Saturday, May 29, 2004

A brief note on Jukka's new images

Bill Allegrezza says "jukka's new image poems complicate reading patterns in a way that two dimensional writing does not. as a reader i am left wondering where to enter into the text, if there is a consistent text, and if the text is primarily aesthetic or communicative."

Jean Vengua responds that (a) "lot of the poetry that I see on the new non-linear poetry seems to be about graphic surface (color, shape) and structure. Some partial sense of meaning comes through in the existence of words or word-fragments."

My attitude towards Jukka's current work is much more aligned with Jean in that I feel Jukka has moved, rather rapidly I must add, away from poetic to painterly in his new images. The earliest ones on his new nonlinear were like magnified shots of text, fragments from a larger whole. Then colour was added, with the focus on the colour, almost as though now he'd discovered how to do it he was doing a few practice runs. Still concerned with words &/or letters, still providing an entrance way through things familiar.

Now I feel we do not enter the poems but step back from them the way we do with paintings so that we can see them entire. Certainly the words are there, fragmented, hinting, eroded. It is as if we have passed beyond the ocular microscope & are now dealing with electron microscopy that is showing us that what we thought were empty spaces between words and letters have a depth & a topography of their own. The entrance way is way back, in the verbal poems that still are there behind. We've entered a Mandelbrot world of fractals where the poems enter us rather than us entering the poems.

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