Notes on Recent Reading 33 (Tourneur, Peacock, Greene)

The Atheist’s Tragedy (Tourneur)

     This play, the only dramatic work now credited to Cyril Tourneur, is generally mentioned in literary histories as an example of the revenge play or the tragedy of blood and indeed a number of corpses do accumulate in the course of the story. A ghost appears as in the Senecan precedent, but, unlike Hamlet’s father, Montferrers’ spirit counsels leaving retribution to providence, thus rendering his very appearance adventitious. Similarly, the principal villains, D’Amville and Levidulcia both repent when they realize their end is at hand. Indeed, without the former’s unlikely confession at the end, Charlmont would not have been saved. The author’s apparent orthodox Christianity contrasts with Marlowe’s heroes who at times suggest an atheism likely shared by the author. Nonetheless, Tourneur includes a caricatured hypocritical Puritan, Languebeau Snuffe, whose attempt to seduce Soquette is quite ridiculous.
     The blank verse is raggedy, with many hypometric lines unjustified by content and awkward transitions from prose to poetry within a single speech. Still, Tourneur is capable of some fine metaphors and clever double entendre-based comedy, the story summons up powerful back-brain emotions associated with sex and violence, and the plot could, I think, engage an audience with its action even today.


Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey (Peacock)
 
     The two works are published together by Everyman’s Library, the grand series which, like the Modern Library, provided literature tastefully presented and at the most modest price. They are still available, but, at prices like $18 a volume, they have lost much of their appeal to the impecunious.
     In Headlong Hall the first of Peacock’s conversation-based romans à clef, a group of guests gather at a country estate, each riding his own hobby horse. The vogues of 1815 are all satirized alike, providing an entertaining account of what people were then talking about. We encounter the perfectibilarian who thinks all things are evolving for the better and the deteriorationist who is convinced of the opposite while the “status-quo-ite” mediates between them. Among the other characters are critics, poets, a painter, a female novelist, a phrenologist, a landscape gardener, an appetitive divine, and a rough rendering of Coleridge in the person of Panscope. Though virtually nothing happens in the course of the narrative, the conversation is constant and amusingly interlarded with unusual words, arch footnotes, and unlikely classical quotations. They are considerably more fun than Peacock’s lyrics which the generous reader will find facile and good-natured. The story, such as it is, ends with the earlier general tone of geniality heightened by a round of prospective marriages that provides a cheery optimistic conclusion. Jenkison, the status-quo-ite, has the last word, saying, as the reader may imagine the author saying as well, “the scales of my philosophical balance remain eternally equiponderant.” The book’s appeal is doubtless to the bookish which is to say I enjoyed my second reading as much as I had my first.
     In Nightmare Abbey, Peacock has constructed a work both more shapely in general and more pointed in particulars. Here the story, and there is more of a story, centers on Scythrop, a version of Shelley caricatured to emphasize the brooding Sturm und Drang aspect of his sensibility. Other actors (perhaps more accurately called speakers) include Mr. Flosky, a devotee of German idealism like Coleridge, the Byronic Mr. Cypress who provides the opportunity to satirize passages from Childe Harold, the Manichaean Mr. Toobad (based on J. P. Newton), the Honourable Mr. Listless, a languid fop based on a school friend of Shelley. (That original, incidentally, just to show that reality may outdo imagination, was the extravagant dandy Sir Lumley Skeffington.) The plot involves Scythrop’s inability to choose between two lovers after his rejection by another. These have been associated with Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, and Mary Godwin. An author lacking Peacock’s ethereally light touch would surely never have ventured to represent that progression of loves purely in fun. But Peacock’s own spokesman in Nightmare Abbey is the buoyant Mr. Hilary whose genial good humor is all but irresistible, making all partisanship somewhat absurd and suffering somehow beside the point.


