untitled

Philip Gallo is a typographer-poet, or "typoet," and his work depends on the careful alignment of simple words for its effects. "untitled" makes reference to the concrete poetry of the middle of the twentieth century. Diter Rot, whose name serves as the central text of this poem, was famous for a number of rigid typographical poems, including one that played with the letters "t" and "u" to produce, in varying ways, the words "tu" (you) and "ut" ("do" on the musical scale). Gallo's poem also appears to allude to "ping pong" by Eugen Gomringer, another early concrete poet.—Geof Huth