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!