L'arc c'est toi

Roy Arenella, "The NXT/TXT" (September 2011)
I am rarely a mailartist anymore. I stopped on my birthday, when I stopped sending a poem out each day for an entire year. I've made only one set of postcards I've sent out to folks this year. I am slowing down, becoming winter, a slow cold. I cannot create as I used to. I am given over to slowness.

But some people still send me pieces in the mail, things to think about, to be thought of. I think of them. One of these senders of mail, though slow now himself (at least in my direction), is Roy Arenella. His cards are visual poems, but on his own terms. He follows no fashion for he fashions things anew.

Working with small pieces, things like the letters of words and the simplest of images, Roy creates a set of punning, a quiet humor, something to keep us thinking. He thinks quietly out into blossom.

So the title of his card to me last month was "The NXT/TXT," where the e's are easily left out, and the x becomes a still point of spinless spinning where two words are held together. He introduces to us the idea that there will be a text that replaces text.

And this text appears within a frame of film, and the text is an image, and the image is the frame itself and the word "w/ords," the idea of images becoming text, even when those images are merely text.

Because text is visual language, a future idea, but from the past.

We used to call it retrofuturistic.

It all circles back to itself.


ecr. l'inf.