George Roberts
Minneapolis, MN
Art is essentially a practice of slowing down and asking questions, then slowing down some more and looking for answers.
Message
I wrote this poem with a show of my work scheduled for June 2021 in mind. The show was presented at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design's Emeritus Gallery and was entitled "The Alchemy of Language."
A LANGUAGE BEFORE WORDS is from a collection of poems HERE, written from Winter Solstice 2017 through Spring Equinox 2021. I had begun, influenced by the late poetry of W.S. Merwin, to write poems without line or stanza breaks, without punctuation, attending to the more subtle poetic techniques of sound, rhythm, repetition, and raw image. This practice requires more of the reader, asking each one to decide, after several readings, where the pauses, stops and emphases belong.
- Collections: LETTERPRESS PRINTED POETRY
