Afterword: Semantic Knots
BY Ari Wolff
These two visual poems, “On learning to hold oneself in the night” and “On the other side of longing,” come from a series of sculptural works, Semantic Knots. These underhanded knots are a form of wordless writing and an invitation for nonlinear modes of reading in the tradition of asemic writers such as Mirtha Dermisache and Henri Michaux. Scanning the sculptures textualizes and illuminates their formations, freezing them in position for poems to occur.
Knots are typically used to attach or fasten; they produce fabrics, nets, connections, anchors, etc. Like unreadable writing, these knots betray their function; they clasp nothing but themselves. They touch but do not connect. They commit only to questions. What does reading have to do with the body? What gestures are universal? What is possible beyond coherence? As you give meaning to this work, are you the reader or the writer?
View the visual poems this afterword is about, “On learning to hold oneself in the night” and “On the other side of longing.”
Ari Wolff is an artist and educator whose work engages language as a visual object. Wolff lives in Queens, New York.