The Daily Glance

Márton Koppány's Modulations is a vispo book.  Most of the poems contain bits of language, even if they are asemicly oriented.  Several of the pieces are visually striking, such as "Study 1" and "Study 2," and several of the pieces make obvious but interesting language experiments, such as in "sleeping i" in which an "i" sleeps on a bed with the "i" curled like a person except that the dot of the "i" is below and to the side.  



My favorite section of the book is a series titled "Surface" that was completed with Mike Cannell.  The sequence plays off the single word "surface" and pushes the word visually into its meaning, i.e. there are places in which the word goes above and below a boundary that appears somewhat like water.  In some of these pieces, the word gets bits of its letters chopped off (like half a "u") so that the word seems to be coming in and out of some surface.  This process, of course, leads me into thinking about Saussure and into wondering if Koppány is making a critique of Saussure's theories.

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