73 Poems

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Poetry. Art. Music. Book and CD set. "73 Poems" is the product of a collaboration between Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara, known for her work with John Cage and Morton Feldman. Goldsmith's visual poems, elegantly reproduced in this Permanent Press book, are given an aural interpretation on the 45-minute CD that accompanies it.

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[bri · Rating 5 out of 5]

i listened to joan la barbara's musical interpretation of this set of visual poems while i looked at each of them and the experience was… well, the poet geoffrey young said it better than i can in his review:

Goldsmith understands language as threefold: sound, sight and sense (Pound's melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia). But because we cannot experience language's triple aspects simultaneously, we move from its sound, to its visual encoding, to its meaning in any number of unpredictable ways. Connected thus to aspects of Fluxus, to Concrete poetry, and to experimental writing in the computer age, Goldsmith's text art intersects with today's culture on all fronts.

a sumptuous immersion of sight and sound, a lovely snapshot of 1993's pop cultural landscape but still a playful, timeless exploration of language as a medium using words as brushstrokes. joan la barbara's ekphrastic compositions journeying from sweet and simple to dark and moody to lighthearted and almost tongue-in-cheek took this from something mentally absorbing to physically all-consuming. it's art like this that reminds me why i love poetry.