Labile

Michael Basinski creates visual poems that are colorful cacophonies of text and shape. His handwritten poems, which often serve as scores for equally exuberant sound poems, are filled to the margin with broken lines of text that curl into one another, read from different directions, and are often filled with nonsense words of his own invention. "Labile" is a good example of a visual poem that defiantly spurns convention. It is a neo-Dadaist poem intent on shaking the reader out of quiet acceptance and somnolence.—Geof Huth