The exhibition ‘telefonkatalogdiktet’ in the library Deichmanske bibliotek, Schous plass, Oslo
In 2006 I was back in the library where it all started three years earlier (see ‘het still’). The exhibition was made and organized in the same way as before, with large-scale prints made from book-pages spread around in the library.
The same year the Norwegian publishing house Samlaget had published my most important work as a concrete poet: telefonkatalogdiktet (‘the telephone-book poem’). When reading (!) the telephone-book of Oslo, I had picked out about 1100 family names on a subjective, poetic basis. By ordering them after numbers of letters and syllables, I have created different structures and pictures. This was possible by the use of the font “Courier” that gives all letters the same space on the line, just like old typewriters did. This creates a connection not only to the old way of making concrete poetry, but also to pattern poetry.
Graphic design: Dimitri Kayiambakis and Ottar Ormstad