Magnetic Poems

These clean, crisp-looking visual poems stand in contrast to Matthew Stolte’s recent work which makes much use of smeared paint and ink, partial forms, layerings, and other devices to create a veritable storm of lettristic forms and words. In these Magnetic Poems the colorful letter-forms are stable as found, and merely arranged on galvanized metal sheets. There is, however, an inherent instability in the original pieces, in that anyone could move the magnetic letters around. So this book can be seen as a moment stopped in time, as these pieces no doubt look different today. Because even moving them around is likely to jostle their arrangement. Thus this book is a talisman to the inherent protean nature of poetry and of the language of which it is made. -John M. Bennett