new zealand electronic poetry centre

k a   m a t e   k a   o r a  

a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics
 

 


1,000 Words or a Picture:Could Poetry be a Contemporary Art? 
   

 

AN ALPHABET FOR TWO
 

When Marcel Duchamp took a urinal and reconstituted it as sculpture by adding the title Fountain , 1917 , he implicated language in the construction of contemporary art ; and signified the possibility that words , like plumbing fixtures , could be readymades . By providing a new interpretation for a familiar noun , he made visible not words or their meanings , but the delicate relationship between the two .

Our cultural authority on words and meanings is the dictionary ; which is also a readymade treasury of art materials . This suggested one possibility for the conjoining of poetry and contemporary art : I sent a poem in the form of an alphabetical list to Murray Edmond . Unexpectedly , he responded in kind by composing a poem of complementary words , each in some way inspired by its alphabetical equivalent on the first list . This is part of the enjoyment of being a member of a community of practitioners : receiving such gifts .

What Murray gave me included more than the pleasure of his verbal adroitness and wit ; by siteing me as reader at the point of intersection where his words change the intentions of mine , Murray enabled me to appreciate how I had constructed my relationship between words and meaning . This led to a third list , a poem to evince how Murray’s words changed my own thinking . Reading down each list reveals a poem while reading the lists together , and reading across the rows of words , yields a surplus ; in this surplus is another consideration of Duchamp’s practice .

allusive
billow
caesura
dust
exult
feather
gift
hover
impulse
juncture
kindle
lambent
map
nuance 
origin
prospect 
quest
rein 
shimmer
transpire
usher
veil
wonder
xeno
yearn
zenith

assure
brindle
cult
dimmer
earn
fonder
gone
heather
illusive
jamb
kale
lei
moribund
nutation
over
pennyworth
quasher
rust
shift
tincture
ululate
vein
willow
xylem 
yap
zest

alluring
bloom
cleave
dream
eternity
fallen
grieve
harrow
innocent
jealousy
kowhai
laughter
memory
nictation
obviate
peer
quicken
redux
sinuous
tinglish
unveil
vernal
wilderness
xystus
yare
zoozoo

A poem is a text ; as readers , we tend to follow it like a map , trying to determine how its material topography delineates  the writer’s construction of meaning . But in this combined work meaning is performative , occuring between writers , between poems ; these lists represent the space of meaning as topology or the dynamics of movement .

This is network space , through which meaning is transiting ; it is not located in the text but is generated by hypertextual connections , which can be both random and linguistically or subjectively ordered .The work itself is an event ; enfolded within but not identical to the text object .

For Duchamp , modern art needed to interrogate and exceed the occular ; he uses language to confront and confound our usual ways of seeing . Poetry too is more than a visual artform : the voice resonating in the cavity of the body before entering the domain of the audience ; the structure of the stanza referring , through the Italian derivation of the word , to a chamber , a room to be entered . Poetry is a spatial artform , not confined to the finite dimensions of the page .

An innovation in printing enabled Mallarme to use the field of the page to represent the space of thought in Un Coup de Des , 1895 ; perhaps one way we can locate our writing practice in the materiality of contemporary life is to work with this new experience of space . The network , the mutability of meaning , creative collaboration ; this is a current locality in Aotearoa .

 


 


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Last updated 27 May, 2009