I did a series of anti-war poems, created
by taking rubbings with lumber crayons
off of public monuments.
I was raised that silence is complicity.
And I had a real problem, as a pacifist,
with monuments to war and violence,
because the language on them, I felt, was speaking at me.
And I wasn't comfortable being silent,
because silence is complicity.
But I also have a lot of respect for the choices
that other people make, and I didn't
want to do anything that was disrespectful of the fact
that other people had different value sets.
So I thought if I composed these poems using nothing
but the language that was being used on me,
that was as respectful as I could be.
All I was doing was taking the language
they were using and reformatting it to my own purposes,
not adding anything to it.
So there was a series of about 150 of these that I did.
This is an Israeli type designer named Oded Ezer.
He has some really crazy, amazing stuff.
Some of it is gorgeous and beautiful,
because he's a professional graphic designer.
These are letters that are--
they're Hebrew letters that are beginning
to come up off the page and take a life of their own.
This is him in a piece that he has made.
It's a mohawk, but what it actually says is "typosexual."
He's very font-obsessed.
This is a Belgian artist named Helen White.
She does a lot of visual poetry and has several series
that are like this, where the finished
piece is kind of a documentation of a performance or of a piece.
There's a guy named Billy Mavreas,
who's a Canadian cartoonist, actually.
He publishes little comic book scenes that he draws himself,
also a prolific visual poet.
Again, the piece is not what he's holding in his hand.
The piece is the photograph of his hand holding the piece.
This is an American artist named Kathy Ernst.
She has a whole series of sculptural concrete poems,
for lack of a better phrase, visual poems.
This is Maria Damon.
She's also a pretty prolific visual poet.
But I really love the work that she's done that is stitched.
This is just one example of many,
where this sort of fabric and text mixing works very well.
This is David-Baptiste Chirot.
He lives in Milwaukee.
An amazing, amazing guy.
In fact, a conversation with him was
how I developed the notion that I
want to start exploring rubbings in a way that
led to the other ones that I showed you.
His rubbings are totally not like what I do at all.
David is-- he walks everywhere, and he
knows the city of Milwaukee so well that he wakes up
in the morning and he says, I'm going to make this poem.
And he plans his walk.
So one main different-- what I did,
every one of the ones I did, that text
was all on a single monument.
I never came up with my message and said,
I'm going to go find it.
I stood in front of the monument and said,
what can I take from this text?
Some monuments yielded multiple text,
but no text came from more than one monument,
whereas what David does is sort of the opposite.
He decides what he wants, and then he goes
and he finds it in the city of Milwaukee,
because he's so familiar with it.
That's what this one is.
This one over here--
he makes clay because these human--
I forget how he says it.
It's a mix of the word poem and human.
And what he does is he builds these clay heads,
and he carves into the clay heads the text that he wants.
And then he inks the clay heads, then
he presses the paper onto the clay and pulls it off.
Holly Crawford, in the spirit of Victor Borge,
does performances of just the punctuation in various poems.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[NOISEMAKER HONKING]
[END PLAYBACK]
And what she really does--
this is just a video version of the performance.
She really does them in performance, which
is even crazier and funner.
This is on the floor in Bob Holman's apartment.
His floor, his walls, almost every surface in his apartment
is covered with poems that are not necessarily his;
some of them are, but not all of them.
I just love this notion of living
in a space where not only do you have the poems in your books,
you have them on your floor, you have them on your walls,
you have them on your ceiling.
There's really no way to avoid them.
This is a project that is in the works.
A friend of mine, Pat Stump, is an amazing artist,
and he makes his own frames.
And when I found out he made his own frames, I said,
can you make a frame in any shape?
And he said, well yeah.
I said, could you make a letter of the alphabet?
He said sure.
I said, could you make every letter of the alphabet?
He said, I don't know.
And then he did it.
And my friend, [? David ?] [? Haig, ?] who's another
artist collaborating on what would ultimately be this
project, watched Pat make these frames,
and he said he didn't draw them first--
he just started cutting the wood.
