's say you have a city with four synagogues. What if you created four works of stained glass poems that a.) were reliant upon their material to be understood fully (hence, not really reproducible via paper) and b.) could either be read as four separate poems or one whole poem? What about taking the idea even further: one reconstructionist, one reform, one conservative, one orthodox temple; each poem is specific to the school, but can also be put together into a poem that celebrates the unity of the Jewish Culture. Such a work may be exceedingly difficult to create... but it is not inconceivable.

(4) Illuminated Manuscripts / Poetry Comic Books. My question is this: where, currently, is the poetry-book as art object? It's been some time since Blake's "Innocence & Experience"; we need to get to work. It's true that it's more difficult to sell such a book, but wouldn't a museum or art-collector be capable of purchasing such an object if the textual / visual quality was astounding? Wouldn't a university purchase such an object if it spear-headed the revival of this particular craft? One could go the direction of the Koran - towards calligraphy. Or in the direction of something like Fallow (intimate relations among words / images). Or both.


(5) The basic point is this: paper has become our free-verse - our every-man verse, our un-thought standard - and it shouldn't be so. What distinguishes poetry from prose is the hyper-attention to and exploitation of form (if you could put it in a paragraph and not really lose anything - it's not a poem). Form exists only within a Medium; and, a Medium cannot become Art without Form. So poetry - hyper attention to form + text - means thinking out / through the medium: the ink, the paper, the schematics of reading, the shape, the layout, the materials - everything - must be thought out by the poet and thought through towards the millions of different avenues in the city of the possible, before what has been created can truly deserve the title of "poem."

(6) Polemic Complete. Now, for something completely different.