regard as sacred

"Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind."
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Notation: The various line breaks in this concrete or visual poem, the reordering of the words, and the permutations and fragmentations of the words suggest both the disorder of the mind and a new “sacred” order of the text from the deconstruction of the original text. Reading the poem, not necessarily from the upper left hand side of the page scanning right and down, but beginning in the middle, or at the bottom and scanning left and up, or through the middle, in other words randomly, with the white spaces signifying a unit of silence, equivalent to the missing word, and beginning with a single voice but then also adding, and reading simultaneously, with a second (or third or fourth) voice, turned the concrete poem into a sound poem, again suggesting disorder but also creating a new aesthetic order or experience.

(This is how we read this poem in performance; pretty standard instructions. But it also emphasized that the way a poem is presented on the page is the notation of how the poem is to be performed; again, pretty standard instructions).