If we are serious, we find it difficult to assess a work of art, because the art is in the concealment of its meaning, its manner, and its purpose. Because of this, I allow the pieces of a work of art to accumulate upon me, like dust in a room left closed for decades because someone dear to me died there and I do not wish to experience that death again, let alone forever and again. 

 So it is with trepidation that I strew a few words about Dawn Nelson-Wardrope's “Remnants of the Red Ribbon Sect.” I will begin by noting I have no idea how two visual poets of such mastery as Dawn and her brother Stephen can be birthed from the same spring. Their imaginations take up the entirety of a large city, yet they create their work with ferocious yet not frantic intensity without being anything more than one sister and her brother. 

This book arrived today after I had made two visual poems scratched onto stone, and each is good enough, yet I cannot see the graceful intensity in those pieces as I see in Dawn’s. (As an aside, Dawn once sent my wife Karen and me a few small visual poems a few years ago, and those gifted to me have lain on a bookshelf facing out at me until I packed them away this weekend to transfer them (and many other things) to my ridiculously huge archives in a couple of weeks. I hated to send them away, but I have sent away so much else already, and I must reduce my quantity of stuff before Karen and I move out of Manhattan in 11.5 months.) 

Let me note that Dawn’s poems in this book are constantly beautiful, disturbing, and dense—never quite telling us what they must mean, because we must determine that for ourselves. 

These poems are collage poems bursting with text and image. They are not meant to mean so much as they are meant to affect the percipient as they flip through page and page again to see repeated images and ideas, while every poem reamins its own unique and compelling gestalt. Out of fragments of text and image, Dawn makes a new world habitable only to humans who realize the power of text and image, of poem and the extent to which a poem may become more than itself. 

 Dawn’s verbo-visual tropes are myriad: tearing paper to stanch the flow of text, typing dense patterns of text onto the base page of the collage, adding circles of paint (gouache to my eye) on the page, cutting and pasting Madonna-like faces onto most pages so that someone is looking at us as we look at her and the collage she inhabits, sometimes holding pieces of the collage down with paper clips (and other fasteners) instead of glue, circling words in the collaged texts to make us focus on the artist’s own interest, collaging onto the boards of the book instead of merely on blank paper , including repetends to the text (often “solitude”), so certain thoughts stay in the mind of the reader longer, and focusing on rough-hewn collage techniques—thus working in the style of dirty visual poetry, the rich and loamy soil so many of the best visual poems are grown within. 


Of course, none of these words of mine tells you anything important about these poems, so look at them yourself. Or buy a copy of the book from the wonderful Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, or order the book from Amazon. I received mine today. I did not wait to read it.

ecr. l'inf.
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