Journey without Maps (Greene)

     In 1935 Graham Greene traveled for a month through the African bush, mostly in Liberia, in search of something like the prelapsarian world. The reader must surely be impressed by the rigors of the trip: the lengthy daily hiking along faint or unmarked trails, the inhospitable climate, the numerous parasites and vermin (who knew that rural African huts typically contain families of rats?), and the very real threat of disease. In addition, he was managing a multi-tribal hired crew of thirty or so and, to top it off, now and then passed through areas ruled by authorities endowed with arbitrary power. The territory he crossed was literally unknown at the time – he notes that the U.S. Government map leaves the entire center of Liberia blank except for the single word: cannibals.
     Greene’s account is fascinating and well-written. He excels at imagistic lists and effective rhetorical effects, though his occasional use of non-African material works less well. Greene is particularly good at conveying the “seediness” of semi-civilized regions and the disagreeable details of life in the deep bush. He regularly expresses what might be called a “preferential option” for the traditional life which he portrays as, at any rate, more intense, direct, and, in some sense, real than the life to which he is accustomed. His accounts of African religion are generally sympathetic though he makes little effort to understand specific practices or beliefs. His fundamental rejection of exploitation, including the weird Liberian regime, led him to reject European colonialism as well as domestic tyranny. Surely his perspective is governed in part by the specter of world-wide depression and European fascism. In the end, though, the reader remembers his worn shoes, aching muscles, and the constant plagues such as “jiggers” that had to be extracted from beneath the toenails. He had a difficult time rationing his whisky to last until the trip’s end.
     His cousin, Barbara Greene, accompanied him on the trek. Her own account, published as Too Late to Turn Back, differs, I understand, in many details from his.

The Artist as Demiurge: Seligmann on Space

This essay introduces the Seligmann Center’s publication of the fourth of Kurt Seligmann’s New School lectures. They are available from the Center or through me for $15 apiece. Each includes a reproduction of Seligmann’s typescript together with scholarly and artistic responses.

Unattributed quotations are from Seligmnn's lecture.



