Enzo Minarelli

Italian poet and visual artist Enzo Minarelli (1951) coined a new genre by turning poetry into an art of installations. Some of his "polypoems" from the 1980s and 1990s were collected on The Sound Side Of Poetry (1991) and Whenwordies (1997).

Fame (Pogus, 2012) manipulates the human voice with software and then adds sound effects. Unlike the previous recordings, these polypoems are very brief. There are no lyrics, just streams of vocal sounds. Many of them suffer from a lack of "musical" development. The Freudian whirlwind of Third Polypoem For A Great Man, the horribly deformed sounds of nature of The Flavour Is The Presence Of Each Person, the aquatic documentary of The Weak Suits, the cyclical "om" of Those Who Fear The Pain capture your attention for a couple of minutes but too many of these aphorisms sound like trivial application of old-school electronica. And, being so brief, none of them achieves enough critical mass to stand on its own. In the hands of a more creative soundscape artist, This Poem Expresses By Means Of Sound What The Word Cannot Express, To Caspar David Friedrich could become a brilliant syncopated industrial blues, but here it languishes in an uninspired loop. This is too amateurish to do justice to the idea of "polypoetry".