Some Notes on Spatial Poetry

SPATIAL POETRY is a term I have coined to describe my attempts at wedding time-bound, two-dimensional poetry to a more plastic involvement with space. Its roots lie in my own fascination with the poetics of the late Charles Olson, and with the emphasis on presentation in Beat Poetry. SPATIAL POETRY also shares many ideas with the Happenings movement of the early ’60s, for in both the audience per se is abolished, and replaced instead by a group of willing or unwitting accomplices.

The first SPATIAL POEM here documented, “Motion,” is an attempt at involving the reader very physically with the poem through the act of reading it. In order to read the words printed on the heat molded plexiglas sheet, the reader must flip and turn the rather awkward and sharply pointed sheet repeatedly. This SPATIAL POEM was constructed for the poet A. R. Ammons after an argument in which he vehemently asserted the point (taped to my plexiglas sheet) quoted from his own poem “Motion”: “the word is/not the thing.”

The second SPATIAL POEM, “An Acute Crevice,” is a more refined piece, in that it places more importance on the actions of the reader/recipient/participant than on the staid words of the piece itself. The plexiglas object and the poem scrawled across it are really just foils (the words are not even reproduced here) to seduce the participant into furthering the action of the SPATIAL POEM herself. SPATIAL POETRY leaves the cluttered realm of trochees, metaphors, deep images, and cramped pages for the actions and motivations of an audience/participant endowed with the opportunity to create an ‘art action.’

The most ambitious SPATIAL POEM to date occurred at Cornell University and involved six readers (including poets Albert Goldbarth and Thomas Johnson), a very steep street cordoned off by the Ithaca City Police, many photographers, one newspaper reporter, and a plexiglas object on wheels. The object was rolled from reader to reader so that, had it not disintegrated on the rough pavement, the poem would have been completed orally as the street was traversed physically. However, the spectacle of the situation and the various municipal offices involved in obtaining permission were actually more crucial to the ’life’ of this SPATIAL POEM, than were the words recited.