So he built his own font out of wood
just in his head, which is amazing to me.
But the plan that we're going to do with these,
we're going to decorate all of these canvases,
and then we're going to try to hang them in galleries
and allow galleries to tell us how much wall space they have,
and then we'll let them know what words they can make.
This is a project that never came to fruition,
but conceptual things are good, too,
especially for what we're doing.
I had a friend who was a juggler,
and there's this thing called site swap, which
is a system of notation for jugglers to use.
So you can say, this is how you do this four ball out of a five
cascade.
And there's this specific notation for it.
And in some of the rotatable things that you've seen already
that I do, I mean, I looked at this
and I said, oh, there's got to be some linguistic patterns
that this would work, you know, where every time the ball
comes up, you're making a sentence here.
This should work.
So I talked to my friend Marco, who's a Java programmer,
and I said, could you do this?
If I came up with words that match some of these patterns,
could you do this so that there was words there
instead of balls?
He said, sure, I could even make it so the guy had three arms.
That's a guy thinking off the page a little bit.
This is text art by a guy named Bradford Paley.
What you're looking at is--
the full text of Alice in Wonderland
is around the outside in that ring, and then in the center,
you have the text again, but more
as-- the placement where it is within this ring
is weighted based on word frequency
and where the word is located in.
The best analogy I can make for this
is if a word is way up here--
imagine that there's sort of like a pin with a rubber
band on every word and it gets to the middle.
If there's all these rubber bands pulling
at it from everywhere, that's how it ends up in the middle.
But if it's out here, it's because, in this part
of the text, it was very prevalent and very not
prevalent in other places, so it got pulled out to here.
And then the animation that's happening
is you can see the green going around the outer.
It's going through the text right now, word by word.
As it hits various for words, if they're repeated,
it's sort of going out to all of the places that you see it.
This is essentially a data visualization tool,
but it's also a full concordance.
And it's tweakable, because you can go in and you can say,
oh, I don't want these words, I don't want those words.
I just want to see all of the appearances of this
and the other thing.
And there are several different texts
that he makes this available for.
This is just--
Cecilia talked last night about how the poem is--
it's only recently on the page.
So the notion of poetry off the page
really needs to sort of realize that, for most
of poetry's history, it has been off the page.
There's this particular poem called,
"I Wanted to Forgive You, So I Tried to Erase Your Name,"
and this guy, Scott Pound, wrote this piece.
He was fascinated whether this thing was a poem
or not, because he found it in a recording in an archive.
And he was questioning whether it
could be called a poem because it wasn't written down.
I find that notion shocking.
Like, of course it can--
on the page is an aspect that a poem can take and can inhabit.
It's truly not a requirement.
I mean, what a notion, that it's required.
This is something that they maybe do in your city,
maybe not.
There's a lot of cities that have sort done
these poetry in transit things, where local poets submit poems,
or sometimes they use classic, royalty-free stuff.
These go on a bus.
So when people are riding the bus,
instead of seeing advertisements,
they get to see poetry.
This is an app for iPad and iPhone, amazing.
You send a text--
and, in fact, let's just see this thing in action,
because my description could take a lot longer than
if I just show you.
You send a text message to somebody,
and if they have the Dance Writer app also,
and the presenter can hit Play--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[END PLAYBACK]
Maybe not the best way to say, honey,
can you pick up a loaf of bread just for the amount of time
it takes, but certainly beautiful and a lovely concept,
combining dance and text.
This, you will have the opportunity,
if you haven't seen it already, it's next door.
It's amazing project that [? grr, I didn't do ?]]] myself.
In fact, you can mark my words--
20 years from now, people will be
talking about this project as sort of a watershed moment
when the book and the digital were
combined in an interesting way for one
of the very first times.
There will be other things like it,
but they will all be cheap imitations.
This is a beautiful project.
You need to go next door and check it out.