Visual Poetry /Dan Ivec

:: The Last Acrobats ::

:: The Empty Sky, The Lonely Kitchen & The Endless Forest ::

:: Only One Room Has A Star Ladder ::

From the writer

:: Account ::

The lan­guage is writ­ten in a script that includes many logograms. It is a com­bi­na­tion of words that refer to stan­dard­ized speech sounds and also recur­ring images—many of them birds—which rep­re­sent ideas and emo­tions, like in a hiero­glyph. This lan­guage is most­ly read on the moon and in oth­er out­er space climes. I have includ­ed some images of poet­ry writ­ten in this lan­guage. I will not attempt to trans­late these works as it sad­dens me to revis­it them. I will, how­ev­er, briefly allude to the con­tents of each poem.

The first image is of “The Last Acro­bats” and it takes place on a dis­tant star. You can see some crea­tures hold­ing on to a sun and using it as a type of Fer­ris wheel. Two oth­ers walk on a wire above the whole town. And there is a chaot­ic lit­tle sea on this star that is danc­ing so wild by itself below the build­ings. The con­stant com­mo­tion on this star caused it to fling itself fur­ther and fur­ther into deep space, and it has not been vis­it­ed in many years. That is the con­text of this poem, and it is writ­ten in a sad, ele­giac mode.

The sec­ond poem con­sists sole­ly of sym­bols and no script. A very terse and strained work, it is real­ly just a short list of trou­ble­some feel­ings. It is called “The Emp­ty Sky, The Lone­ly Kitchen & The End­less For­est.” In between jobs, I once spent a year wan­der­ing through the forests in the “lost” province of the moon. This poem real­ly cap­tures that time.

The final work, “Only One Room Has A Star Lad­der” tells of a famous dis­trict in my favorite city. This is the city where I once lived. In some build­ings, the occu­pants have affixed to their win­dows enor­mous lad­ders that go nowhere and are only used for sight­see­ing. Climb­ing such lad­ders is great fun and, to be hon­est, is still the only thing I real­ly want to do.

Dan Ivec is the author of On the Stairs (Meek­ling Press, 2014). He cur­rent­ly lives in Pitts­burgh, Pennsylvania.