these columns can be seen as merely a segment of the avant gardes' use of
language as subject matter. each column but an art and/or literary object
referring back in/on itself, a closed system. however, Cross is not
interested in such selfserving endeavors. there exist too many intangibles,
poetic and artistic gestures, implications, highly charged energies
radiating from the language and its new contexts, all of which add up
differently from each reader/viewer individual inferences as if her body
of work were an oracle, each column an icon. moreover, when reading her
columns become chants due to the small and large silences formed by either
or by both addition and subtraction, immediate silences, word dictionary
noise - auditory and visual - altered/erased.
for me the work vertically plunges to the first roots of visual poetry,
which are also nourished by the some soil as poetry: magic and religion.
generally, any discussion concerning the origins of visual poetry focuses
on pictographs and hieroglyphs while failing to examine the myths featuring
the invention of writing, particularly matriarchal origins. also ignored
is that as poetry evolved from magical chants, visual poetry evolved from
the patterning of spells on charms and amulets, which in turn were derived
from knots tied with spells. in one sense, then, the visual poem has
always been an object and its test has always been its power to invoke awe,
wonder. indeed the columns by Cross invoke wonder and awe, which are the
highly vibrating aspects of her verticle reach. the awe begins immediately
while viewing, scanning with the eye, then by reading, listening with the
ear, then the blending as one learns the language of site and sound, sound
and silence, visual image and word image, language as a visually sensual
pleasure in itself, the visual image becoming its word, object turned word
turned thing come alive by sound.
this maker is not only freeing letters, words and phrases from confining
scientific lexiconed rules, not only letting them out onto a playground
to form new combinations and possibilities which spins the ball of old
dictionary logic off like an electron jumping orbit to make light. oh no.
she like other visual poets teaches new ways, of approaching our mother
tongue; these are the new spells cast to destroy the patterns language
shapes thought by/with. she breaks the old frozen webs begun in 18th
century dictionaries, and though she hands these found words freedom it
is not an absolute extremism not a nihilistic act, which could easily lead
to a narcissistic abstraction, but a freedom with far fewer constraints
enabling the visual poem to strike a universal chord that vibrates in each
of us during and after the encounter with her making.
This is a cooperative effort on the part of Kaldron and Light and
Dust.
how many times has the equation "the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts" reached your eyes or ears? Cross' treatment of dictionary columns
and her search within them for found words has added another factor to the
equation/subtraction. in the purer minimal columns the spaces devoted
totally to the science of meaning, to the repeatable act of definition,
are negated in the pursuit of the unique, the unrepeatable act. this is
only one of the many tensions complexly woven by this maker waving a wand
tuned to a negative capability, of taking from an arena of so-called
certainly, turning phrases, words, letters and their parts into clues,
hints of the greater mysteries and uncertainties we all face. Cross has
taken a book, which from various points of view can be looked upon as
having nouned verbs to death, to object, and breathed new life into its
dead leaves. Cross as life giver is related to the summerian and egyptian
goddesses of writing who scribed the deeds of the dead upon the leaves of
the tree of life.