Visual Thesaurus
Stephen Vincent

I continue - with great pleasure - to investigate and play with this Visual Thesaurus! It might be either fashionable, true or both, these days, to imagine "parallel universes." But, partly, as I watch the visual thesaurus site spin out the cosmology of its (word) wares, I began to ask whether or not a Thesaurus, on some level and by definition, posits the possibility of multiple, parallel universes. That is for every poem there is either a correspondent poem (o dear, back to Spicer & Lorca again), or a poem that is correspondent, but oppositional, absolutely contrary in its terms. Could a thesaurus take the universe of Ron S's "Ketjak" and either create a parallel version, or, so to speak, turn the weave upside down, and reveal its antithesis through its linguistic opposites. Or maybe it's possible to read any work with its reversal of terms as part of the critical experience of reading it. It's not necessarily an anti-Authoritarian gesture, but maybe a way of enlarging the work, and taking that end of the creative responsibility as the reader of the work.