2. Paul Noble's Nobson Newtown
Whereas Holzer uses buildings as a site for poetry, the British artist Paul
Noble literally makes poems out of buildings. From a birds-eye view, the
fictional city of Nobson
Newtown is filled with deteriorating buildings that, examined closely, are
3-D letters. And in the midst of his decay, poetry is everywhere: “Ye
Olde Ruine (One)” depicts the letters of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, while the decrepit buildings of ”Nobson
Central” actually spell out the first lines of T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
3. bpNichol Lane
Sometimes poetry can be pedestrian, in the most literal sense. One of Canada’s
foremost experimental poets, bpNichol (born Barrie
Phillip Nichol), tried his hand at nearly every form, from sound poems (documented by Michael
Ondaatje) to poems stitched on pillowcases. One of his shortest poems has
been carved
into the asphalt behind Coach House Books, and simply reads: "A / LAKE / A / LANE / A / LINE / A /
LONE”—and can be seen on Google
Street View.
4. James Franco's Herbert White
The famous actor wears many
other hats (author, academic, film director) so it comes as no surprise
that he’d somehow transform a poem into a film. Frank Bidart’s “Herbert
White,” a dramatic monologue spoken by a necrophiliac murderer, is a poem
so disturbing that one of my teachers “has to apologize for teaching it.” And
yet the transition from the page to the screen is a
success—and memorable enough, too, that the young director will be
publishing his own poems about the experience: Directing
Herbert White.
5. Christian Bök's Xenotext
Films decay, paper crumbles, buildings fall. If a poem has to truly endure,
it can only do so by becoming part of nature. Enter Christian Bök, Canada’s
foremost experimental poet. “I propose to encode a short verse into a sequence
of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium,” he writes in The Xenotext
Experiment. “I hope, in effect, to engineer a primitive bacterium so
that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a
useable machine for writing a poem.” In other words: the world’s first animate
poem. The words to be encoded in the bacterium are “Any
style of life / is prim,” which will be transformed into “The faery is rosy / of glow.” What
will future generations and aliens make of this near-immortal poem? One can
only guess.
A Black Balloon Publication ©