Leah Benetti

Graph Paper Poems

Concrete poems explored thru typewritten characters and graph papers. These are part maps part illustrations part poetry, but I have tried to leave enough space between these ideas for your own associations which go beyond my own.

“There is a natural relationship between the typewriter and the grid.I was attempting in the beginning to deconstruct what was in the spaces between two ideas. It started with the route from you to me. Initially, I considered these poetic investigations as maps from my memories. I was marking my experience of past journeys as visual spaces. I envisioned an ideological solution appearing after I processed these notions thru the graph paper. It provided a new structure and new logic to navigate the page indeed, but I found myself asking the question; am I the cause of these divisions between ideas in the first place? Was I constructing their separations?I wondered where my body existed spatially in poem. I wondered what existed between my written voice and my spoken voice. I experimented with typing more gesturally ignoring the perfect framework of the grid substrate. Typewriter keys are of uniform size. There is a natural relationship between the typewriter and the grid. I discovered bp nichol’s ideopomes which employed this relationship. Writing visually – the ideopomes moved me to use words and text elements as landmarks and entities, along a train of thought, which marked the beginning of this series. These poems were not premeditated, they happened spontaneously and erratically.”