Form: How Materials Become Effective

Abstract

It seems as though the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé challenged what I outline in the previous section. “We do not make poems with ideas, but with words,” he wrote. Mallarmé’s poetry is concerned with the force of rhythm, sound, and changing meaning depending on if a word is read in silence or aloud. In contrast, I have followed ideas that articulate an object through diverse realms and delineate how something coherent, something with an identity, comes into being. Mallarmé’s approach to poetry was revolutionary, as he took the opposite approach, but nevertheless with a similar aim.