Prelim

This site will present the blogbook Post Language, a three-part collection of poems incorporating pictures, accompanied by an essayistic attempt at a statement of their poetics. The three parts are titled with familiar phrases: "Taking Thought," poems of perception; "Trouble in Mind," poems of social contract; and "Get the Picture," poems of image vocabulary. The guiding concept in the poetics is a use of the word "illustrativity" to extend beyond and around the term "illustration." This is developed through the way that the suffix "-ative" forms an adjective describing "the habit of performing an action" rather than the simple noun form of an action ("illustration" as a thing which "illustrates"), and then becomes a descriptive noun through the suffix "-ity" expressing state or condition. That is to say: the state and condition of a habitual sense of comprehending illustration, i.e. "illustrativity," is what is being worked with here. Hopefully, this will appear through the relations of words to pics to thot.

Each poem/picture here was posted first on FaceBook. It was the procedure there by which you "Add Photo" and then "say something about this photo" that led to the creation of these works. Thus, "Post Language" as their title. They were all posts already before they got posted here. The urge to be "illustrative" has a longer history explicated somewhat in the essay posted between books two and three.