TYPEWRIT ; ERRORS AND COMPOSITION IN THE POETICS OF PLACE
While in Panama on site visit, I wrote a poem for each of the twelve days I was there. This was done with pen in my notebook. In the meantime, I started making a list of as many surface qualities as I could manage; by the end of the site-visit I had 37. Alongside this I shot seven rolls of black and white film trying to capture the various textures and surfaces of Panama and its waters. This was accomplished through daily walks and observations from the coast of Panama City. Given the nature of the analogue photographic process, I could not see the photographs I was making until I had returned to the Netherlands. Further, in order to lift the poems from the notebook into a presentable format, I used my typewriter. Retyping the poems unintentionally allowed for further editing, this was also accomplished in the Netherlands, after being on site. There is therefore in both cases (poem and image) a deferral of the site, a postponement of the encounter with what it seeks to describe. This set out the beginning of thoughts of the image as (non)site, a relationship between site and sightlessness, and the idea that process, form, and content are much more involved with one another than is commonly understood.
Typewriting is a skill that, unlike using a keyboard in Microsoft Word, requires practice. The results can be unforgiving because there is no backspace, it is real. In typing out these poems, I had created mistakes – transferring poetry from a handwritten notebook to A4 sheets, and editing on the fly while needing to focus much more diligently on each keystroke resulted in mistakes. I tried to correct them in the same document instead of typing them onto a clean sheet of paper; thereby leaving traces of changing ideas, missteps in the production, lapses in judgment and fragments of a contingent poetry. The error gained power as a compositional feature, so long as it was accommodated within the structure and goal of the final product. These poems were titled, ‘Poems on Water’ and bundled as a loose collection of pages, indulging in the ambiguity that the work was at once ‘on’ the topic of water, and at the same time, the ideas were afloat, in motion, and therefore quite literally on water. While at the typewriter, I produced one additional poem, composed of the corrective keystroke of the dash: ‘-‘ to create a sequence of lines and rhythms that emulate the pattern of ripples receding into the distance.