Lead is soft rather than brittle. The result of throwing lead words off a
cliff would be to reduce them to lumps of lead, "mangled," rather than
broken, little different in fact (if one hadn't been let in on the secret)
from any other leaden thing thrown off a cliff. Except that she recorded
her process and told us about it. This isn't about thingness so much as
about a memory of or an idea about thingness. Whereas if she'd used, say,
cast iron the words would have become shards of words--in their way
intelligible as the ruins of words, without external commentary. Seems
closer to poetry to me.
Of course, cast iron is more difficult to work with and considerably more
expensive. Less poisonous, tho. One takes the good with the bad.
Mark
At 08:57 PM 12/16/2005, you wrote:
>Cornelia Parker, an English sculptor, is having an exhibit open locally at
>San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center. Without going into detail about her work
>(I find it fascinating), Ken Baker, the Chronicle Art Critic wrote today:
>
>In a 1992 piece, "Words that Define Gravity," Parker wrote longhand a
>dictionary definition of "gravity," replicated each written word in cast
>lead and threw it off a high cliff. To complete the work, she collected the
>lead words, mangled by the fall, and suspended them on threads just above
>gallery floor level. "The words got made illegible by real gravity," as
>Parker put it.
>
>I been thinking about this quote all day. I misread it the first time. I
>thought she said, "The words got made 'legible' by real gravity." Or, I
>would have preferred it, if she had said that. That the words cast in lead
>became tested and real by the experience of falling. And I had gone from
>there with the idea or query of whether or not a person's new poem could
>stand such a test - that, in some form or other - to achieve the legibility
>of the purest possible poem - we should drop the poem off the side of
>building to discover how its language survived or gets transformed through
>such a fall. (Ideally, all the cliches, fatuous phrases, rhetorical
>thoughts, useless sentiments, silly pauses, artsy line endings & closures,
>etc. would be knocked out of their polite frames). As with Cornelia Parker,
>we could then pick up the poem's pieces and hang each word and/or line by
>invisible threads from the top of a fresh page. Ideally, it would be the
>purest form of poetic legibility.
>
> From this point on, I thought, both poet's and writing workshop classes
>should be situated on the edges of cliffs overlooking smooth rock hard
>plateaus on to which poems - one by one - could be thrown down, violently
>broken apart, their pieces recovered, and located in the most accurate
>possible way on the page.
>
>Yet, as luck would have it, I am also reading Ital Calivino's Invisible
>Cities. All day I find myself running into chapters that close with cryptic
>little phrases, "There is no language without deceit," and "Falsehood is
>never in words; it is in things."
>
>Is a poem, or its language, such "a thing."
>
>I think a lot of new poems and old poems - mine included - should be cracked
>again and again. Otherwise they be lies.
>
>Isn't this Biblical? Broken tablets, fresh revealed truths, et al?
>
>Sounds to me, at least, like Cornelia Parker has found some real pleasure in
>the discovery & making of it.
>
>
>The whole interview with Cornelia Parker can be found here:
>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/16/DDGTUG89VC1.DTL&type
>=art
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