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CHRIS MANSELL

New from Puncher & Wattmann and Thorny Devil Press: 101 Quads

101 Quads is the first in the Visual Poetics Series and first mainstream publication of the full set of quads.

Quads are a new form of poem I originally developed on a Lemair Deluxe 1300 typewriter (taking advantage of the fixed width of characters). The quads in this book are in Prestige Elite which echoes the Lemair. The first quad (afternoon ferry) was composed directly on this typewriter (and is almost indistinguishable from the printed text) but subsequent poems were composed using a grid, pencil, and importantly an eraser, before returning them to their native four square form. The poem within the poem was composed simultaneously.

The title of the original collection, Stung, or its offspring Stung More are examples of portmanteau interiors which can be sound-mined for red to produce new elemental poems which can be read (aloud) separately. They abstract their encasing poem and sometimes reduce it to an authocthonal form.

Fifteen characters, eight single-spaced lines, interlinked four times = one quad poem. Four hundred and eighty characters exactly.

Art lies in the limitations and in the freedoms one chooses. In the quads, the physical form is restricted but the structure of the poem is expansive and non-linear. If one were to make a diagram of a quad it would be a three-dimensional cluster rather than a list – rather like oral language which is persistently fluid, contextual and often incomplete.

The poems have no punctuation. This is partly aesthetic: the surface of the poems should be smooth and untrammelled by otherwise excellent apostrophes and their ilk. This has semantic consequences. There can be no it's. Importantly though, there are no full points, no shudder-stop endings. Sentences run together in a speech slide way as they do in talk. A fragment is enough to guess the rest in conversation. So. Meanings slide in and out of each other. Words also become promiscuous and make indecent conjugations.

There is necessary semantic and lexical disturbance: the poems slow down perception by eliding lexical units; the red/black words within words, destablilise and direct attention to subsidiary or additional meanings hidden in the words. They slow reading down and demand much of our informal but deep language skills. They are not, I think, translatable.

They are not concrete, not solid, but laminar.

The quads exist in some other forms, for example as a five metre long chiffon of 'afternoon ferry'.

Here afternoon ferry, as a five metre chiffon, is sailing from of a window in Great Buckingham Street, Redfern.

This quad is one of the more narrative poems and refers to Abdul's Lebanese restaurant in Redfern, Sydney, which has been a favourite of many for decades. I suggest you read the whole poem first and then the embedded poem in meta poem in red.

The original naked Lemaire Deluxe