A Bird in Flight and the Perpetual Motion Poem

Jim Andrews, “Ound Poem” (2006)
UnlikelyStories 2.0: The Cross-Media Issue, guest edited by Dan Waber, has many gifts to give us, but the greatest is the gift of variety. What other webzine presents videopoems, digital poems, visual poems, sound poems, spreadsheet poems, conceptual poems, spoken word poems, hypertext literature, a new way of calendaring (almost Mayan in feel), a filmed interview of Mairéad Byrne where she never says a word, and a review of a video game as literature? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

I’ve had another night to sift through all the contents of this issue. And I was tripped up in only a few cases. Peter Bindle’s “Bin Badder” is viewable only by Mac users. I couldn’t get Nico Vassilaki’s videopoem “In Other Words” to work, no matter what I did. Trying to run it from the webpage froze my computer (hardwired to broadband Internet) twice—and hard. Only the on/off button got me out of it. I downloaded the file to my computer but still couldn’t run it, and I had all the software that should have run it. I had similar problems with Rupert Owen and Snuffbox Films’ film “I Don't Want to Go to Nashville.” But, elsewise, all was fine.

Open the website and start first with “Song Shapes,” some of the silent sound poems of Jim Andrews. Those familiar with Jim’s work will see a visual similarity between these and his intermedia masterpiece, “Nio.” Unending strings of letters, beautifully colored and shaped, circle or swirl in space, enticing us to sing them. As they continue, their texts become harder and harder to read but they keep running. Though silent sound poems, these are visual and their visual overpowers the screen until it fills with rounded shards of letters glinting up at you. I’ve had “Ound Poem” running for about two hour on my computer now, and it resembles a blue thunderhead shimmering with light, just a little bit rectangular in shape. It is a perpetual motion poem.

Poke around a little bit more, and you’ll find Christian Bök’s “Two Excerpts from Cyborg Opera.” These two pieces—“from Mushroom Clouds” and “from Motorized Razors”—appear in two versions. First, we see the textual essence of them, and they’re fine little sound poems exhibiting all the tendencies of Bök’s Oulipian-flavored art. But listen to the accompanying sound files. His readings are powerful motors of sound and invention, and he reads them as a song; each poem, a chorus—he performs it over and over, creating a singsong, ricochet, rat-a-tat, buzzsaw, seesaw sound that sticks in your head like a peanut butter earworm.


Marko Niemi, “birdy morning” (2006)
Marko Niemi, proprietor of “the Finnish Ubuweb” (where he often translates English visual poetry into Finnish), entertains us with a dozen digital poems, most of which are simple interactive poems constructed to make us think of the construction of meaning through written language. His “birdy morning” is a simple cinematic shot, held steady, where birdlike letters fly through colorful trees. Like all the kinetic poems I show on this page, they do not appear here at all. I have done nothing but capture shots of them in flight. These snapshots tell us little about the whole that is the bird but they also let us understand something we otherwise couldn’t understand about some of these flightful beings.

Wander over to Barbara Cesare’s spoken-word poems, and you’ll find something like simple colloquial poems but read with artful passion enhanced by little sonic rumblings and turnings that change these simplicities into orchestrations of those tiny (that is, huge) bits of a real human life. The voice is a powerful instrument of poetry.


endwar, from “Alphaglyphs” (2006)
When you’re ready for some thinking, take in endwar’s “Alphaglyphs,” which are Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that examine the shapes of letters created in pixellated grids when mathematical functions are carried out against them—or something like that. endwar explains it in some detail in the issue, and I appreciate that detail,

but many of the artists here spend many words explaining their works, putting them in context, telling us how to understand them. I enjoy the insight of the artists, but I usually want very little of it upon first seeing works of art. I want to figure out the art by myself first. I want the artworks to tell me what to think of them. I want the artworks to tell me how to read them, how to understand them, how to purify them down to meaning. Certainly, I love the explaining word, but I love the being word even more.


Jim Andrews, “Soundshapes” (2006)

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Below the Bar
I found myself today reading what Paal Bjelke Andersen had to say under the title “On Soldatmarkedet by Monica Aasprong.” Andersen’s ability to read Norwegian and his understanding of Aasprong’s poetics leads to more insights than I could, so spend another day with Monica.

But also spend some time at “International Exchange for Poetic Invention,” which is a multi-language (though, so far, primarily English) weblog founded in November 2006 by Charles Bernstein and Ton van ’t Hof. The weblog veers wildly—geographically and topically—from entry to entry, but always focused on poetry, including plenty of poetry brand new to me (too often from recently deceased poets). The focus here is on “poetic invention,” Bernstein and van ’t Hof’s weird term for “exploratory/ investigative/experimental/radical/conceptual poetry.” I sometimes can’t believe what takes me two months to find!

ecr. l’inf.