Richard Kostelanetz
35 YEARS OF VISIBLE WRITING: A Memoir

Koja Press
ISBN-10: 0970722486
ISBN-13: 978-0970722485
 Paper, 54 pp, 6x9
$12

Richard Kostelanetz has been a leading otherstream poet for several decades.  His general mode of working as a poet is to find some feature of words that few if any other poets have exploited, and build several thousand poems exploiting it.  Well, maybe only a few hundred.  Anyway, 35 Years of Visible Writing contains many of the best of them, with a valuable commentary by the author on his practice and philosophy as a poet.

Making the book by itself close to a visual poem is its design by Igor Satanovsky, who provides just the right images of Kostelanetz's work in just the right places not only to near-perfectly accompany Kostelanetz's commentary but flow interactively into a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts, to use an expression Kostelantz says in the book is a main aim of his as a poet.  Nothing stunningly brilliant, just a lot of things elegantly and sensitively applied.  For instance, Satanovsky alternates white on black with conventional black on white pages throughout much of the book.  The first exception to the alternation is a . . . minimalist canvas, I'd call it, filled with “69” over and over in black on a white background.  The constant op-art reversal of the “6” (or is it the "9?") is given an extra charge by the sudden white background where black was expected.  Elsewhere, a lefthand page contains one of Kostelanetz's "corner poems," as I guess I'd name them, in which the corners of the page is occupied, respectively, by “WORDS,” “VECTORS,” “VIBRATIONS” and “POEM,” in white, each oriented in a different way (i.e., perpendicularly upward, and the reverse, and horizontal, and upside-down).  On the facing page is a variation of the same poem that consists of the same four words and orientations plus twelve other "inter-resonant" words that form four smaller corner poems.  That it switches to black letters on a white page makes it seem like a jump from night into day.

Satanovsky does all kinds of other things with different-sized type, text going up and down or in circles or elsehow, shaped swatches of text, and the like — always enhancing Kostelanetz's discussion and works, never intruding on them.

POETRY