"Faith"

Hello! My name is Flutur and I am following the electronic literature blog remotely. Robert Kendall’s “Faith” is a visual poem, as Ana reminds, but also a kinetic one.

The independent movement of the colored lexical units along the white screen is seminal, because it helps to establish and expand the text. Its expansion, especially, takes place in the form of a rhetorical release - most of the predicates are cut apart, most of the copulas are semantically displaced, and the lines and sentences constantly fragmented, in the end favoring the isolation of the single word.

Grammatical transfers take place thus producing the counter-effect of the traditional ‘single transcendental principle’. It announces an inconsistency between the destabilizing effects of the rhetoric as it is presupposed by the title of the poem, “Faith,” and the metaphorical compromise that the reader has to deal with in going through the poem.

The sentences care for a gravitational field which can be monitored as they marshal one another. At the end, however, they seem to violate the materiality of the language itself and adopt specific poetical postures. As the title of the poem falls down the page, the reader/viewer understands that there is a fundamental change in tone from the assertion of transcendence in the beginning of the poem to the acknowledgment of negation and hence absence and death at the end.