Writing All Around Us

Thinking about "flarf" and "conceptual writing" - and about the concrete poetry at the ICA - and about the Futurists - and about Ezra Pound - there is writing all around us that we ignore, or treat as hieroglyphics. Took a few little photos in the week.

The way language gets used, debased, or made meaningless interests me. So I had to chuckle, given that we live on an island, at our "aquatic deprivation" in the first picture here; then as if to emphasise the stark warning black on yellow, and the wonderful, er...dead person drawn there (it was at some sort of electrical installation), the existential rubric "danger of death" - yes, we all face that, poets especially give it much thought. And, the anonymous graffitti artist in the toilets at Kentucky Fried Chicken, creating what - a warning? a haiku?