Situation One: In Stéphane Mallarmé’s essay “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” a copy of the new but now decidedly old (and clearly dying) medium of the printed newspaper is lyrically presented by the poet as blowing from a park bench and unfolding itself around what are described as “whispering” roses. Mallarmé distinguishes here between the flimsy, ephemeral pages of his newspaper, now limply down on the ground, and those more weighty, secured ones of a book that have remained beside him on a bench; he watches as the book’s pages are opened by a passing gust, causing them to flutter in the wind but certainly not fly away into the flowers. For, as Mallarmé writes, “…the foldings of a book, in comparison with the large-sized, open newspaper, have an almost religious significance….their thickness….piled together…form a tomb in miniature for our souls.”
Yet it is with the open newspaper that, almost in spite of himself, Mallarmé’s daydreaming eyes seem to return that day, seeing its variously-sized letters and words moved about by the wind, obscured by and yet interacting with the flowers around it—shadows cast, pages torn by thorns; the roses “whisper”…but whispering what, one wonders? All the noise that’s fit to print, perhaps? Less a “tomb…for our souls,” that newspaper there, what Mallarmé describes further as “good wrapping paper” (perhaps a “tomb” for fish or the day’s purchased vegetables), and more a passing spectacle of, what he later calls, “words led back to their origin, which is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so gifted with infinity that they will finally consecrate Language.”
Sitting on the park bench that day, Mallarmé likely realized that it was mere chance, a throw of the dice even, the whim of the wind, as to which words, which of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters, would be seen upon that tattered newspaper; the material of language—consecrated or not—was to register but fleetingly, and as what the poet refers to elsewhere as a kind of “scattering of ornaments,” soon ruined, blown about in the breeze.
Situation Two: William Carlos Williams, in a poem found in The Descent of Winter, writes from the vantage of the new and still stubbornly enduring medium of a moving automobile where, as Williams elsewhere notes, “the inevitable flux of the seeing eye” has finally met its match, the perfect machine for the machinery of his poetry. Seen through the windshield, in motion, at night, is that other new medium of its era, the “illumined” billboard, upon which the monumentally reproduced images of “two / gigantic highschool boys / ten feet tall” are described by Williams as “leaping / over printed hurdles,” alongside the large words: “1/4 of their energy comes from bread.”
This billboard, its bright lights so powerful as to diminish those of the starry night, even perhaps the “Pleiades” by which the poem begins, has here returned its pedestrian words and its gigantic image of leaping boys back down to earth, its commercial purpose—selling bread, offering energy—rendered almost as a kind of illuminated consecration, one that finally overshadows and outshines the heavens above.
Situation Three: In both of the above described situations, we see detailed within them, on lit billboards and scattered newspapers, instances where language in the landscape is presented—writ large and in motion—as a place-bound, time-determined event, prefiguring and literally locating off of the page something of Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that “The place indicated [by a poem]…is a place of language. Indication is the category in which language refers to its own taking place…to the very event of language.” And now, as my own modest response to Williams and Mallarmé’s well known situations of language, let me begin again by speaking of a recent situation of my own that, veering from the printed page and in the wake of those described above, also engage and indicate varied elements of time and space, their taking place.
For today, instead of asking the more familiar and time-honored question of what is a poem, a better, more fitting one might now be: where is a poem, and when? For poetic language, set loose, no longer necessarily settles solely into the kinds of solutions once fixedly bound in books, printed on published paper, but today—whether we like it or not—floats fluidly, promiscuously even, into an ether of more ephemeral, fragile form, while offering a rich and unsettling disorder of now new, and newly mediated, beginnings.
Such dislocations of poetic language have arisen, or have been made to arise, in relation to a series of my own “writing on water / writing on air” installations, site-specific and short-term projects that I have undertaken at various locations around the world. Now, though, I want to focus upon one of these installations, entitled “Floating Form Less,” that I completed in and around the library of the University of North Florida, in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2009, the third of five such installations. This multi-dimensional, large-scale writing on the landscape was installed for a period of fifteen days in three linked locations: on the surface of a pond adjacent to the university’s library; on the large windows of that library’s four story stairway overlooking the pond; and, finally, within the library’s two main elevators situated at the center of the building.
With its multiple (moving) vantage points, this tripartite installation—each of its component parts pointing equally to the other—performatively enacted the dispersions of this particular poem’s time, of its particular place, through its variously constructed temporary spaces: its words floating upon the surface of the pond, seen through the library’s stairway, or heard, hidden, within the library’s own elevators. In this multi-directional manner, a spatial layering of languages was presented in which a person’s own real-time progressions through the installation were then largely to determine the poem’s shifting and short-lived locations and where, echoing Mallarmé in Un Coup de des…, his own words dispersed across four pages: “Nothing…. will have taken place …. but place …. except …. perhaps …. a constellation,” a constellation constituted, and dissolved, in space, by time. Seen in motion, the installation and its multiple readings were thus arranged, and re-arranged, by the self-directed bodily movements of those moving through it, with the where of the poem converging with the when, its time and place entangling.
