Artist Statement:
My inclinations have always directed me towards the (actual, ever-changing) limits of verbal communication. But I don’t distrust/need/enjoy words more or less than the empty spaces between them, the sheet of paper they are written on, the rhythm of the turning of the pages, unknown and forgotten symbols, fragments, natural formations like clouds—each of them and any combination of them may be an invitation. When I feels easy and ready to make something, I experiences their complete equivalence.”
Nearly sixty years ago, Charles Olson warned, “The poet cannot afford to traffick in any other sign than his ‘one’,” preparing the way whether he knew it or not for Márton Koppány to take leave of his native Hungarian and to move into English, where for more than two decades he has been creating traffic signs with the gleeful abandon of a deranged city planner with an advanced degree in Dada. Language is our great connecting principle and Koppány’s language artfully breaks, reduces, and repairs poetry with a metaphysician’s discomfort and a with a physician’s healing touch.
Congratulations to the Chicago Poetry Project for bringing Marton to Chicago. Very nice write-up on him, but I’m not sure I agree with one small part of it_he may seem like a poet with an advanced degree in Dada, but his poems almost always have an un-Dada lyrical center to them for those lucky enough to be able fully to figure them out, as I think I have sometimes, but not always.
–Bob Grumman