portfolio: Rick Pieto
The Glitch Poems were created in the tradition of visual poetry. Each glitch poem contains, at its core, several traditional poems. These conventional poems are improperly mixed and conveyed with—some intentional, some random—visual symbols, numbers and letters. The inappropriate incorporation of visual and literary elements creates a text that is poetic but also a site where noise and interference scramble the reliability of the traditional poetic text and its meanings.
Furthermore, each poem is printed numerous times, creating surfaces that produce a density that denigrates the integrity and clarity of the standalone traditional poem. Each glitch poem—with its mixture of words, symbols and letters—creates a powerful graphic statement that at the same time hinders the typical act of reading by creating a seemingly illegible surface that sets up innumerable texts that appear as our eyes glance over the page, combining words, phrases and graphic symbols into fortuitous new poems.
—Rick Pieto
Rick Pieto is a visual poet and writer living in the Silver Spring, Maryland area. His visual poetry has been exhibited at Rhizome DC and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and published in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and forthcoming in Midway Journal and 805: Lit + Art. His poetry is forthcoming in The Big Windows Review. He received a PhD in media ecology from New York University and has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Baltimore.