Michael Smith

Body of Text Michael Smith

Poetry. Photography. Performance. BODY OF TEXT is a collection of concrete poems made by marrying poetry with body-based performance art and documentary photography. Dressed in a full black body-suit, Michael V. Smith is photographed by David Ellingsen in hundreds of poses which resemble Greco-Roman letters, Asian characters, hieroglyphs, or Rorschach inkblots. These are then arranged in book form, to a maximum of three images per page. In the same spirit of moving beyond language as heard in the sound poetry of Christian Bok the poems in BODY OF TEXT occupy a liminal space between poetry and visual art. The body is made word, is made site, object and subject. The body is symbol.