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Sh-h! (the secret) Balan frequently engages in verbal puzzles, puns, and word games. His “Blyskucha ideia” (A brilliant idea, (Figure7) is an example. The expres sion “a brilliant idea” is considered a trite meta phor which has lost its power and become a cli che. The author to attempts convey the abstract notion by a visual representation of a physical phenomenon. A luminous comet appears in the sky. The astute reader will easily make the con nection between the concept and its visual repres entation which is intensified by the cluster of let ters which shape the body of the comet. Balan also explores the labyrinth form of poe try which was widely spread in European Baroque literature and in Ukrainian Baroque poetry in par ticular. These gridlike compositions were tradi tionally associated with ciphered or even mystical writing. Labyrinth poems could be read in several ways but to read them, one had to discover the method of ingress. Unlike its Medieval and Baroque antecedents, Balan’s “Sh-h! (the secret)” can be read in only one way. The reader’s glance must travel vertically from the top to the bottom in order to reveal the secret that there is marijuana grow ing in the corn field (Figure 8). Fig. 8. Jars Balan. “Sh-h! (the secret)”. Another visual poet of Ukrainian descent is Andrew Suknaski, who currently resides in south ern Saskatchewan. Suknaski’s works include col lages, poem drawings, experimental haiku and narratives. His experimental poetry is based on various forms of visual and linguistic expressions drawn from multicultural sources, among them, his ancestral Ukrainian heritage. In “Autumn Equinox” (Figure 9), originally published in Writing on Stone: Poem Drawings 1966-67, Suknaski attempts to integrate English, Ukrainian, French and Chinese elements in a sin gle poem draawing. The poem pictorially presents an image of the universe at the time of the autumn equinox. The parts which are labelled as heaven, earth and man are in the shape of a Chinese ideo gram denoting “king”. This sign functions as a background for two ideograms which together stand for “autumn” in Chinese. The outlines of the Chinese ideograms denoting “autumn” clearly resemble human figures which are located at the “human” level of the universe. Combining these ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЧЕРВЕНЬ 1997 19 Fig. 7. Jars Balan. “Blyskucha ideia”. (“A Brilliant idea”).
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