When the word wants to be a thing

"After deluding ourselves for a while that tactility had no particular value, we once again appreciate its importance as a form of experience that binds us in the most intimate way, through our fingertips, to its source--the object of our interest. For the maker, the process of fashioning something three-dimensional using tangible materials, bounded by physical space, confers a feeling of actuality and, as a consequence, an element of authenticity that the depthless non-space of the computer screen cannot match. Constraints can even be a virtue, forcing the imagination to work harder. These qualities are communicated in the design and viewers pick up on them....For as long as we continue to inhabit our bodies and navigate a path through the material world, no digital stimulation will ever compare with the intense, unique, sensorial pleasure of being somewhere and making a mark." -- Rick Poynor, Print Magazine, Jan/Feb 2005 "Being There" (p. 33-34)

I think this is what I'm talking about in all of this "making poetry a thing" : my desire for tactility, for a process of making something. I think I've sort of written myself into a corner by claiming that I will, without a doubt, be making a space that represents a poem; when after thinking and reading about it more, I want to create a language that accomplishes some of the things that poetry does (surprise, discovery, illumination, making the ordinary extraordinary) but is not bound by the constraints of written language as we know/use it. Constraints that the reader experiences, and those that I experience in being limited to one set of tools. Poyner, above, may be talking specifically about the flatness of an image created on a computer, but I have never felt that printing a poem (or design) gives it that much more life, even if it is given a tangible form of sorts.

I can't get away from language, but I don't want the marks to be recognizable words. In the same issue of Print, there's an article about handcarving letters in stone, and how the letters stop being letters and become sculpture. Nick Benson, the inscriber for the text in Friederich St. Florian's World War II Memorial, talks about using "u cuts" vs. "v cuts" since their extra roundness would allow more light to enter and reflect around each letter.

This gave me an idea to combine marks and light: Get a typewriter (manual probably best) and type words (I suppose the thesis) on to thin paper (like tracing paper) and typing really hard so that on the reverse side you get indentations; actually,what I'd really like to do is break the paper, thereby also breaking free of the 2-d constraints AND creating tiny holes for light to show through so that when illuminated and casting a shadow, another "text" appears.

Layers that the book can include (that a regular book form precludes), that do inform the writing/making:
Poem
Academic references: cross as well as singular
Context, setting: where I was, how I was feeling, music