The Object of Poetry

Joseph Keppler, "Five Poets and No Poem" (2007)
Every trip begins with the imagination of the trip, so tomorrow I head out to New York City for the opening of a photographic exhibition, and from there I will fly the next day to Portland (not the one in New York or Connecticut or Tennessee or even Maine, but the one on the other side of the country, in the state of my great-grandmother's birth) for an exhibition of object poems.

Almost every one of the object poems, sculptural presences of language, are already available for viewing in the exhibition's online gallery. Curated by David Abel, this exhibition pushes the definition of poem quite a bit more forcefully than even the idea of sculptural poetry does. Joseph Keppler's remarkable piece above is just one of these. At first glance it might seem wordless, and thus not able to be poetic, but each piece of the poem is cut out of an I-beam, every one of them is an I, a person focused on him- or herself and thus not capable of focusing outward at the world, or even at the creation of a poem. Each I (the title tells us this) is focused on self-definition rather than on generative actions leading to poetry.

But Joe's is an easy piece to dis- and reassemble in poetic terms. Others are totally wordless, or consist only of marks that do not even resemble text, or they suggest that the viewer/interactor considers poetic processes while considering or handling the works. None of which bothers me. A hard definition of "poem" allows for some clarity, but when was poetry concerned primarily with clarity. The poets assembled in this exhibition are those who are pushing across boundaries in all of their work, so doing so in the realm of the object poem is just another way to do that pushing.

I call all of my own object poems "semiobjects" because they are semiotic objects, because they are half object and half something else, because they move like tractor-trailers through our imaginations. And all of these pieces, in some way, push us towards language, even if not to it.

Two days from now, I will be attending the exhibition opening, and the day after I'll perform with a number of others at a poetry performance. Then I'll fly back to this side of the country. I'm going three thousand miles away for the weekend. Here's the schedule:

Artists' Reception: First Friday, November 4, 2011, 5:00-8:00 p.m.

Poetry Reading & Performance: Saturday, November 5, 2011, 4:00-6:00 p.m.

Curator On Site: Saturday, November 26, 2011, 12:00-6:00 p.m.

I hear that the west coast, where I and generations of my family are from, is where the sun sets into the sea, so I'll be traveling toward sunset, which is another word for death, which is another word for sleep, which is what I'll do right now.

ecr. l'inf.