Spencer Selby's collection of visual poems, Problem Pictures, is ahead of its time. Or, rather, the technology to "read" these poems has not yet evolved.
The technology of the book slows the apprehension of this work -- these works, accumulative, interwoven, inter/intra-textual/textured -- down, down, down. Pages implicate time, turning pages invokes sequence, its hyper-logical head rearing over, intruding into, the reading process. These poems not only demand space the page begrudingly and essentially ineffectively gives; they require a timelessness, a mixture of instants, that a book cannot produce. Slideshows, powerpoints, websites, too, do not suffice at this time.
I envision no machine, no technology. I envision a state of mind, fluid states of mind unconstrained by time and space. Then we would know these poems. Then we could see visual poems.
I see the poems injected/projected into mind (or on a wall or a ceiling if you prefer boundaries), poems shifting through the blink of an eye, the reader creating the space/s of the poems -- overlaying, juxtaposing, overlapping. Visual poem becoming the image of thought, the thought of image...
**The technology of blogs, too, is insufficient. How the hell can you see what I am seeing in these poems? Sure, I can upload a page or twenty pages or fifty -- but then sequence has got me/you/us.
Posted by: soshi boy | May 02, 2005 at 11:43 AM