Active Poetry Eva Partum
Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 9:24PM This piece is on view at the Tate Modern museum in London. It was made by a Polish artist in the 70s who was interested in something she called concrete poetry. I think I find this video so interesting because the letters don't make the poetry, the scenes in which Eva is scattering the letters seem to be the poetry, and the letters are just the context. Sometimes when I am reading poetry, and my mind is going off on some wonderful journey, I find it sort of frustrating that the medium, the form of the actual letters, has so little to do with the imagery they create. I have seen wonderful examples of Chinese, and Arabic calligraphy that attempt to mimic the lyric of a verse in the quality of the stroke of the pen, but for my western eyes, this always seems more like decoration. In this video Eva is able to capture something of the concreteness of poetry in the context of letters which are haphazardly thrown and clumsy in relation to the grandness they attempt to convey.
