Art I like - Robert Grenier

Robert Grenier is a visual poet - his work consists of language, but in his later work you may not realise it at first glance.  He set out in the 1970s to see what kinds of immediate, instantaneous effects he could achieve with a few words at a time http://jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml. His masterpiece is probably Sentences, a series of micropoems written - or rather, typed - on index cards; see a digital version here. 500 poems are presented in a fold-down box and can be read at random.

These poems are "about" how we actually “feel” language at the point of impulse. They are pointers to the psychological qualities of the mind that perceived them. they explore the "sixth sense" - wherein the imagination discovers mysterious connections between reality and “saved” referents, connections that were not apparent under normal syntactical practice, as the mind worked at organising data from ongoing reality. They become "no longer “poems” as such, but a coded short-hand for the cognitive verbal processes underneath the layers of habitual practice and daily presumption"http://jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml

His "scrawl poems" are also referred to as "illuminated poems" (in the sense of illuminated manuscript) or "holographs" (handwritten documents). In the past two decades Grenier rejected type in favour of "drawn" poems, moving on to exploring a new formality: colored-line designs of three and four word poems, in notebooks. They need to be drawings - the heavy layering of textures, via colour, helps reading (and communication); their richness comes from this reduction.

The sense of any of these poems is not its significance - hence they cannot be "translated" into typeface, or deciphered quickly enough (even by Grenier himself at times) to be read out loud, even though the limited space of the page limits the amount of linear elements. Each letter is expressed through the effort of its formation, and reading requires minute attention to form - the reader, in seeking to comprehend these unknown glyphs, must re-compose the words, the poem with almost as much effort as the author used.

These poems take understandable written language towards an extreme - the syntax makes deriving an exact meaning difficult (though this may be desirable in a poem), and the "drawn" nature of the originals conceals the letter forms, making any "reading" into an obstacle course. There comes an instant when the word in the scrawl poem pops into consciousness - and it's interesting how the graphic format of these poems plays with making that moment explicit. Reading reveals a secret. The poems also play with the notion of the private and the public, with admission into a select circle. (They may even have a certain smugness.) Certainly their fragmentary nature works as a metaphor for the fragmentation of our vision and perception, as James Davies says here, and the form of the poem is part of its content.

Of the scrawl poem above, Grenier says: "Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question."