This ninth installment of Car Poems shifts gears to visual poetry. Below, Sacha Archer introduces viewers to his Framing Poems and elaborates on the power of a given frame to defamiliarize, destabilize, and ultimately expand and resignify the signs we take for granted.
The four visual poems here are from a series tentatively titled Framing Poems. My main concern in this work and some other related projects is the role of the creator—in this case, the poet. Framing Poems presents the poet as guide rather than, perhaps, as singer. Someone who directs, or re-directs, your attention. As the title suggests, framing is key. After all, part of these poems is a frame, and not just any frame, but a slide mount. Part of these poems is a frame. Not, these poems are framed (which, of course, they are, also, by context). These four poems investigate a book, a text, as object, by isolating and dislocating them through the rectangle of the slide mount—insisting on a visual gaze. What then happens to text and image relationship is largely up to chance—where a familiar image, i.e. road sign delivers you imaginatively, and how the (nearly) random text operates there.
Sacha Archer is an ESL instructor, childcare provider, writer, and visual artist, as well as the editor of Simulacrum Press (simulacrumpress.ca). His work has appeared in journals such as filling Station, h&, illiterature, NōD, UTSANGA, Matrix, Word for/Word and Otoliths. Archer’s first full-length collection of poetry, Detour, was recently published by gradient books (2017), followed by Zoning Cycle (Simulacrum Press, 2017). His recent chapbooks are, The Insistence of Momentum (The Blasted Tree, 2017), and upROUTE (above/ground press, 2017). He has a chapbook of visual poems forthcoming from Inspiritus Press entitled TSK oomph. He reviews, interviews and writes what he pleases at sachaarcher.wordpress.com. Archer lives in Burlington, Ontario.
