Curated by Christodoulos Makris Is this a Poem? draws its reader in and asks them what—and how—they think
by Catherine Gander
Christodoulos Makris has spent most of his artistic career pushing the boundaries of aesthetic categories. Over several collections of poetry, digital artworks and other poem-objects, he has explored poetry’s capacity not only to hold and deepen the reader’s attention, but to activate the reader’s creative responses, and to put those responses to use.
For Makris, poetry is less a Wordsworthian outpouring of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” than an immediate, active encounter with a kind of buzzing, social energy. His poems are often ‘found’ (verbal collages of text already in the world), and frequently draw their material from the digital space in which we all, increasingly, spend our time.
Working in a country whose rich poetic history is so closely associated with the lyric and the land, Makris invites his readers to widen their poetic perspectives, to query the very definition of poetry, and to consider the biases that underly our comfortable aesthetic preferences. His latest curatorial project, Is this a poem? Adventures on the edge of an artform, currently showing at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in Dublin, is one such invitation.
Political and personal, playfully self-aware and formally inventive, the pieces in Is this a poem? exist beyond the page and outside the parameters of what the Irish literary mainstream regards as poetry. The exhibition works across six strands—video, audio, object, installation, digital, performance—requiring the reader to listen, to watch, to touch, and to feel, to enter the poem’s space and participate in its making. “In Ireland,” Makris tells me, as we settle down to our discussion in a backroom studio of MoLI, “this work is often relegated to a footnote in the story of poetry – and this is in large part my impulse for putting the exhibition together.”
the pieces in Is this a poem? exist beyond the page and outside the parameters of what the Irish literary mainstream regards as poetry
It’s always difficult to break embedded assumptions about what warrants the appellation ‘poetry’, but Ireland has been a particularly tough nut to crack. “Irish poetry is often concerned with certain things about Irish identity, but not the other things about Irish identity,’” Makris says. “Some of this is to do with visibility, about who gets invited to festivals or receives coverage and in what contexts, and about how Irish poetry is perceived and promoted.”
Ireland’s critical culture also has a big part to play in helping to broaden the horizon of the Irish poetry landscape. Makris is certainly not alone in coming up against barriers to challenging attitudes toward what constitutes poetry in Ireland, and toward who should be allowed to make it and to comment upon it. The landscape is, happily, changing, and Is this a poem? is a crucial reminder that poetry, in all its formal and aesthetic diversity, is a vital part of our culture – vital in the sense of essential, but also in the sense of living, energetic, evolving.
An Irish avant-garde
I ask Makris how the exhibition came about. “I’d written an essay on Irish avant-garde poetry, and the exhibition grew out of that,” he explains (an abridged version of the essay can be read in issue 59.2 of Poetry Wales). “I knew the curators at MoLI wanted to animate the museum space with contemporary work. When I pitched the idea to them 2 years ago, I thought the exhibition might go some way towards giving these works cultural legitimacy. Can we widen our conversation about what poetry in Ireland is?”
The pieces on display are clearly in broader conversation, also, with 20thcentury avant-garde movements such as Dada, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Does Makris see his work, and the exhibition at large, as a natural development of an avant-garde tradition? “Absolutely,” he responds. “Avant-garde is a form of expression that embeds within it contemporary modes of living. Many of the modes and explorations in this exhibition are to do with technology. So visitors and readers without a classical background in poetry might be more likely to engage with these works in an immediate way, albeit without using words like ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ – which can be alienating to the general public.”
Can we widen our conversation about what poetry in Ireland is?
One exhibit self-consciously removed from the digital realm is Sara Baume’s ‘Handmade Readymade Souvenirs’: exquisite little replicas of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, crafted out of scrap materials and presented in a glass cabinet. Playing with concepts that Duchamp’s now legendary intervention injected into artistic discourse (among them: appropriation, recontextualisation, aesthetic agency, and the role of the found object), Baume calls these recreated Readymades “an attempt at irony”. Was that Makris’s reason for including them here?
“They are an outlier in some ways,” he tells me. “But they are also a signifier for all the other pieces in the exhibition. They get us thinking: does a poem have to be crafted, or can it be ready-made?” Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917) was famously rejected by the salon of the Society of Independent Artists on the grounds that it wasn’t art. What ‘Fountain’ did, of course, was to fundamentally shift those grounds, turning a negation into a question that would ring through curated spaces thence onward: is this art?
“This whole exhibition is a question,” Makris tells me. “The question mark is its motif.” Does he have an answer to the question his exhibition poses? “I don’t even think the answer is important,” he says. “A poem has to always question its form, and the limits of the artform itself. These questions guide what I do, and are always behind my approach, whether in my creative work, my editorial work, or my curatorship.”
