Thursday, December 06, 2007

sliding accumulation

I've briefly mentioned Tony Green here before (scroll down the sidebar at right until you see the image of a cone-like object). Tony, of New Zealand, makes poem-objects of various kinds. Or: sculptured poems. Or: three-dimensional linguistic accumulations. "Accumulations" is in fact a term he sometimes uses. The above object is called a "sliding accumulation" and it really does "work" just as you think it does from the way it looks here. It's made like one of those little palm-sized games you played when you were a kid. One space is open and you slide the little tiles around until you are able to put things in the right order--letters or numbers or colors. Here of course it's a poem--a poem that can't really be wrongly arranged. What you have instead of options for reading.

I'm pleased to say that I own one of these. In a latter entry I might attempt to show you how some of the patterns mean.