time poem
/8
- time poem
- 1969
- typewriting on paper, series of 8 pieces
- 20,4 × 14,8 cm
Until 1967, Milan Adamčiak regarded his writings as private play with language, words, writing—chiefly a way to explore. When he became aware of contemporary international trends in concrete and experimental poetry, he focused more intently on creating cycles. As he wrote he took inspiration from the local environment, composing texts using patterns from embroidery, drapery, home-woven carpets and other folk ornamentation he observed. He noticed the structure of bureaucratic forms and administrative language (“Forms”). He worked with the visuality of magazines’ graphic style (“Pages from a Magazine”). Passing by standard paper formats, he employed random rearrangement of text fragments. He also wrote in multiple languages using Slovak, Czech, German, French and English, making the text unreadable (“Patexts”). He made use of passing time, waiting and actual clock ticking (“Time poems”). In randomly selected poems, he would erase words and replace them with symbols (“Selective texts”). In other poems, he would throughout substitute binary code for vowels and consonants (“Bipoems”), or poetically mix and rearrange letters (“Numeric texts”). He used rubber stamps (“Typoems”) and drawings as part of a text’s typography (“Scriptural poems, Lettrisms”). He created repetitive structures from a typewriter’s accumulated letters (“Typorasters”), and visualized complicated life situations so as to produce a combination of lines, each representing a single human life (“Liniengedichte”). He combined drawings and text in diagrams, with a line representing intensity, tension and the passage of time among two verbally-defined polarities, such as life and death, tension and loosening (“Intentiograms”). M.Mu.