CONTACT WITH POETS

With Local Colour, I propose a form of writing that takes Eno’s
formation of ambient music as “a tint” literally. Dispensing with words
(and integrating Concrete poetry into its prosody), Local Colour is weightless
and pristine, unmarked by language, consisting solely of tinted rectangles.
Eno promotes an ambient aesthetic that creates “space to think”
and “enhance[s] the mood.” I prefer an ambient writing which is closer to
the materiality of Concrete poetry and to statements by Robert Smithson.
Smithson famously argues that “[m]y sense of language is that it is matter
and not ideas—i.e. ‘printed matter’” and that:
[l]anguage should find itself in the physical world and not end up
locked in an idea in somebody’s head [...] writing should generate
ideas in to matter and not the other way around.
Smithson supports the poetic prioritization of the material of language
through his infamous “heap of language.” Eno looks to an ambient stylistics
in order to create a flattened, peaceful, artistic space designed to enhance
such ethereal ideas as “mood,” “calm” and “a space to think.” I
would rather suggest that an Ambient poetic should be more reflective of
the modern milieu, emphasizing the overwhelming graphic textual ecology.
*
Both Local Colour and flatland: a romance of many dimensions are poetic
translations, and as Robert Frost famously stated, “poetry is what gets
lost in translation.” In both volumes, my translation ignores the mimesis
of meaning. These two volumes embrace Conceptual poetry’s methods of
appropriation and Ambient poetic’s stylistics of using chain restaurants
and other flat-pack public spaces. Instead of pointing at the wash of language
that inhabits public space (the what and the how much) Local Colour
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