Encountering the poem
Originally 14 pieces dotted throughout MoLI (we’ll come to why 14 became 12 later), Is this a poem? is arranged a little like a numbered treasure hunt, encouraging visitors to actively seek out the pieces among the permanent exhibits and the architectural elements of Newman House, the museum’s Georgian townhouse premises. “We even talked about putting an exhibit in the toilet,” Makris delights in telling me. “I’ve done that before, in StAnza Poetry Festival in Scotland. We didn’t do that here in the end, but the idea is always to challenge people’s expectations. For example, Robert McClean’s video poem ‘Songs for Ireland’ is under the back stairs as you enter, or outside the café as you exit.”
The physicality of the exhibition is crucial; it’s a multisensory experience
Of course, you can decide not to follow the guide at all, and let the exhibits appear in front of you in a more chance encounter. In which case, the question of the exhibition’s title resonates louder: “Is this a poem? Is this part of the exhibition, even?” I put it to him that how we arrive at these exhibits—often suddenly, so that our awareness of them is created in the moment, in a way that is total, and embodied, and immersive—is similar to the way a poem acts on our consciousness to activate an often unexpected, synaesthetic response. “Yes!” Makris enthuses. “In fact, in some cases, you enter the poems. The physicality of the exhibition is crucial; it’s a multisensory experience. We have Suzanne Walsh’s ‘BirdBecomeBird’, a vocalisation of bird song, piped into the museum’s garden; we have the videos of poetic performances by Emma Bennett and Ella de Burca among others; we have Bebe Ashley’s Braille poems framed on walls and stuck to various surfaces throughout the museum… You need to have a body to experience these poems in some way.”
Such embodied encounters, I suggest, call to question issues of access. “You’re right,” says Makris. “And this is important too. For example, the majority of visitors will not be able to read Ashley’s poems—but some will. Yet the poem still exists. Likewise, when we held a number of performances on March 1st here at MoLI as a core element of the exhibition, we called them poems. Where are they now? They were recorded, but seeing a recording is not the same as being at their live happening. Those poems exist in the moment of their performance, and in the memory of the encounter.”
Those poems exist in the moment of their performance, and in the memory of the encounter
Physicality is therefore as important to the poems in this exhibition – and to poetry in general – as impermanence and immateriality. Working in a poetic tradition that includes the documentary, Makris knows well the impulse to illuminate hidden histories and amplify muted voices. If archiving the past entails putting it in a box and filing it out of sight, documentary poetry unboxes it, breathes life into it, and in many cases transgresses the boundaries of media and discipline to dismantle the box entirely. In such cases, the document, which has become the poem, is extended beyond the confines of its original formal and (con)textual conditions.
There are exhibits in Is this a poem? that engage with the box in its transitional form. The glass-lidded wooden container of Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME, in which reams of translucent paper bear typed, fragmentary witness to the atrocities enacted at the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, stands in quiet testimony in the middle of what was once the drawing room of Newman House, turning the space into an unsettling chapel of (un)rest.
Other exhibits project text onto screens or write it on walls, such as Julie Morrissy’s ‘1937 Constitution of Ireland’, which reminds us, via verbatim quotation, of the stark sexism structuring the State’s foundations. While some exhibits ask us to come up close, others require us to step back to see. This concertinaing of perspective prompts us to consider our interactions, not only with the poems, but with their ostensible speakers, and with the other bodies moving through the exhibition in tandem with us.
The medium is the message
Makris’s own piece in the exhibition, ‘Chances Are’, is a ‘riverrun’ of language generated by computational code: a real-time feed of every post on the website X (formerly Twitter) featuring the word ‘chance’. During my visit, I saw multiple posts in French, many by consumerist bots, some about football, but most about a triumvirate of politics, sex, and money. Chances are that these are the impulses that drive social discourse, at least on X. Yet the more I read, the more I felt the sting of not being heard: I was standing in front of an echo chamber, reading the transcript of a conversation from which communicational exchange had been evacuated.
“Often,” Makris says, “when we think we are responding to someone online, they may not even be listening – by which I mean reading. It’s like talking to a void. And something that appears very important in one moment can be quickly forgotten and disappear in the next. It won’t come back again. There’s a comment in this piece about the ephemerality of communication and the medium itself. It can be switched off. It can change form.” (The original code for the piece, when X was Twitter, is now defunct.) “It has no end. It had a beginning, but the beginning is lost in the abyss. Will it still exist when the exhibition ends? In theory it will, even if no one sees it.”
