In the Arena of the Visual and Literature

LitArena 6, pp 42-43 (October 2013)
We come out of darkness—and it is the darkness inside our own mothers.

Created in the formless dark, we take shape only within the light, eyes squeezed pudgily shut, hands in tight fists shaking at the new bright cold.

Slowly, the world takes shapes, we open our eyes, we learn to focus, our fists relax into working hands, and we make things with those hands for the benefit of those eyes.

And sometimes what we make are visual poems.

I am left sometimes stunned by beauty, because I could not imagine it but there it was.

And visual poetry can work with the beauty of the word, the image, the wordimage, and context.

The Austrian magazine LitArena has just published another giant glossy issue, and it includes, scattering within its light-shattering pages, about 20 visual poems, all of them given enough space to breathe—and us enough space to see them clearly.

I think of a rawlings' blown up greater than its natural size so that we can see the stoppered vial of glass filled with polished and drilled stones and a slip of sinuous paper with Icelandic written upon it, and I think of her moving from Canada to Iceland and working in a new place and placing this vial upon a volcanic rock.

And so many others.

I was suprised even from my piece: slip of a photograph pulled off an iPad's running screen, with a few words laid upon it needed, and I saw how conventional it was, unlike so many others within these pages, but I thought that the conventionality was what made it unconventional, and I heard my voice, punning the word out of existence, coming through the words and the smudgy-neat imaged I'd made.

And I tell you all of this, even though you may not ever see a copy of this magazine, just so you know it is there.

ecr. l'inf.