The Macaronic Beauty of Black on White

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

First from Cuba, Carlos M. Luis now lives in Miami in a beautiful home filled with art and poetry and his wife Martha. He works on his own visual poetry in a small studio at the top of his stairs, right off the bedroom, and it is so filled with papers and paints and equipment that you might think it impossible for him to create anything, let alone visual poetry that is beautiful, careful, and controlled. But that is what he does.

This time, he has created (in a pamphlet entitled "Traptexts 1") numerous visualized versions of a single polyglot poem of his, in order to show us his powers of creation to the hilt. This poem merges English, Spanish, Latin, and French into something akin to syntax. Yet this mix of languages isn't enough play for Carlos. He has to create little portmanteaux as well (Transitmust, plaft, doublenumbs, nothingun) to tell his story, which is essentially a disturbing dream story, a narrative balancing a the edge of sense. And once he has written his textual poem--the plaintext version of which appears on the backside of this booklet--he deconstructs it visually, dispersing its clear order and syntax as he remakes it into various self-illustrating forms.

Carlos M. Luis, "Traptexts 1," pages 6 and 7 (2005)
He inserts images in the poem, allowing us to see what he sees, his little disturbance of the night. But as he does, the story changes a bit. Luis doesn't just reorganize the text; he rewrites it at times: on the first page, the word "dripsorgans" replaces the original "dipsograms." In some of the visual poems, the entire text of the original is visible, but made almost impossible to read, forcing us to bend toward the page and into the dream. In other pages, Luis reshapes the text with garish typefaces that serve as costumes and then he chops the text into pieces he can manipulate, leaving us with scraps of words to read: eashed, bre, cruaabs, fasti. He adds dramatic text-like forms (of black on white or white on black) to the page, thereby textualizing the story even more, pulling it out of our messy subconscious into a messier conscious state. Furcas predominate, reminding us of going outside

without spreading the locust
trapping unleashded moons
between outside muddy legs.

By the end of the sequence, he has rendered most of the words unreadable by changing their characters into musical notes or unreadable symbols, or by laying them over each other to such a degree that sense is obscured. One of his last illustrations is an ouroboros (a snake eating itself from its tail--a symbol of eternity) entitled "2^e Sphere du DESTIN" (the "Second Sphere of Destiny"), because we cannot escape our dreams, even as we forget them.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's eIghT-pAGE pREss has published "Traptexts 1," and you can find out how to acquire your own free copy of this and other eIghT-pAGE pREss titles by visiting its website.

Veremus dit the other peeptom
chanting questing the nippers dead
cremados en las ollas with crumbs
that organ the prickly words
fasting like shadows inside out
looking backwards in nothingun.

ecr. l'inf.