SHADOW POEMS by Rosaire Appel

(2008. 68 pages. b&w)

A poem is a construction surrounded by pristine, uninhabited space. This makes the page an active situation. The poem threatens to destroy the white space, and the space, pressing in on the poem, threatens to silence the poem. The poems in this book are by many different authors. The poems aren't censored, they're shadowed. Thus they slip though the copyright barriers - and also slip though the mind. Yet they still occupy space. It is the space surrounding poems that continues to inspire me.

Morpheme Pages (2008) by Rosaire Appel 

(68 pages, black&white.)

Considering language, what of the marks on these pages? Looks like language – but doesn't smell or taste like it. Pre-words? Post-words? They are un-words, they resist wording. Their language is non-historical: with every reading you start from zero. Still, these are not private, incommunicable, unsignifiable, non-suggestive, indecipherable gestures. Visual linguistics are a shared trait. You see a chair in a cloud, I see a chair. We communicate. Yet it doesn't mean there's a chair in the cloud. You see a chair, I see a pigeon, still there's nothing to argue over. A cloud is still a cloud.

arrived & left