Now out from Otoliths—modulations by Márton Koppány

modulations
Márton Koppány
52 pages, full color
Page size 7½" x 7½"
Otoliths, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-2-0
$19.99 (currently with free postage in the U.S.A.)
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/modulations/11269905

Nearly sixty years ago, Charles Olson warned, “The poet cannot afford to traffick in any other sign than his ‘one’,” preparing the way whether he knew it or not for Márton Koppány to take leave of his native Hungarian and to move into English, where for more than two decades he has been creating traffic signs with the gleeful abandon of a deranged city planner with an advanced degree in Dada. Or maybe not so deranged. I read the poems in modulations as perfectly sensible, whether fish are emitting thought bubbles in the sky, or a table’s legs are deconstructed to show their essentially asemic nature. Language is our great connecting principle and Koppány’s language artfully breaks, reduces, and repairs poetry with a metaphysician’s discomfort matched with a physician’s healing touch. —Peter O'Leary

There was a time when pictures and writing were not as separate as they are today, a time when the picture was given not just to show but to tell; a sort of “picture-writing.” And each “pictograph” was as an aperçu, at once an insight into and a brief digest of the thought to be communicated. The poet Márton Koppány has found for himself a form most becoming of his intuition; each panel here is an aperçu into that space where picture and writing are one, that space where the mind knows the word in the figure of its substance, that space that is language-in-eidos. And so I see Koppány’s panels as “eidographs,” as urtexts of “eidetic poetry.” —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, author of The Logoclasody Manifesto

What can you say about . . . except that . . . with clouds just
where they . . . which is, to say, in short, a master of the . . .,
as well as . . . the. For instance, the refle . . . one poem
of the invis. . . stillness (         ), not to exclude (

                                    In fullest slowest color. —Bob Gru . . . n

The minimalist visual poetry of Márton Koppány has many qualities lifting it high and above most visual poetry composed over the last 100 years in any language. We are fortunate he has chosen to compose in his second language, American English, wedded to discipline. His manifestations always lean forward into the new, not a mere recycling of the old and worn out. It brings smiles, smirks and the belly laugh. It is consistently permeated with the rare characteristic of awe so many others lack and never reach for. And, for me, on too many occasions, his visions give me a jealous wish that it had come my way rather than his. —Karl Kempton