To begin with a bit of background: to date, there have been five different such installations completed on and around this Florida pond since the spring of 2007. What wasn’t realized at the time was that, with this first “writing on water” installation, I had begun something that would remain open-ended. For as it turns out, that first, tentative installation was but the beginning of an on-going project that has been returned to annually, a piece written very, very slowly, and very, very largely—each letter gigantic, around eight feet by eight feet, cut from thick plastic and, with the aid of a kayak, clipped onto lines of twine stretched across the pond and attached to a row of wooden stakes pounded into opposite shores.
One of several vantages for reading these installations has always been within the library’s four-story stairwell, its tall stairway overlooking the adjacent pond upon which the words are placed. The library’s stairway, like most stairways, is an often overlooked architectural site, in part because it is, if thought about, a kind of non-site, or quasi-site, in which one is “neither here, nor there,” but always already (on the way) elsewhere. After all, libraries in particular are mostly imagined as made up of sedentary spaces designed for reading, writing and thinking; an individual sits still within the library’s furnished rooms, immobilized, in order—one hopes—to concentrate [consecrate] and study. Still, the library’s stairway functions, in fact, as a liminal zone of mobility and transition from one floor to the next, for movement up and down the stairs, from one real space to another; one does not stop on the stairway, but instead, in accordance with gravity (exertion going up; ease going down), keeps moving, like Marcel Duchamp’s descending nude painted as if seen in perpetual motion.
The stairway in the university’s library is no different in its functional capacity as a space intended primarily for passage. Though with its wall of tall windows facing directly out onto the adjacent pond, this normally neutral, or pragmatic space has been made quite dramatic, offering even a moving site for seeing (a seeing in perpetual painterly motion). In direct response to its uniquely aesthetic qualities, for the 2009 installation, the stairway’s use was expanded further to include what I was to describe, in conjunction with the “writing on water,” as a “writing on air,” with various large words printed onto transparency and attached within the thickly gridded, Donald Judd-like metal frames of the stairwell’s windows.
Once in place, the words on the window were then seen, and seen through, in relation to the words simultaneously seen on the water, the lines of language shifting their locations, read in their indeterminate conjunction, inside and out, moving onto and alongside one another, in alignment with one’s own movement up or down the stairs. Through the poem’s own parallactic displacements, spectators to the installation thus found themselves reading in various directions and dimensions at once, depending upon their passage within it — moving vertically, either from the first floor to the fourth, the fourth to the first (or entering somewhere in the middle); and seeing horizontally, through the transparent surface of the window and out onto to the pond below.
An additional entry point into this piece was through the library’s two central elevators which, like the nearby stairway, offered another non-space, another liminal zone of mobility through the building, through the poem. As its doors closed, a prerecorded sound installation was immediately, but discreetly heard, already in progress, a looping mp3 player hidden within clocks hanging from the elevators’ shiny metallic walls. While, beneath each clock, affixed to a Mason jar filled with water, a small, living goldfish swam about, accompanying viewers on their ride through the building.
The sound installation heard during the short elevator ride was taken from many interviews conducted several weeks before, outdoors, directly in front of the library, as people were asked to describe that which they saw before them. In part, the point of this sound collage within the elevator was to transport, through the muzak of language, something of the sensual experience of being directly in front of the library into the confined (sarcophagal) space of the transporting elevators, to transfer linguistically described aspects of the library’s open exterior—the people, the trees, the buildings, the water...the fish—into its contained, controlled interior.
Also, the elevator was being conceptually paired with its architectural partner in mobility, the nearby stairway. In the elevator’s case, though, instead of us making the determined bodily movements up or down stairs, reading in relation to them, such movements were made mechanically for us, as we were moved from one floor to the next, standing still, listening to the language hidden within the ticking clocks.
Upon entering the library, a first choice had to be made: do I take the stairs or ride the elevator, a decision that would also determine one’s initial entry into the poem. Going one way, the stairway offered its windows opening grandly outward onto the pond, a palimpsest of language seen floating from them; while, going the other, the elevators, with their heavy doors closed tightly inward and onto the collage of voices describing that same scene, that same exterior space from which one has just passed (with the goldfish talismanically present as a floating reference to the pond just outside the building, its big eyes now seeing us, seeing it).
In a final reconfiguring point to this poem, after the first week, I returned to the stairway and, like the year before when, out on the pond, the installed line of language “murmur of words” had discreetly shifted through a rearrangement of letters to become the “murmur of wounds,” several of the words in the stairwell were also ever so slightly adjusted, altering further the tone of the poem and the locational alignments allowed both from within and without.
With the completion of this installation, the “writing on water/writing on air” project had grown into its latest, if fleeting formation, floating formlessly, with additions continuing in the following years. Of course, those words on the water and windows have long since vanished and are now no longer anywhere, light/less…. sight/less, having taken place as but a temporary constellation, remaining now as the remembrance of an event of language, one that has long since been liquifed, liquidated, but which is nevertheless photographically recreated here, made even almost to resemble the old medium of a poem on paper, which it never was, nor did it want to be. For this project endures now only in the form of its documenting images, a liquid light, a viole[n]t sight, illumined like a billboard, flat images still that—eliding the poem’s temporal and spatial dimension, its animating breath of intended self-destruction—now offer a limited after-life of their own, a trace of the event, a whisper around roses.
Keynote panel presentation at the conference “Convergence on Poetics,”
University of Washington-Bothell, September 27-30, 2012.