“I’m asking you to believe, not in my ability to bring about real change in Washington. I’m asking you to believe in yours.” —Barack Obama.

With Endgames, Marton Koppany seems to be attempting to step beyond his trademark “poor” or minimalist work, which I think is his source of strength. This is indeed a difficult proposition for originals like M.K. who arrive at a form that seems perfectly to fit what they have to say. Where to go next? Armand Schwerner was in a similar situation with his “Tablets,” I think and he eventually arrived at a complicated, totally self-self-self-conscious articulation for his series that–I have to admit–disenchanted me. Marton also takes one or two steps in that direction with his “Graffiti 1-12″ series in which he riffs on his trademark empty frames and cryptic statements, by adding seemingly personal, perhaps even autobiographical, annotations. And this is the point: to anyone who knows the previous work, “Graffiti” comes across as a step toward the self-involved, the more easily indentifiable, even the cute. The genuine shock, the metaphysical humor, of the older work is replaced here with a commentary on the autobiographical narrative that we’ve encountered before.

Finally–a note on my own publishing philosophy for Ahadada books. In 2003 I published a fine little collection of Marton Koppany’s work, which is still available through SPD. I do believe that this book presents some of the best and most brilliant of Marton’s work. We worked hard to produce and promote this book and we find that we still have quite a few copies left. Although I would love to continue to publish Marton Koppany’s work, which I genuinely admire, I’ve decided to forego the pleasure until we’ve sold all we have of Marton’s books. That policy will apply across the board to most of our authors. So if my friend Marton Koppany would like to help us move some of our stock of his books we’d love to see another manuscript. It’s just business.

The kind folks from Otoliths sent me a copy of Endgames by my friend Marton Koppany. In this print on demand volume, graced with two solid paragraphs of observations from Karl Young on the back, Marton collects some of his color work. Though, as Young observes, color has the capacity to communicate more information, it also complicates the field aesthetically when one is creating. The old questions of which color goes best with which, which color compliments the piece and which doesn’t, etc., come in to play. The problem is further complicated when color matching is not carefully monitored at the level of image and ink processing and ultimately book production. Some of the pieces in this 76 page book suffer from what appear to be Marton’s own limitations in his understanding of what makes good graphic art (”Colon No. 2,” for instance) , while most highlight the short-comings of Lulu’s production standards. One of Marton’s best color works, “Forecast,”–with its balance of green, yellow, white and gray,–is simply not served well by the printer. “Poem,” “Click Poem,” and others that rely on subtle contrasts within the same color field clearly do not work because the printing process was not up to the task. Of course, better production standards would have meant a more expensive book, both in its initial setting up and in its ultimate price, but still one hopes that the best of these creations will find a better vehicle in the future. Young also mentions that Marton leaves some of his black and white austerity behind with the poems in this volume, but it is when he returns to austere black and white that he gives us some of the most successful pieces in the book. “Reverberations (Endgame No. 1)” is brilliant in its minimalism and its subtle grays. And there are others. I’ll have more to say about Endgames in a future posting.

A few years back Marton was kind enough to translate two of my poems into Hungarian for his “Institute of Broken and Reduced Languages.” These found their way to Karl Young’s wonderful “Light and Dust” site, for which I thank Marton and Karl. Earlier this morning I was delighted to find that Ville-Juhani had translated these two poems from Hungarian into Finnish and had posted them on this blog “Susi rajolla-merkkeja mielesta & maailmasta” for which I thank Marton, Karl and Mr. Ville-Juhani!