Speaking about the process of her first forays into this permutational method, there seemed to be an even more augmented sense of awe with the microscopic and the macroscopic:

I feel wonder when I learn about the existence of intrinsic patterns in the world, for
example the occurrence of Fibonacci numbers in nature. I also enjoy encountering and
creating symmetrical arrangements. On the other hand I am very attracted to, and
challenged by, chaotic material and asymmetry

(Petrichor, 2017).

The element of chaotic material is important here, as Vidler saw the potential, despite the challenge, for a poetic representation of quantum mechanics (that fundamental theory in physics which describes the behaviour of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles), a representation foundational for her poetic vision. She once essentialised this perspective in correspondence to me:

Hi again—one of the great things about the Stale Objects [online] chapbook is that
there’s no limit on page length so I think I'll make a very big chapbook (as I feel
sheer quantum is an intrinsic aspect of the work). For a while there I sort of
fought against the quantum on some level (telling myself things like “ok, that's enough
now, Cath, how could you possibly ne [sic] doing so many” etc)—but since I released
myself from those self-imposed attitudes I've felt a lot better!

(personal email, 2016)

In her next series of permutational poems, Lost Sonnets (2018), from Timglaset editions, Vidler stumbled upon a new little visual quirk, or quark, that would drive the quantum creation of 155 sonnets, and that quirk was the arrow:

I began to make the lost sonnets after playing in Microsoft Word with the ‘insert
shapes’ function. I inserted a diagonal arrow and then just copied and pasted it without
really thinking. This small act revealed an interesting spatial arrangement between the
two arrows which led to Lost sonnet 1. The other vital ingredient to the series’
beginning was a state of mind that I was in — I was between series, feeling a little ‘lost’
due to that, and also thinking about sonnets a lot, wondering whether I might try and
write some. These feelings, combined with what I saw when I duplicated the arrow,
created the conditions for all the lost sonnets that followed.

(‘Making the lost sonnets,’ 159)

This sense of loss Vidler attributed to the feelings of being in between writing projects, but it could also potentially be attributed to the loss, or eradication, of words in her visual poetry process (note her desire to be “writing” sonnets), and also to more complicated personal feelings we can’t know, necessarily so. Another aspect of writing intrinsic to poets, and most pressingly for visual poets, is the aleatory, as demonstrated in Vidler’s discovery of the arrow. Elsewhere, in an email to me, she wrote of her sensation of loss and how it somewhat resolved itself by chance. What is key about the following quote is that it reminds us of one of the most interesting things the arrow represents:

[W]hen I first made the series I felt creatively unable to deal with a more chaotic
representation and instead found some lovely old images of wind in a project
Gutenberg book […] Grayscale with little arrows pointing and flying in various
directions, which felt like something I was trying to get at.

(personal email, 2016)

In Wings, her book with Cordite Books from 2021, Vidler quite literally created winged patterns to catch this wind and fly further on its proliferating creative paths. Wings become swarms become Rorschach inkblots become stars become nebulae become galaxies. The selection from Wings in Selected Visual Poems is a major highlight of the collection, firstly because the initial publication by Cordite wasn’t able to print them in colour due to the high costs of colour printing, and secondly because Stale Objects editor a.j. carruthers and Vidler, before her passing, chose to, in part, reverse their order, starting with various complex coloured “Wings” from the middle of the series, then moving chronologically backwards through the permutations to the simpler black and white “Wings” that materialise into one insect (the first in the original series), before finishing the sequence with a flurry of the later most complex coloured “Wings,” like bursting dreams. The play with contrast here is astonishing.

Elsewhere in Selected Visual Poems are lesser known (and some unpublished) but equally interesting series: ‘rhythm poems,’ which expand on Vidler’s use of the arrow from Lost Sonnets; ‘abc poems,’ which see the first three letters of the alphabet morph visually as a trio into crabs and flowers and circuit boards, among other things; ‘jacaranda poems,’ which seem to evoke mycorrhizal networks; ‘oleander poems,’ which are perhaps the most complex of all the series in the way they combine the mycorrhizal with floral patterning and with wind; ‘hearts and other repetitive poems,’ which bring to the fore a more vispo or concrete aesthetic practice; and ‘lost matchstick sonnets’ — physical, or sculptural, poems made of a matchstick box and 14 or 28 matchsticks captured in photographs — which is a delightful, humorous series to finish the Selected collection with.

To conclude here, I’d like to share the resonant ending of an incredible unpublished quadruple sestina that Catherine sent me in 2017. This sestina, titled ‘Objects,’ with its many cascading 12-line stanzas, exemplifies Vidler’s pursuit of “sheer quantum”: the whole poem seems to be contending with her poetics of algorithmic flares and the galactic visions she could see in the cellular; and it finishes, after 24 stanzas, with this 6-line envoi, which refers back to “chaingrass,” the abiding/guiding metaphor that so inspired her endless permutational methodology:

Chaingrass, independently of any outcome concerning the moon,

continues to show itself to me (regardless also of repeated cloud).

An object (or collective object), its fluid-blades display a number

of possible permutations under this subtle breeze (the stone-state

exhibits curious empathy), displacing (now) my desire for stars.

Newly stunned (no words, no fear) I bear witness to its properties.

Vidler’s Selected Visual Poems is an event for followers of visual poetry in Australia and abroad, and should prompt urgent further reading of her entire poetic oeuvre — cut short as it was when she died of cancer in 2023 — a singular and vital avant-garde oeuvre that should not be relegated to the backwaters of Australian poetry.