Northwest Concrete & Visual Poetry Exhibition
(OSEAO: Gallery of the Senses, 14th and Pike. Mon-Sat, 4-8 pm, free. Through May 29.)

The institution of the poetry festival can be problematic. Often poetry festivals lean on a vague rhetoric of celebration, when it's not at all clear if everyone really wants to celebrate the same thing, or to celebrate at all. In other words, they can be far too safe. The Seattle Poetry Festival (or rather its potentiality, in the form of the shiny, red press kit now gracing my fingertips, bright as Eve's own apple), however, promises to be interesting and uncomfortable, mixing poets from traditional, spoken word, and theory-driven approaches.

Fortunately, one doesn't need to rely exclusively on the assurances of a press release, as one small show is already up. And although the Concrete & Visual Poetry exhibit (at the OSEAO Gallery on 14th & Pike) isn't technically part of the festival, it may prove to be the most engaging of the various offerings. Curated by Nico Vassilakis, the exhibit features a wide sampling of poets/artists, including a large showing (about half) from the Northwest. These works are instances of what Gilles Deleuze would call a "territorial" (rather than "despotic") graphism; looking at them, the viewer is caught in a limbo-space between sign and image (or reading and seeing), which demands dynamic reconfigurations of both.

Ezra Mark's untitled image, for example, looks like an undecipherable handwriting, as if the "text" had evaporated from the lines, leaving behind the eerie ghost of a script. Other pieces are more typographical in orientation. Among Vassilakis' own contributions is 16 Walls, a series of tile-like constructions that breaks down the integrity of the alphabet itself, recombining and connecting the typographical elements of letters into unsettling and organic visual fields.

A digital slideshow provides historical context by presenting illustrative works from a variety of eras (medieval ornamentation, Dada texts, concrete, and language school poetry). Seeing them, it becomes apparent that these modes of writing constitute--in their resistances to the demands of voice and transparency--a space as vital as it is deliciously unstable. COLIN BOOY