Archive of: Roznoveanu, Mirela
12 by Mirela Roznoveanu
More years ago than I'm willing to admit, Jim Andrews and I were having an email exchange and he was discussing one particular challenge he found in creating digital art using Adobe® Photoshop®, which is that the artist has to always be careful that the finished piece doesn't look like it was created using Adobe® Photoshop®. Within the context of the conversation it was clear that what we were talking about wasn't so much hiding the tool itself, but, ensuring that the work demonstrated what the artist could do with the tool, not what the tool could do for the artist.
One defining characteristic of concrete poetry, to me, is the way nuts and bolts of language are exposed to scrutiny, leveraged, in fact, to make the poem. The fact of the object, the token, the tool that is language is a part of the meaning making mechanism of the poem.
The following 12 pieces by Mirela Roznoveanu were obviously created digitally, there is something PowerPoint-slide about them that makes me think of the office, of business, of flow charts, diagrams, and of math. There's also enough freehand-looking lines to qualify parts of these as being doodles, or sketches, or provisional notes of exploration. I like this notion of poetry in general, and of concrete poetry in specific—that the poem is a provisional doodle of a flowchart of the mathematics of meaning.
Please click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
Climax Series
Poem Series
Zen Series
Born in Romania, Mirela Roznoveanu has published volumes of essays, literary criticism, poetry, and novels. She also distinguished herself as a journalist. In 1991 she came to the USA where she continues to write prolifically for both American and Romanian publications. Her many books include, in the USA, The Life Manager and Other Stories, Born Again--in Exile and, in Romania, The Civilization of the Novel: A History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote, Life on the Run, Platonia, Time of the Chosen, and Apprehending the World. Next year will see the realease of a new book of poems, New York Elegies.
For more by and about Mirela Roznoveanu , please visit http://pages.nyu.edu/~mr24/