Void Forms

A visual poem by Ben Robinson

Without Form by Ben Robinson, The Blasted Tree

I have been thinking much about collapsing texts as of late, a phrase I have no fixed definition for but has felt in line with my own current textual explorations. So upon stumbling over Ben Robinson’s Without Form I felt a flash of recognition—perhaps this is what I am aiming for: a text that is entirely absent of text. There exists the ghost of a text here, yes, as Robinson’s series of visual poems bases itself in the form of the bible, and uses a quote from Genesis 1:2 to ground the project (“And the earth was without form, and void.”), but the words themselves are vanished, leaving simply the numerical notations of chapter and verse. Can I say I prefer the bible this way? How simple it renders the religious/spiritual endeavor: to seek not what is there, but what is not. Here is Stevens’ snow man, “the listener, who . . . beholds / Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.” In their scattering of numbers across the page, Robinson’s poems project constellations, timeless patterns unhinged to language. “Where are the clouds of the mind?” asks Elisa Gabbert. If the mind’s clouds gather in language, here is a text unclouded, revealing starpoints dancing in diffident configurations, a math of the dead, a technology of self-reference, footnotes to an ocean of key-less pianos. A direct communion with the Void, the one and only true form.

Read and watch the animated poems (lovely) at The Blasted Tree.