     Kurt Seligmann’s lecture “The Quest of Space” opens by noting the distinction between the physical space of the two dimensional canvas and the imaginative space created by the artist. He then proceeds to discuss the relations between these and the space of lived experience. Though Seligmann considers historical techniques for achieving the illusion of three dimensions, his essential interest is not in photorealistic verisimilitude but rather the potential for art to create an autonomous zone, no longer dependent on observed reality but subject only to the creator’s vision.
     Having posed in this way the fundamental challenge of visual invention, he conducts a painter’s tour through art history making cogent comments on cave paintings, Italian Renaissance, and modern works. Many of his observations are suggestive, even impressionistic, inviting further speculation rather than making dogmatic statements. His account contrasts the unframed floating images of palaeolithic art with the ancient Near Eastern works with which the artist “overcomes his awe of the boundless by magico-plastic means.” These poles, which might be termed the realistic and the magical, define the issue for Seligmann. Pragmatic rather than dogmatic in his general assumptions, he allows for the claims of expressive theories such as those promoted by the Romantics and functional theories in which the most important element is an effect on the consumer such as didactic art and pure entertainment, yet his own orientation is closer to formalist theories that focus on qualities in the work itself such as those of aestheticists and New Critics.
     He discusses a succession of artistic practices, medieval, Renaissance, academic, impressionist, and Surrealist, providing flashes of fresh understanding more often than not, but always pursuing his grander theme. Though the question seems at times in his exposition a technical matter, for Seligmann artistic creation of space reenacts the creation of the universe described in the opening line of Genesis. Using concepts derived more from philosophic and Hermetic sources than Hebrew ones, he seeks to establish the artist as an independent quasi-divine demiurge whose creations are self-justifying. Spurning the concept of artistic creation as imitation of reality and also the Surrealist faith in the integrity of the unconscious and of chance, he asserts the autonomy of the imagination.
     In this emphasis he distances himself from many earlier writers. The most widespread view, dominant from Plato until recent times, regards art as mimesis of the perceived world, but Seligmann specifically opposes the sufficiency of imitation. For him realism misses the point; its pursuit abdicates the potential of art and, in the crushing phrase he used in “Artist, Canvas, Reality,” realism is “the lowest of tastes.” When he lectured on “Space” he maintained that art is always artificial, “a world in itself . . . alluding to reality, a symbol of reality, a mirage of the thought rather of the real, than of the reality itself.” The greatest medieval paintings are “artifices in the image of creation which was the work of the greatest of all artificers, God.”
     In realistic cave paintings, on the other hand, as there are “no limiting edges,” there can therefore be no distinction between the world and the objet d’art, and this requisite artificiality remains still out of grasp. By attempting to mirror what we see, the realistic artist forecloses the possibility of a more profound truth. For Seligmann the move from applying images to available rock surfaces without any “frame” to “the invention of the four edges of a painting” is “most important.” Within a defined space the artist may create a work which “stands for the universe,” in effect, a new cosmos.
     He contrasts the random “realism” of cave paintings that reflects the mundane vision available to all eyes with ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art works which, he argues, create a “safety zone” in which people are protected from chaos. We moderns, having emerged from the long era of faith stretching from archaic times until the nineteenth century, may yet take refuge in the similarly “foolhardy optimism” of magic which, like religion, promises an intelligible, orderly, and significant cosmos. An accurate vision of the whole would indicate the interrelationships of all parts as a sort of unity in variety akin to that of a multi-faceted diamond. To explore these linkages between micro- and macrocosm is the artist’s task.
     Seligmann dissented not only from the traditional theories of art as imitation, but also from Surrealist doctrine and practice which valued chance and the unconscious. He is surely challenging Breton when he condemns “haphazardness,” declaring “conception cannot reconcile itself with chance.” Further, “Artist Canvas Reality” made clear his reliance on conscious “Mind” in conceiving new art. Reluctant to identify with any other theoretical formulation, he considers Space itself to be in exile in 1953 (just as he and many of his friends had been), yet he predicts a rebirth of this “artistic space” in spite of the fact that “the plastic means used by the surrealists seem to be hostile to any deep and clear space construction.”
     The upshot of his rejection at once of the traditional and academic view and of his generation’s leading avant-garde formation is his judgement that “the boldest works of our time are . . . eclectic” and among these he must surely include his own. In “Artist Canvas Reality” Seligmann had described art as a “mysterious transubstantiation” using the language of Roman Catholic ritual to imply the quasi-divine status of the artist. He notes that the artist can create “a well understood world order to which everything the big and the small, the distant and the close submits.” “The work of art,” he goes on, seeks thus to render visible the “intercourse between the limited and the limitless.” In this way “boundless time and the time of human history reflect one another.” The system works, as he notes in his lecture on “Magic” because art, like mysticism or magic (including the kabbalah), reveals that “all is contained in all,” the universal in every the particular.
     Seligmann’s idea of art is closely allied with his interest in magic and the occult. The written tradition originates with certain passages in Plato (who elsewhere endorsed the imitation theory) and continues through Longinus, spreading with Neoplatonism, and becoming dominant with the Romantics. In the Ion and elsewhere Plato speaks of the artist as god-like, divinely inspired. The idea of the creator as demiurge rooted in passages of Plato is later critical to mystical texts which in turn underlay occult thought including that of the Hermetic Corpus which Seligmann found so significant. Plato’s Timaeus argues that the universe is so orderly and beautiful that is must surely be the product of a demiurge, that is to say, a craftsman or artist whose work is purposive, rational, and benevolent, the intentional product of mind (nous), a term Seligmann employs similarly. According to Seligmann the Persian deity Mazda “carved out” a portion of space-time “in which one can live.” Through imitation of this supreme intellect people may fulfil their highest destiny.
     Neoplatonism sustained these ideas. According to Plotinus "every particular thing is the image within matter of the Intellectual Principle which itself images the Divine Being." Such theories reentered European culture with vigor during the Renaissance through the publication of the Corpus Hermeticum and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. From this theory arise the complex multiple meanings of such paintings as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. What Ficino called “natural magic” to distinguish it from black magic relies on the mystic connections between natural phenomena, their mental representation, and the design of the cosmos.
     In specific terms, for Seligmann this means that “the small expresses the large,” a principle echoing the Hermetic microcosm/macrocosm relationship. The Smaragdine Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and passed down by Arabic authors, asserts “that which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below.” For Seligmann this identity is “the fundamental justification for magic.” Such interconnectedness also underlies symbolic and metaphorical associations of the sort critically important for seventeenth century iconography such as one sees in baroque title pages and emblem books and in the imagery of Metaphysical poetry.
     The conception of the artist as demiurge underlies Seligmann’s fascination with magic, hardly the magic of parlor tricks or Satanism, but rather the linking of above and below, inside and outside, the painting in a frame and the world outside. It is not through the realism of superficial resemblance but rather through a symbolic system of correspondences that the artist mounts to the sublime. For Seligmann the Egyptian deity Thoth, a figure closely identified with Hermes Trismegistus, is an important prototype of the artist. In “Space” he refers to Thoth’s act of creation through laughter. Perhaps ripples of that cosmic laughter may be seen in the carnivalesque costumes and ribands so frequent in Seligmann’s oeuvre.

