POETICKS

Before getting into my discussion of Márton Koppány’s poem, I want to make a few introductory comments intended for beginners in the appreciation of works like it.  First of all, it is a minimalist poem, so dependent for its effects on such small details as, here, its (mis)use of quotation marks.  What is done with these makes it a kind of language poem I term an infraverbal poem, or poem in which what is done inside its letters (or just outside them, in the case at times of punctuation).  I mention this rather dry fact because as a taxonomist, I believe knowing the names of kinds of poetry can significantly help one appreciate  a peculiar poem like this one that one has never seen before.  Why?  Because knowing in advance that what he is encountering is a language poem (as I define that) will (or ought to) alert the engagent to key on what the poem is doing with language beyond denoting, connoting or pleasing the ear and how that may contribute to what the poem is saying.  Knowing that it is an infraverbal poem should make how the poem’s words are spelled or punctuated and how that may contribute to what the poem is saying important to him.   Knowing in this case that the poem he is viewing is a visual poem, as well as an infraverbal poem similarly will alert him to what it is as a graphic design, in particular to why its letters are outlined and of the color they are, and why the quotation marks and background are the color they are.

I haven’t much more to say about the poem: just that it is a spectacularly simple evocation of dust and all it means consisting of no more than the single word “dust” on a dark blue page much larger than it and some star-hued quotation marks, and resonating with its creator’s understanding of Zen koans, as is the case with much (all?) of his work.  A yawn?  Sure, but only to those unable to click sufficiently with what its word and  punctuation are doing to allow us to seep into the eternal night we’re all enclosed in.  Or so it seems to me.