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poetry and essays

My visual poetry is inspired by Milton and Mekas; as much as by Carrion’s and Gomringer’s minimalist pages, the lightness of Chinese scrolls, as well as Lithuanian worlds and stories. I started writing because — like Carrion — I was curious what words do on the page, how they talk to each other and to us. Like Gomringer, I started writing in constellations, with words imitating themselves as snowstorms and curtains. Unlike Gomringer, I do not strip the words down to fig leaves; I am not interested in naked concepts. I am interested in the dust around the words, in the noise between the words and the audience, in the glow of their meaning, their form and their sound, their ambience. I am interested in the hazy edges of snowand sniegas, of   artist book and   poem.

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Until recently I did not write poetry or essays. As a foreigner, I felt I did not have a licence to write in English, as if I lacked the entitlement to play with the nuances between English words. At the same time, after decades in the UK, my Lithuanian had narrowed to kitchen routines. Reading Tomas Venclova, and then Jonas Mekas — Lithuanian poets writing from inside other languages — I began to negotiate my own alienation from my native one.

I often write in two languages. I am acutely aware that for many readers Lithuanian will register less as a text and more as a visual and sonic foreign presence on the page.

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My visual poetry did not emerge from a disillusionment with language and traditional poetic forms; my goal was never to make the language less abstract or less opaque. I do not believe language is abstract or opaque. I don’t think language fails in its expressive power either. Quite the opposite. Language is a miraculous capacity that we have used for communication and art for thousands of years. We have physiology to make it audible, we have developed signs to make it visible, we have the brains to process it into any story, even those that had never existed.

Language is malleable: it can be transformed into something abstract and opaque, as well as luminous and piercing. It can embody a constitution and a myth. Language is neither political, nor feminist, nor creative. It is akin to paint, which can be used to paint a house and the Adoration of the Magi .

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Poems that were made as books and prints are gathered under works.