Ponge

On the typographic shrubbery constituted by the poem along a path that leads neither away from things nor toward the mind, a kind of fruit is formed from an agglomeration of spheres, each filled with a drop of ink.¹

Hardly simply the blackberries themselves. Hardly simply the experience of seeing them. Hardly even the strangeness of writing something of this down. But all and none of these. The poem shapes the shrubbery along a path that leads neither one way or the other – neither toward the simplicity of the blackberries themselves, nor toward the integrity of a mental image. Nonetheless this negative space somehow provides a foundation for ‘a kind of fruit’ to form, gaining its essence precisely through the alienation of writing, in the alienated image of writing, in the blood of writing.

But this is not to say that there is only writing. The blackness is right there, but also points elsewhere and negates every effort to see. The blackberries remain close but there is nothing to see. There is only the instant of the blackberries appearance and disappearance within the poem.