Raskin has had deep insight into the dangers of one mode killing the other, which is perhaps why his work has so arduously separated the two. If the mode of the Poet is rigorously distinguished from the mode of the Critic, it is because the artist has been fundamentally attracted to their potential yet uneasy fusion. Roland Barthes’s ‘rustle of language’ comes back to haunt the artist time and again entire exhibitions can be directly about specific poems by Arthur Rimbaud, such as “Vowels” or “The Drunken Boat.” Raskin’s major book to date is titled The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His sources are few, but intensely engaged and idiosyncratically referenced. Ultimately, modes of expression themselves are Raskin’s medium. His illustrational project articulates a dualistic cosmology-a grandiose effort that attempts to capture and affirm the fundamental opposition between, on the one hand, the ‘Spirit of the restless Poet’ under the expressive mode of ‘Inseparability’ and, on the other, ‘Critical Distance’ under the mode of ‘Simultaneity,’ or what he calls ‘Infinite Juxtaposition’ and the figure of the ‘Documentarian.’ Collages typically appear alongside videos, cartoons, and diagrams of what he has determined to be the essential existential problems confronting the central figure of the ‘Poet Pure.’ Since 1989, a diverse body of work has emerged, marked by remarkably consistent subject matter and a restricted set of visual motifs, all in the service of Raskin’s mysteriously pedagogical aims. Toward this end, Raskin has unwaveringly developed a theatrical multimedia universe, fluidly combining writing with sculptures and the production of props for lecture-performances. At the age of nineteen, however, Raskin stopped writing poetry to devote himself entirely to exploring and manifesting the conditions under which what he calls ‘the Poem’ might remain an achievable aim in our current cultural conditions.