Dylan Thomas.
Again, it's a piece that I think--
without the shape, it isn't.
Kaz Maslanka, again, which you may remember
is another mathematical poem of his.
And when you get into this notion of math,
not just talking about math, but when
you're actually incorporating the symbology of mathematics--
I don't know what that is anymore.
I don't know if that's textual or visual.
Or maybe it's neither.
Maybe that's OK, too.
I mean, maybe this isn't a continuum between the visual
and the textual.
Maybe it's something really a lot more elaborate and complex,
and I oversimplify it by saying it's
between the visual and the textual.
Because we can clearly incorporate symbology
into poetry without it being [INAUDIBLE]..
Here's another one of Kaz's.
[LAUGHTER]
This is an example of--
a lot of people have made poems with an echo at the end,
you know?
And instead of being an acrostic,
where it's the letter working, it's the word at the end.
"My eye snaps all like a camera.
The images, ghostlike, float into fire."
Do we need to see that together?
I think this is a piece that's a different poem if it's
read aloud than if it's seen on the page.
And maybe it's still OK.
It works.
It doens't-- it isn't destroyed by not being on the page
the way some of the other ones, I think, would be.
But I think it's completely different poem
if it's not on the page.
And that's OK, too.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a very famous book, Gödel, Escher,
Bach, among others
[LAUGHS]
And this is a hobby of his, is write-- creating
fonts that do exactly this.
"Light is--" light is a what?
What is light?
It's either a particle or a wave, or it's both.
Again, is that-- I don't know.
Is that visual or text?
This is a long piece.
I'm actually going to-- since I have internet,
I'll just go to the whole thing here.
I put it on a few slides, because it couldn't all fit.
I'll just scroll through this.
It's a poem about George Lewis, that great jazz man.
So it starts out--
here we are, just only poem, text, text, text.
OK.
Still text, but we know that we're talking about a jazz man.
And maybe we've got-- oh, that's ice cream.
But this is not.
Now we've got [INAUDIBLE].
And we're back to text, but it goes on further.
[INAUDIBLE]
So now we're embedding within something that's clearly
textual something that's--
this one's-- I would call a concrete piece, but not this.
This is now music.
I mean, they've included the dashes
in the same way, gives it almost musical stanza structure.
And you've got "Swan" by John Hollander.
This is, again, an example of shape poem,
but a poem that you couldn't read it.
And almost the only way to experience this poem
is like, this visual, [INAUDIBLE]..
Kenneth Patchen-- who if, for some reason,
you don't know who Kenneth Patchen is, you should.
Kenneth Patchen that everything that everybody else got credit
for 20 or 30 years before anybody else started doing it.
Astonishing.
I don't know.
I don't know why there are so many cannons that
do not include him.
I mean, some do.
It's not, like, a universal shunning.
But he was doing all the stuff that concrete poetry
movement of the '40s did, he was doing in the '20s.
Hey, Dan?
Yeah.
We have a really beautiful book of his in the library.
Awesome.
So if you guys want to check it out, ask the library.
I totally encourage that.
And Kenneth Patchen was a painter
and did a lot of paintings that incorporated text
in ways that were really beautiful and challenging.
This particular text is all typographical.
This is just this extended section from it.
Like I said, he was a painter, also.
Jenny Holzer, who we saw before.
You know, when you do this to the text, when you put it
in bronze like this, when you cast it in metal,
how can it be more integral to the text?
How can it-- that, to me, is a sculptural
object that needs to be experienced in its place.
And this is the last one.
[LAUGHTER]
Just cracks me up every time I see it,
because it takes me some time every time I see it,
because the lips are just so preposterous, but perfect.
Gary Barwin is a Canadian poet of much known.
So when I started, I said, tell them
what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them
what you told them.
So at this point, I would like to tell you what I told you.
What I hope I told you is that poetry off the page
is not a fringe activity.
It is not something rare and out there.
It is something that is perhaps hidden by its diversity,
that the forms that it takes are so myriad that it takes
the smarts to put it under the umbrella of off the page
to be able to see how much of it there really is.
I think often as poets, we find ourselves standing
in a circle looking in, and we need
to be standing in a circle looking out.
Because when we do, we see this range of surfaces and materials
and techniques and opportunities to put poetry where it belongs,
which is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere we can.
And I hope by this second section,
that I have been able to show that what I always--
so often to come back to Nichol.
Nichol said that concrete poetry--
and much of this, I think, could fit, at least connected
to the rubric of concrete poetry.
"Concrete poetry, at its best, reminds us
of the importance of the small gesture."
And I think as humans, not even as a poets,
but as people, we all need to be reminded of the importance
of the small gesture.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]