‘Holes’ by Graham Allen plays with related concepts, projecting ten-syllable, one-line, diary entries as lines of a vast, scrolling poem. Each poetic line is dated (the first at 23 December 2006), which has the effect of a poem coming toward us through both space and time, catching up to us, as if we, in the hyper-present of the poetic moment, are the poem’s teleological end point.
Yet ‘Holes’ is also, in a way reminiscent of Baume’s wry piece, about history repeating itself. Many of the entries could be relevant today, including those referring to the war on Gaza: “29/07/2018 // When Gaza is flattened, the war will move on”. Reading Allen’s poem, I found myself trying to impose a narrative on his life, filling in the gaps between his diary entries with what might have happened.
Does this human impulse to narrativize play a part in Makris’s poetic and curatorial vision? “I enjoy work that I need to grapple with,” Makris tells me. “I don’t enjoy work that gives up its meaning – that gives you everything on a plate and asks for nothing from you. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot: how to create gaps for the reader to enter into the work? To inject their own experiences, personalities, in a way that doesn’t lock them out but involves them in the poem?”
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot: how to create gaps for the reader to enter into the work?
All of the exhibits in Is this a poem? ask for the reader to exercise their critical-creative capacity. So is ‘reader’ still the most appropriate word to use here? Is ‘participant’ better? Makris ponders this. “‘Reader’ still works”, he decides. “In contemporary reality, we read, most of the time, in the same spaces as we contribute. I’m thinking mostly about social media here. But as readers, we are increasingly implicated in everything we read and create, because most of our reading, at least our casual reading, for better or for worse, happens in the digital space, and we often end up feeding back into that space, by posting, replying, reposting, etc. I think there’s been a shift in the way we read. It used to be more passive, and now it’s more active, at least for me. Reading creates meaning, as well. That shift is key to the work I do and to a lot of the work here.”
This is (y)our poem
Experimental poetry is still often pitched (erroneously) against ‘traditional’, lyric verse as a form that intentionally confuses its reader, disorientating them by defamiliarization or high concept. But Is this a poem? is expansive and inclusive; it draws its reader in and asks them what—and how—they think. The pieces in his exhibition explore the spaces, virtual or otherwise, of our connections and missed connections, of our repeated attempts to relate to each other, to something beyond and bigger than ourselves. “It’s interesting that you say that”, Makris nods. “The final exhibit in the show, which is not on display any more, was called ‘Is This Your Poem?’ We wanted to invite a response to the whole exhibition, and so we gave visitors a wall, and crayons to make marks on it. We didn’t know what response we’d get. Would people be reluctant to sully a museum wall? But it became huge. People went outside the borders of where they were supposed to mark. It looked like a mural.”
What fascinates me most about this final exhibit is how Makris describes it – as if the piece itself was a living entity, an animated, seething mass of marks made by a collective experiencing a deep need to be heard and seen, to contribute, somehow, to the discourse: “It escaped its confines”, Makris enthuses. “It started going in one direction, then another, and then it started going up the stairs.”
When Makris describes to me how the behaviour of the exhibit proved too challenging for the museum, I find myself sympathising with the artwork, as if it were a caged animal that broke its bars too many times and had to be terminated for the public good. “It escaped from where it was supposed to go,” Makris explains. “The concept overcame the practical constraints. So in the end it got decommissioned.” Makris pauses. Was this coming-to-life of the poem a surprise? “It was unexpected,” he responds, “although I was absolutely delighted with it. Sometimes the institution cannot hold the ideas it tries to contain.” Sometimes, art breaks the barriers of what is expected of it.
Is this a poem? runs at MoLI until 22nd September, 2024.
Catherine Gander is a critic, poet, and academic specialising in documentary poetry and word-art intersections. She led the mentoring and social change project ‘Diversifying Irish Poetry: Poetry Critics of Colour in Ireland’ (affiliated with Ledbury Poetry Critics UK), which was responsible for drastically increasing the visibility of poetry critics of colour in Irish publications (funder: Irish Research Council; strategic partner: Poetry Ireland). Her most recent poetry book is Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024) and most recent academic book is The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Maynooth University.
Christodoulos Makris is one of Ireland’s leading experimental poets. He has published five books of poetry as well as several limited-edition pamphlets, artists’ books, digital projects and other poetry objects. He has received commissions and awards from Irish Museum of Modern Art, StAnza Festival (Scotland), Maynooth University, The Arts Council of Ireland, University College Dublin, and Irish Arts Center (New York) among others. He is poetry editor at gorse journal, and his many programming and curatorial credits include partnerships with International Literature Festival Dublin, European Poetry Festival, and Museum of Literature Ireland.
