Lego my Rothko!

from 'The History of Art in Legos': click to see more

In case you’ve ever wondered what poets do when they aren’t writing poems, this is it. Not making things out of Lego, though that would be cool, but finding random things on the internet. It’s a skill. Some poets are better at it than others. The poet who found this Lego Rothko and posted it on Facebook is particularly adroit. It’s as if he had been frequenting the Larrikin’s End Art Gallery and Bait Shop, and knew exactly what I was looking for.

Come to think of it, it reminds me strangely of his last book cover.

So it appears there is a poetry/Lego connection. I knew this already, actually. In a truly inspiring departure from the cultural hermeticism poets so often seem to display, the Canadian arch-experimentalist Christian Bök once even asserted in his work that the Great Order of the Universe resides in Lego bricks. (There is an elegant simplicity there, to be sure.)

Of course, once you’ve done it with the instructions, you then want to make one from scratch. So Bök went all Technik, in an historic attempt to embed the DNA code of a poem into a bacterium. It almost worked, too. Amazingly. But I’ve heard that the bacterium did what any responsible person would advise, and edited the code down to half its length (see paragraph 7). I gather he’s still trying to reclaim his beloved second stanza, with that image of the sun setting golden over the lonely Euphrates… that wouldn’t have happened if he’d just stuck to the basic set.

There may be yet others we don’t know of.

In the meantime, maybe we should tell them down in Larrikin’s End, and see if they can do a bit of YBA with some bait and picture wire.