CONTACT WITH POETS

juring of texts within texts czechs je n’ai rien à dire.
seulement à montrer. / ich habe nichts zu sagen. nur zu zeigen.
/ i have nothing to say. only to show. (2012) is an aweinspiring
book of literary conjuring i have nothing to say.
only to show places text-based visual poems within larger textual
fields embedding them into the margin-to-margin written
from which they assert themselves inspired by frank oharas
1950s poem a small bouquet czech invited seven authors to
write a background text in which oharas poem could be seamlessly
embedded the seven radically different resultant texts
share one trait—within each piece oharas poem is perfectly uncannily
hidden each photograph represents the new texts
with oharas poem roughly highlighted; a small bouquet hidden
in a larger poetic field czech has also commissioned friends
to write the background text of one of the most famous concrete
poems apollinaires classic calligramme il pleut rains
down the page in a now clichéd trope; under czechs tutelage
her colleagues craft pieces of prose in french in german and
english—each of which contain the letters of il pleut in the same
textual position as the original czech then photographs each
piece as if it were part of an entire volume a dream book
where a single page contains the material for any given poem
hidden poems—the middle third of i have nothing to say. only to
show—is the most astonishing czech has scoured an unfathomable
number of magazines and popular culture scraps and
has found—in a mind-blowing act of literary archaeology—
evidence of famous modernist poems embedded in larger
blocks of texts like fossilized dinosaur feathers preserved in
the crush of shale czech simply highlights the uncanny occurrence
of entire poems photographs them in situ and exhib-
39