The Marks of a Poem

The online journal, Peep/Show, continues to reveal its international visual poetry issue, this time presenting us with the work of Tim Gaze, whose work in asemic visual poetry brings us to or beyond the edge of the textual. Tim has focused his attention on the action of taking mute and unrecognizable marks and saying something with it. Or allowing us to see something said within it.

This is not at all a new way for visual poetry, as it's at least decades old, but it still is a form of visual poetry that can cause a ruckus because it fiddles quite heavily with people's expectations of what "poetry" (and even "visual poetry") might be. But when I look into this expressive blots and smudges of ink I am pushed back to the later work of Bob Cobbing, who, with the power of pre-digital xerography, pushed the textual to or beyond the edge of the textual.

I like what I see in such experiments in expressive unexpressiveness.

ecr. l'inf.