A Range of Visual Poetry

This survey was prepared for a program at the Seligmann Center December 3, 2017, part of a periodic series on the characteristic techniques of the last century’s avant-garde. Apart from making a few suggestions toward a definition of the genre, I mean only to highlight some significant works. Not only is my choice of poems somewhat arbitrary, I have allowed myself sketchy comments on each individually without attempting to construct an overarching theme. The piece is more notes for a class than an essay.



definition

     Visual poetry is that in which the appearance of the poem on the page constitutes a significant element in the work. All poetry relies on spatial arrangement if only by default. The word verse itself refers to the “turn” at the end of the poetic line by which much poetry is distinguished from prose. On many early artifacts considered to embody religious or magical power, the placement of words is essential. The artful use of space as an aesthetic strategy by poets became widespread in ancient Greece and has continued to the present.
     Visual poetry has many varieties. Some poetry may be written conventionally while including an accompanying picture, such as in the emblem books popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or Blake’s illustrations for Young or Dante. In Blake’s own handmade books the poems still use recognizable verses, but they are more subtly integrated with the illustrations, while Kenneth Patchen’s twentieth century painted poems further the integration of verbal and pictorial elements. The poem may even be read in the absence of the artwork to which it relates as is the case in much ancient ekphrastic poetry.
     On the other hand, the poets who initiated the flowering of visual poetry during the 1950s and originated the term “concrete poetry” prescribed austere and rigorous requirements. For some the ideal was a poem in unique form, without allusion or pictorial representation of any object, indeed without explicit reference to the world, which is to say “abstract.” Perhaps the most extreme development of this sort is composition using non-alphabetic symbols or idiosyncratic hieroglyphs and ideograms.
     I have here excluded works with an illustration apart from the text while including those in which a recognizable image is formed by the words themselves, the most common type of visual poetry prior to the twentieth century. I include as well artful variation in typeface, while excluding the use of symbols other than letters in patterns. I do not consider the arrangement on the page of many free verse compositions such as some of E. E. Cummings or Charles Olson to be visual poetry under the assumption that their design is essentially less visual than a cue to reading.


examples

     Among the poems of the Greek Anthology are a number in which the word are arranged to resemble objects, a practice the Greeks called technopaignia, which might be literally translated “games of skill.” These include a piece attributed to Theokritos in the shape of pan pipes, an altar by Dosiadas, and an egg and hatchet by Besantinus. Under the name of Simmias of Rhodes are poems shaped like an egg, a hatchet, and wings.
     One of the most widespread religious symbols in ancient Near Eastern culture is the labrys or double-bladed axe. The text of Simmias’ “Axe,” a dedicatory verse, indicates the close relationship between such poems and religious practice.

