REVIEWS

Fig is the very incarnation of the Amor de lonh, the love that can never pass into knowledge, the language that remains forever outside sense, ‘that can never be translated into the logical experience of signification’[16]: that is, it is poetry.

—Piers Hugill: Love and Grammar: Fig, Jacket #31 (October 2006)
Bergvall, a London-based poet who was raised French and Norwegian, is, along with Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most influential experimental spoken-word artists internationally.

—Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2006
Bergvall thinks of creating another language as of an exploration or a journey across language. Yet, as Bergvall’s ‘crossroads’ show, this trip is not linear; her texts are bred by points of contact where languages come and go. The vehicle of this traffic ‘at the crossroads of languages’(Bergvall 2002) is an overflowing, deconstructive linguistic movement challenging the notion of a dwelling for language.

— Vincent Broqua, Pressures of Never-at-Home: notes on gender in the work of Rosmarie Waldrop & Caroline Bergvall, Jacket #32 (April 2007)
Fig is the latest from London based poet Caroline Bergvall, whose text and sound pieces have been produced internationally. The work is multivalent; repetition and variation are often overlaid with graphic, physically performative, collaborative, or site specific aspects exploring language and materiality. While one might argue that for a poet the page, or text, is primary, Bergvall’s conceptual and constraint-based poetic practice offers a compelling challenge to this basic assumption.

—Sina Queyras: The Fruits of Risk , The Brooklyn Rail #5 (May 2006)
Goan Atom occurs at the junction of a number of different intellectual and aestheticcontexts: contexts which Bergvall has assiduously traced and, where necessary,created.

—Nicky Marsh: Review of FIG (Salt Books), HOW 2 (Vol.2. Nr. 2, Dec 2004)

A complicated volume to put together as a number of the pieces had initially been written and produced for presentation in various gallery or performance contexts. Each with a long compositional note attached to it. Black and white photo documentation.

VOLUME OF 12 PIECES

16 Flowers / Flèsh / About Face / Say Parsley / Via (48 Dante Variarions) / In Situ / More Pets / Dog / Reading Ginsberg / Reading Arendt / 8 Figs / Gong

DETAILS

ISBN: 9781643620015
Salt, Cambridge, 2005
Designed by Marit Münzberg
Out of Print

Fig is the second installment of Goan Atom and continues its exploration of poetic practice registered through physical uptake. Delighting in the corporeal use of language, these pieces explore the surface tensions of our encounters with the processes of recognition. Each piece has previously been initiated as part of a performance work or collaborative installation and short prefatory notes reflect on these different writing practices.

Purchase

8 Figs

DETAILS

Chapbook
Equipage, Cambridge, 2004

8 texts 16 ampersands 32 textual lines 48 sides
Designed by Marit Münzberg
Republished in full in Fig (2004)

EXCERPT

Fig 2 is a pattern.
As such a gradual development
like a fruit, or a face.
Purple is purple, grows more purple
more-purple then less, more-blue than red,
more blue then black, then more-black than blue.
Colour breaks out.
Leaves comatose ring around the mouth
spreads like a memory one hasn’t formally had, yet intensely familiar.
Neither returning nor gone
not approximated in language nor in promises of language.
…

Fig is the very incarnation of the Amor de lonh, the love that can never pass into knowledge, the language that remains forever outside sense, ‘that can never be translated into the logical experience of signification’[16]: that is, it is poetry.

Bergvall, a London-based poet who was raised French and Norwegian, is, along with Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most influential experimental spoken-word artists internationally.

Goan Atom occurs at the junction of a number of different intellectual and aestheticcontexts: contexts which Bergvall has assiduously traced and, where necessary,created.

8 Figs

Ghost Pieces

Goan Atom