“I no longer see poetry but between the lines. It is no longer for me, it has never been for me, in books. It drifts in the street, in the sky, in the dismal workshops, above the villages.
It hovers magisterially over life which, at times, disfigures it.”
-Pierre Reverdy
In conjunction with the “John Ashbery in Paris” conference, I installed visual poems directly onto the eight windows of the room where the conference was being held at the Institut Charles V – Université Paris Diderot. For this installation, I selected various fragments of Ashbery’s own poetry (from his Paris period, ca. 1955-1965) with which to develop usable language for the project. Then, in a kind of (unauthorized) collaboration with the poet, the windows and the remarkable Parisian backdrop, I designed the graphic manifestations and expansions of the poet’s language in relation to the unique setting and circumstances involved. This writing on the windows offered the rare opportunity to write on the Parisian air, the words floating over the city’s rooftops, often aligning with, while even “at times, disfigur[ing],” its many notable monuments: the Colonne de Juillet on the Place de la Bastille, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Basilica of the Sacre-Cœur, the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower.