Things Done for Themselves: Preverbs - Tapa blanda

Poetry. "Preverbs are not so much assertions as events. Read on the page or, better yet, spoken, each of Quasha's lines is an occasion for becoming aware of meaning in the making. Releasing words from semantic routine, reinventing syntax on the fly, the PREVERBS provide us with endless opportunities to entangle ourselves in ambiguity and seeming contradiction. As they bring us to the verge of unintelligibility, entanglement becomes an embrace and we generate new powerful meanings not once for all but in a succession of instants that carry us from line to line, page to page, precipitating us into an expansive, endlessly renewable present."—Carter Ratcliff

George Quasha is a poet, artist and musician who works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Author and/or editor of 20 books, his awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in video art.