(Epeius of Phocis has given unto the man-goddess Athena, in requital of her doughty counsel, the axe with which he once overthrew the upstanding height of god-builded walls, in the day when with a fire-breath’d Doom he made ashes of the holy city of the Dardanids and thrust gold-broidered lords from their high seats, for all he was not numbered of the vanguard of the Achaeans, but drew off an obscure runnel from a clear shining fount. Aye, for all that, he is gone up now upon the road Homer made, thanks be unto thee, Pallas the pure, Pallas the wise. Thrice fortunate he on whom thou hast looked with very favour. This way happiness doth ever blow.)


     Here the poem itself becomes the dedicated object, not only describing but in fact becoming an embodiment of the axe. The poem may well have been inscribed on an actual votive axe, recalling the one in the temple of Athena with which Epeius was said to have built the Trojan Horse.
     For a considerable time after the fall of Rome, the practice of visual poetry was largely confined to the sacred object with which it had begun. For instance, the Ruthwell cross, carved in the 8th century but with the runic inscription added perhaps two hundred years later, is inscribed with a passage from the “Dream of the Rood” which complements the carved scenes.

ᛣᚱᛁᛋᛏ ᚹᚫᛋ ᚩᚾ ᚱᚩᛞᛁ ᚻᚹᛖᚦᚱᚨ / ᚦᛖᚱ ᚠᚢᛋᚨ ᚠᛠᚱᚱᚪᚾ ᛣᚹᚩᛗᚢ / ᚨᚦᚦᛁᛚᚨ ᛏᛁᛚ ᚪᚾᚢᛗ

Krist wæs on rodi. Hweþræ'/ þer fusæ fearran kwomu / æþþilæ til anum.

"Christ was on the cross. Yet / the brave came there from afar / to their lord."


     Surely the worshippers felt as though the addition of the words not only encouraged meditation but also heightened the spiritual power of the cross just the addition of a slip of paper bearing a name of god brought the golem to life. The worshipper approaching the cross can feel Christ’s nearness as he reenacts the text.
     The Renaissance brought an efflorescence of shape poetry called carmina figurata. The trend was encouraged by George Puttenham’s 1589 The Arte of English Poesie in which he mistakenly maintained that such “ocular proportion” was characteristic of Eastern courts. His “Column” in praise of Queen Elizabeth is to be read from the bottom up though the last line concludes with a useless period.


Is blisse with immortalitie.
Her trymest top of all ye see,
Garnish the crowne
Her iust renowne
Chapter and head,
Parts that maintain
And womanhead
Her mayden raigne
In{ }te{ }ri{ }tie :
In honour and
With ve{ }ri{ }tie
Her roundnes stand
Str|en|gthen the state.
By their increase
Without debate
Concord and peace
Of her sup{ }port,
They be the base
With stedfastnesse
Vertue and grace
Stay and comfort
Of Albions rest,
The sounde Pillar
And seene a farre
Is plainely exprest
Tall stately and strayt
By this nob{ }le pour{ }trayt.


     Here the extraordinary form exalts the monarch with the stately and noble form of the column familiar from antiquity and serviceable as a metaphor for the support of the state.
     During the seventeenth century George Herbert became perhaps the most popular composer of visual poems. Again, the devotional character of “The Altar” is deepened by its shape. The taste of the succeeding century is suggested by Addison’s condemnation of shape poems as in Spectator 62 in which he ridicules as “False Wit” the writing of “whole Sentences or Poems, cast into the Figures of Eggs, Axes, or Altars.”

     In Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés the words are tossed across the page though with the greatest care. Still, the first major work of visual poetry that established the technique as a characteristic of the avant-garde was Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. The shape poems of this collection display extraordinary art and subtlety, fully exploiting the graphic form and employing considerable ambiguity and ellipsis. Apollinaire in his introduction says that “The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.” (Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy)
     One of the most well-known and complex is the page which includes what may be regarded as three interrelated texts: “The Mandolin,” “The Carnation,” and “The Bamboo.” (Should the image here be inadequate, the reader should seek a better one online.)

