"SONG" by MARTON KOPPANY

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

"SONG" in HUNGARIAN LANGART by Marton Koppany
(Eratio Postmodern Poetry Issue 18, 2013)

[First published in The Blind Chatelaine's Keys, March 23, 2013]

"Song" (see above) has just become one of my favorite Marton Koppany visual works. And that's because I interpret it as an ars poetica. Whatever one says -- whatever a poem presents -- is inevitably affected by the listener/viewer's subjectivity and so the communicated or poetry experience is completed by audience -- as shown by the incomplete bubbles of its speech balloons. But note, too, how the bubbles are incomplete. That is, the shapes taken out of the bubbles look like bite-marks (those shapes could have been shaped in numerous other ways, like a crack; instead, they offer the implication that the listener/viewer "bit" into (or interrupted) the remarks or poems. This implies that the incompleteness of the remark or poem may be due, not to the communicator/author but because, the audience is not totally listening to the message. Either way the result is the same: the experience is affected by its audience.

Further, note how Marton positioned the speech balloons to be coming from what looks like nests. That's apt, for what is being communicated is just the egg to what will become the experience.

Last but not least, I do appreciate the work's optimism as denoted by its title, "Song" and enhanced by the choice of light blue for the background. It suggests that the experience will be a beneficial one, and while one cannot hope for that worthwhile interaction from all or most general communications, one can hope for it when what's being presented is a poem. Hence, ars poetica.

Thannnnnnnnnnnk you, Marton!

*****



Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor. But she is also pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books.  Her 2013 book, THE AWAKENING was reviewed by Aileen Ibardaloza at OurOwnVoice; and her 2004 book MENAGE A TROIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, was reviewed (along with Joi Barrios' poetry) through the essay "The Self Revolution of Radical Love--Externalizing Internal Worlds of Freedon in Filipina Poetry" by Michaela Spangenburg at OurOwnVoice.  Eileen invites you to her new blog, EILEEN VERBS BOOKS; poets are invited to participate in three of its features: "Poetry and Money," "What Are You Reading?" and "What Do You Re-Read?"