I have tried to ferret out what “Liquidity Issues” is and have frequently been up against the question of what we do not know about “Liquidity Issues.” We do not know whether the project is a true collaboration or a remediation. We do not know who the speaker in the poem is and what relation do they have with the woman in many of the lexia.
But when we let go of these unknowns, when we learn to ignore them and just appreciate the shininess of the project there is indeed a lot to like about “Liquidity Issues.”
To begin with, the poem has some wonderful lines. Taken as a whole, I don’t know that the poem entirely works. However with lines like, “Wouldn't salt in the wounds/ make you want to eat the body?” it is difficult not to appreciate the writer’s turn of phrase, even if the poem itself may not cohere completely.
The presentation of the poem, too, deserves examination beyond questions of its place in new media. At first, the presentation of the text comes off as gimmicky font-masturbation, but especially held up against the droll text of the poem by itself, the gimmicky-ness is replaced like the first time viewing Emily Dickinson’s fascicles against the print reproductions – there is something undeniable about text not constrained to left-to-right uniform size/font/weight – particularly in poetry – that enhances the text itself. The appearance of the text is uniform in that it fades in once the “camera” settles on one frame. However, there are two noticeable breaks from this pattern – two different lines appear over the image of the stitched cut, as well as the bare-midriff. The break in the expected pattern (Click, move, text. Click, move, text. Click, text.) causes visual dissonance that necessarily adds weight to the second line appearing on the image. In the case of the stitched skin image, the two text presentations deal with the body and the second one is the previously mentioned body/salt line – again, a strong line, but emphasized because it both breaks the rhythm of the navigation and because it is such a beautiful line transposed on such an ugly image.
While we do not know the extant (if any) of the separate pieces coming together, we do know that together the final picture is worth looking at. The project, taken for what it is (and not for what it is not) is more than the sum of its parts. How much more is open for debate, but I close this analysis with an appreciation for the shininess that “Liquidity Issues” is. It is not groundbreaking, but sometimes we don’t need to break new ground, but merely want to admire the ground upon which we stand.
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