Pictographs

Visual Poetry. Pictographs mixes the different types of picture-writing with fragments of prose-writings in a formal arrangement linked to West African visual traditions. Keith's constructions emply designs intended to be scanned metrically, a visual counterpart to the off-beat phrasing of melodic accents in African and Afro-American music. Keith's writing seems to be suspended between two othernesses: painting and music. The staggered siting of glyphs and signs marks the subtle crossover from picture language to picture theory. Text runs in strips against a black background, not so much as arguments to follow as seams joining master and slave narratives. In Keith's discourse on his situation as a poet in a late capitalist society, a picture emerges of an artist who in mastering his art becomes a slave to it.