The Theatre of the Outre Othre

Suzanne Mercury, Theatout're

Sometimes, people aren't perceptive enough to see the differences in the smallest things. Not all pwoermdists write alike. None do. Pay attention, and you'll see the differences.

Suzanne Mercury has a few elements to her style. She favors initial capital letters--something quite rare in a pwoermd--she is working with a heavy French influence, and she loves flair, curves, ostentation.

She's made a couple of tiny books of pwoermds, lovely things. I have to buy the second from her now that I've known for a week that it exists. She is a maker of things tangible. She makes books. She puts strings of letters on glass. She looks at them against mirrors.

She makes poems like

Theatout're

which we might translate into English as "all that theater could be."

And when I think about this, I recall a pwoermd I wrote in Cambridge, Massachusetts, years ago, and I think that I would make a different pwoermd, with a different meaning, if I'd had a slip of the inspiration she had for this one, and that mine would be

théâtoutré

and why?

Because every pwoermdist is different. Because even if you work within the space of individual words, you will create something unique.

Because Suzanne, as all of us do, puts her intellectual and esthetic DNA into each of her pwoermds.

We call that "art."

pw(o'er)md