David Wolach’s concrete poems, prose, and juxtapositions of graphics make an immediate impression of physicality, even muscularity. The appearance of the text, the arrangement, and the words themselves reinforce the notion that the text is a body and that the poetics that shape and shadow the body give rise to additional dimensions within interpretative possibilities.

The collection of works begins with a long poem, “transit,” which suggests an incantation and states of transition. The body intersects with meaning, as “fire ritual” includes the idea of meeting, a bonfire, marking the body, and finally, expulsion.

meet: What we say & poetry as final breath – what would you say, and
to whom, were this breath your last?

Wolach creates a frame of “body maps and distraction zones” which suggests how poetics represents the way in which the body becomes a zone of invasion that parallels the meta-politic .

As Wolach incorporates the language of mapping, he creates a visual presentation that can be viewed as a map. With Wolach’s text, we can consider visual poetics as mapping. What is being mapped? On one level, the mapping of the discursive process traces the meaning-making process and suggests that concrete poetry is a map that brings the meaning-making process to the foreground.

Body structure pulls together the poems/poetics brings to mind Apollinaire “un coup de des” and other early century writings, including William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.

Mind follows form. The form frames the mind. However, is the frame a limit or a springboard? How are we made aware of the presuppositions – the archeoliths of knowledge we house in different parts of our minds? When and where to do we give ourselves over to things that are bigger than we are? Do we assume the mind is always bigger than everything it can contemplate? On some level, cognition involves domination. To be cognizant of something, by definition, means the mind has wrapped itself around something.

Whatever it is that we think we know about our minds, meaning, and perceptual poetics, we need to try for new interpretive possibilities, over and over again.

Maps help us get it right. Maps help us accept that getting it right, getting it wrong, are indeterminate states of being. The text positions icons in a semiotic way, in geographical relation to each other, while it suggests proximal/distal roles and relations. Wolach’s work suggests the places where the interplay between meaning and non-meaning evokes reflection, emotion.

In “your nerve center taxonomy: eight staged distration ones in miniature,” Wolach’s words and word placement. Phrases such as “modular arterial cacophony” further reinforce the physicality of text, mind, the human body. The text unfolds as the hand sketches, and the mind pushes erasures, over-writing.

The book arts echo the body, fragmented:

One idea that surges is that what is most important is the print that is the darkest, firmest, muscular. The delicate text, the erased or overprinted text becomes engendered – but in submission and to serve as a foil for the dominant.

The “Distraction Zone Stagings” are whimsical: #7 was “written while being fed another’s writing” – with images and issues of consumption added to the other aspects of meaning-making.

Wolach’s “the body as occulted and occulting metaphor” – the way that we are compelled to consider what happens to the body when it encounters the digital; which body persists in such intersections? The digital? The corporeal? The digital representation of the corporeal (the literal)?

The literal becomes impossible without digital signatures. Literal/concrete no longer persists unless it’s inscribed in a long-lived digital format – pdf or html. True or not? We are still investigating. Who knows.