[-empyre-] revisiting Ana Maria Uribe's work

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

When I first encountered Ana Maria Uribe's work, I thought it was basically
old concrete poetry in animated form on the Web, and I wasn't interested in
the mimesis of the meaning of the word and the shape of the poem because
concrete seemed to me simple-minded about language and language was not
simple; it wasn't concrete but abstract, and concrete seemed to be trying to
sweep its complexity under the rug. But, as usual, I see that I was
mistaken.

I think now that concrete meant something to Ana Maria that it didn't to me.
I think there is a lot more going on in it than I saw at the time. For one
thing, she started into visual poetry in the sixties. We're talking about a
woman who knew somewhere around seven languages; and she was steeped in
letters all her life: her father was a well-known poet and also translated
international poetry for the newspapers in Buenos Aires. I think concrete,
for her, remained a fresh way of knowing most of her adult life, and its
idioms were very well known to her. She was an explorer and a traveller, as
we've mentioned, and the idioms of concrete provided her a way of departing
into the unknown rather quickly yet concrete provided the basis of a
language that she did not have to build from scratch but had participated in
almost from the start of concrete itself. And she knew people such as Vigo
who were strongly involved in concrete.

Ana Maria's work is understated in the best sense of that word. When she
told me she could not make plans for March, I feared the worst, and that was
her way of telling me that she was probably going to die in March or before
that, it seems. When I look at the first of her visual poems, "Waterfall"
(1968, http://www.vispo.com/uribe/waterfall.html ) we see what appears to be
quite a simple piece. And it is simple, in many ways, until you think of it
as a read thing. Poetry slips between our fingers. Here is a poem without
letters, a poem of a sequence of parentheses where the 'meaning' is not
simply in the 'picture' or even the language-as-picture concept but in the
no-language-as-language concept. Nothing is cupped between the parentheses.
That is how we hold poetry. That is the beauty of language that we cup in
our hands. Nothing and everything. Or a waterfall.

In the 1969 "A Cutting Poem" ( http://www.vispo.com/uribe/sharp.html ) we do
have a little bit of language going on here. This sort of work does need to
be read; you don't get it by the picture alone. For me, the main thing about
this piece is the play between several infinities or eights and several
zeroes or oh's. Somehow in a single gesture several infinites can be cut or
split into zeroes or oh's. That is how plentiful infinities are, that is how
common it is to split them into two nothings. A kind of an every day
operation like cutting corn. As in  "Waterfall", there is a play between
nothing and everything, or nothing and something.

"A Flock of Angels", part of A Host of Halfties (1997,
http://www.vispo.com/uribe/flock.html ) is quite an improbable piece. This
was done the first year she was building her web site. She has moved into
use of sound, color, and animation. The concept of the fifteen "T"'s as a
flock of angels is striking, somehow, partly because there is the suggestion
that angels are manifested through language. There is a strong electric and
metallic aspect to the sound and look of the piece, and an impression also
of receeding space if we look at it for a while. If we did not know the
title, we would probably not guess that we were looking at a flock of
angels. But then I suppose that angels could be not obvious at all in this
way. We also sense Ana Maria's pleasure and excitement at taking visual
poetry into this new language territory.

A Host of Halfties also includes "A Shoal of Mermaids" and "A Herd of
Centaurs" and, again, they are entirely lettristic. Or perhaps not. Perhaps
they are only half lettristic. Half language, half something else.

"Discipline" (2002) http://www.vispo.com/uribe/disciplina2/disciplina.html
reminds me of the time Ana Maria sent a couple of posts to webartery about
the situation in Kashmir when she was travelling in the north of India and
the press was full of reports of impending war between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir. Ana Maria, on the other hand, reported that families were
holidaying and enjoying themselves in the mountainous and splendid natural
beauty and war was considered very improbable indeed, though there was a lot
of noise in the press about it. She did not rush to go home but enjoyed her
trip to its conclusion.

Ana Maria was in Argentina during the "dirty war" in which about 30,000
citizens of Argentina 'disappeared' at the hands of government death squads.
They were rooting out largely imaginary communist terrorists. So Ana Maria
was all too familiar with very bad government indeed, and militarism at
home. "Discipline" makes fun of it. We discussed authoritarian language a
bit on the list. "Discipline" is Ana Maria's attitude toward
authoritarianism in a couple of forms.

ja