Nailsworth and Miami Beach are both word sculptures which were made purely to give pleasure and to give it, by virtue of the inexhaustible number of variations each is capable of, mildly and indefinitely. They have precedents of greater ingenuity in literature, notably of course in the work of Raymond Queneau and H. W. K. Collam (whose faceted gravestone is a place of pilgrimage for all concrete poets). These however do have the advantage in that they are both solid and moveable and invite the kind of participation from the reader/spectator that gives curators and conservators (those current rulers of the museum world's roost) the heeby-jeebies.

Nailsworth, the first to be made, came out of a request from Dr Bernie Moxham (who now owns it) to provide a work to celebrate that town, for showing at the Nailsworth Festival in 1985. Having toyed with the idea of making a nail-fetish around a bottle of Worth perfume, I suddenly recalled Collam's Tower Poem and decided to make my own movable variant. Andy Gizauskas made up a structure of ten rectangular wood blocks on which I painted words, one on each of the four facets, each beginning with the same initial letter. These had to be worked out in advance so that every possible combination of them would make a coherent sentence, the initial letters of whose words would spell out NAILSWORTH. Since the name of the town has ten letters the number of combinations that can be made by turning the different sections of the tower amounts to over a million (1,048,576 to be exact).

Miami Beach the home of another doctor/collector has coincidentally the same number of letters and it seemed a logical choice for a second edifice of poetic treen, since I wanted to make such a sculpture for my exhibition at the Center for Book Arts in New York (and one based on 'New York' would only generate a paltry sixteen thousand or so poems). The only new refinement of the Miami Beach sculpture is that the words inscribed on the facets are made to be all the same length (a procedure borrowed from the Curriculum Vitae paintings where each line of blank verse is made to be the same length). Since there are still over a million variations it would be invidious to select any one. Turning the elements of the tower one might even stumble upon the secret of the universe (since I have not explored all the combinations).

I plan (sometime in that future where such things come into being) to make such a tower based on the months of the year (Sanitary, Funerary, Harsh, Hateful, Grey etc .... ) which would give over sixteen million possible calendars.

Work and Texts (1992),  p. 110.

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