Review
Sad Clowns of Word: Verbal shapes and poetic objects
An exhibition of work by J.P. Ward, Library-Foyer Gallery ,
University College, Swansea, 9-20 November 1981.
J.P. Ward's somewhat coyly titled exhibition presented a fair cross-section of his more experimental work - some 65 'shapes' and 'objects', as well as some examples of his early calligraphic activities. The catalogue notes drew analogies with, inter alia, the practices of advertising, the shop-front and the Christmas card. Such analogies, however, ignore one important consideration. John Ward denies himself the use of colour, and, by presenting work so exclusively conceived and created upon the typewriter denies himself many of the other expressive resources common to these other media. The resulting austerity is a source both of strength and weakness. The visual impact sometimes seems such a minor aspect of the works that one wonders how useful it is to exhibit them, rather than merely publish them. At the same time, though, the austerity has a central part to play in the exposition of some of Ward's characteristic themes. It is certainly apt that one of the texts used here as the basis for a 'poetic object' should be a passage from Thomas a Kempis 'on the avoidance of excess in words'. Elsewhere we are told that 'the words / say less and less and less and less / each word labours / in its exquisiteness'. Pervading many of the exhibits is a sense of words in pursuit of silence that silence beyond words which can yet only be communicated by the failure of words. Religious questions are never very far away in the best of these works, and the choice of sources used in some of the many works which are treatments of pre-existing texts is certainly indicative of a central area of interest. Such sources include Traherne, Donne, Henry Vaughan and Thomas a Kempis, as well as a number of works involving the treatment of Biblical texts. Such texts are treated by various processes of permutation and superimposition, omission and addition. The notion of the treated text (a common enough technique these days) is, for Ward, related to his conception of the logos as 'the highest achievement that arrangement of [the] twenty-six letter forms can produce, a society's logos is usually imperfect; ...in English, it is perhaps the works of Shakespeare and the authorised version of the Bible that most nearly qualify for this title' (quoted from his from alphabet to logos (Second Aeon) ). Central to Ward's treatment of such texts by means of the typewriter is his sense of the way in which the use of this machine has quasi-metrical implications. The typewriter provides its own grid, with each letter occupying the same area of space. The pattern of repetition which belongs, inescapably, to the normal use of the typewriter, provides for Ward that repeating structure and measure which metrical pattern provides in more orthodox poetry .The typewriter makes available the necessary constant. So, at its simplest, we have such metamorphoses ('Scraps') as
W H O L E S
H O L E
K N O W L E D G E
O W L
Elsewhere the principle yields greater rewards when employed in more complex structures, many of which are reminiscent of the 'emergent poems' of Edwin Morgan. This use of the typewriter grid is 'visual' only in a rather special sense. What it offers is not so much the form, mass or line of the visual artwork, as an alternative mode of forming connections between the parts that make up the whole. The grid poems of Porphyrius, Venantius Fortunatus etc. thus receive a technological updating.
Elsewhere texts like 'Still Life' and '4X400 metres are not, surely, very usefully described as either 'verbal shapes' or 'poetic objects', except insofar as all poems are, albeit tautologically. Of course the terminology doesn't matter greatly, save that that used here raises expectations not fulfilled by the texts, and this is a disservice to the texts themselves, especially when they are as good as some of those on show here (e.g. 'Still Life'). Paradoxically I found myself admiring and enjoying many of the works on show, but a little unsure of the advantages of their being exhibited, rather than being published in book form. Indeed there were items here which seemed positively to suffer from being put in a glass case on a wall, rather than being in front of one on the page. Of course one possible advantage is that a visit to the exhibition might encourage people to buy and read the published versions. They ought to, because J.P. Ward is one of the few people working with equal seriousness and invention in both 'mainstream' and 'experimental' styles.
Page(s) 85-87
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