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For Anni Albers, thread is a carrier of meaning meant to be read, interpreted, and sounded as one might verse. Albers’ language-driven investments in textile are evocaative when considered as part and particle of poetics, as this essay does, and traces Albers’ tangled relationship between text and textile to weigh what the artist’s own conception of gaps, stoppages, and pauses in warp and weft brings to the ever-place of poetry. As Albers’ textiles develop the surface of weavings as energetic spaces of inscription, I posit language as a complex architecture of syntax and knots that allows poetic utterance to remain mysterious and oblique—a rhythmic pattern for the viewer-reader to sound. Drawn from research in the Albers’ extensive archive, this essay inscribes Albers’ work within the field of experimental poetry and deciphers the lineages of process philosophy Albers attended to. Here, the woven page’s abstract materiality resounds verbose: the voice of the thread undulates poetic utterance.



Claire Dauge-Roth is a poet and textile artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work circles the textures of memory-sound, materialities of translation, and what it means to know. Her poems and other writing have been published or are forthcoming in 3 Sisters Literary, Antiphony Magazine, The Queens Review, The Brooklyn Review, and Revue Du Coeur. She is also a PhD student of comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she works on abstract languages and poetic form. As a Lost & Found Archival Fellow, she is currently conducting archival research on Anni Albers’ textiles as kinetic poetics.