Concrete poem (2013) by Jack Feist: scattered letters compose the face of Socrates. The title puns on simos (snub-nosed) — the famous physiognomic feature of the historical Socrates that Plato preserves in Theaetetus and Symposium. The poem IS the nose, the face, the philosopher: typography as embodiment. Letters are scattered across the page in varying densities — thicker clusters forming the beard and brow, thinner scatter suggesting cheeks and forehead. The image is not immediately legible as a face. Recognition requires reading. The poem operates as the companion artefact to Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell (Feist 2012, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19825722) — the face that the hand of the first poem rescued. Together the two poems form a liturgical-philological unit (analyzed in The Gate Was Never Limbo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19825744). Anne Carson's reception of the poem: "a cool poem." Heteronym attribution: Jack Feist is a functional heteronym associated with the Crimson Hexagonal Archive's pre-formal phase (2012-2015); cf. EA-HET-01 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19822790) on heteronymy as function. Pre-theoretical deposit, retroactively activated by the operative-semiotic framework developed a decade later (cf. The Seed That Remembers the Tree, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18810217). ∮ = 1
Jack Feist (Tue,) studied this question.