Poetronics was constructed when I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), and grew out of the idea of floating a poem in space. The four stanzas of the poem alternate, each one lighting up at different times. The electronics were created in collaboration with students and engineers from car coils found in a junkyard, and the glass for the bulbs was blown by Joe Upham.

The installation was first shown in the window of the historic Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge – at that time the only bookstore in the U.S. that sold only poetry. While it was installed it was stolen by an MIT grad student, who fell in love with the piece and decided it was “really his”, and taken to Baltimore where he had it in a show as his creation, after this, a few friends and I drove to Baltimore and retrieved my piece.

Following this, the piece was shown at the CAVS at MIT, the Alternative Museum in New York 1980, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design 1982. Most recently in 2018 the piece was installed with a new cabinet and updated electronics at the MIT Museum in Cambridge for the CAVS 50th anniversary exhibition.