my friend Tony Green sent me this poem by email, and I can't resist putting it up here - some may recall I printed his Sourdough a year or so ago (now out of print) - I like the simple technique of adding layers of static & interference, thru which almost any reading takes place these days with the barrage of data that is always streaming in, like it or not, want it or not etc - as I say, the static being part of the very fabric of the poem - yet we can read it, and can read it aloud (the visual here is the red-herring) - always multiple threads in Green's weavings, a poetry of signs & truncated narratives - if your parachute doesn't open what does it matter what color the thing is - highlighting to what purpose - yet, to deliver the poem at a 'poetry reading' would obscure the experience that is elaborated on the page - to print it on the handpress would be possible if one's capacity for high quality registration was up to it - and while it's probably fair to say that it is the computer that makes composition at this complexity possible, I have a typewriter with a double black&red ribbon, and a set of colored highlighting pens (which I don't have) could certainly make making such a poem possible - and contemporary digital printing would reproduce the poem as is in its colors very well, suggesting something I have occasionally mentioned in the past that, some poems, by their structure, should be reproduced by printing (as an image is) rather than reset by the usual editorial processes - the poet out to 'drive hard bargain' with 'hand-brake on' -