“The Mandolin” “La Mandoline”

     Alternate titles indicated on the galleys are “Le Bamboo Parfumé,” then “Le Mystêre Odorant,” finally “Le Rêve.” The bamboo is surely an opium pipe. Stimulated by the drug, the poet reflects on the war. In his reveries the violence of the trenches of WWI become the musical tones of a mandolin and the wounds of battle a catalyst for truth. Reason puns on rai-son (ray of sound) and then the love object is added to the metaphorical chain. The shape of the musical instrument resembles the circling analogy. Hints are present of Symbolism’s fondness for indeterminate signifiers and Futurism’s fondness for violence, present as well in many avant-garde manifestoes. War is seen at the heart of the instrument the neck of which extends upward like a rifle barrel, but the suffering of conflict seems transmuted, an inevitable complement inextricably linked to art and love.

“The Carnation” “L’Œillat”
     The odor of the carnation, upright and possessed of a certain grandeur in form, provides an emblem of beauty more persuasive because more sensual than the sounds of the mandolin. The poet moves here from metaphor to direct statement, asserting the supremacy of sensation and the confidence that in this way, through the sympathetic power of romantic love, the individual may attain wisdom. The plus sign indicating more was also a Futurist usage.

“The Bamboo” "Le Bamboo"
     The chains of opium smoke signify deep thought. The letter os might mean the exclamation or au, while also suggesting the joints of the pipe. The use of déliées and lient is ambiguous, either “linking” in a fruitful logical way or binding in a limiting way. (See “Le Sang Noir de Pavots” for a dark view of the drug.)

     In the middle of the twentieth century Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari founded the Noigandres group in Brazil in 1952. They established ties with Eugen Gomringer, who first used the term “concrete poetry” in in print in 1955. The most significant grouping of visual poets in modern times, their group became international, including the American Emmet Williams, the Scot Ian Hamilton Finlay, Germans Claus Bremer, Dieter Roth, and Franz Mon, Austrians Gerhart Rühm and Ernst Jandl, and the Swiss Daniel Spoerri.
     The “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” by the Brazilians, the principal manifesto of the movement, was published in 1958. The “Plan” declares the end of “the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit)” now to be replaced by awareness of graphic space as structural agent. The Noigandres writers acknowledge Pound and Fenollosa (as well as Apollinaire and Eisenstein) as influences inspiring the possibility of “the ideogram method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements.” For them their art, though constituted of language,” is “nonverbal” while not giving up “word’s virtualities.” Their concrete poetry, they claim, represents “total responsibility before language” as well as “thorough realism.” They opposed “poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic.”

Coca-cola is at once wildly popular in Latin America both as a beverage and as a t-short theme, but the company is also the most visible symbol of American capitalist domination. In Pignatari’s poem the ubiquitous advertising slogan “beba coca cola” decomposes through babe (a variant of bébé?), cola (tail or glue), and caco (or caca, i.e. shit) to cloaca. The final word is an anagram for Coca-cola. The piece is engage, a protest against American imperialism and consumerism.

     Dick Higgins was a composer and printmaker as well as poet and a founder of the Fluxus group and Something Else Press. In his poem he plays with the line reported in a 1966 Scientific American article by Anthony Oettinger concerning computer generated language. Oettinger said that, using “Time flies like an arrow” as a pattern may lead to unintelligible English sentences. Discussing the complexity of a language in which, for instance “time" may be a noun or a verb or an adjective, “flies" may be noun or verb, etc., he then said, “Worse yet anything ruling out the nonexisting species of time flies will also rule out the identical but legitimate structure of ‘Fruit flies like a banana.’” The lines were quoted in magazines and science journalism and entered the popular consciousness as a joke, often attributed to Groucho Marx.
     Since the text derives from a discussion of the gap between computer processing and human thought, Higgins is acting machine-like by using pre-written words, yet he presents them in an assertively novel form. The line of three es above and three is below creates a symmetry the formal balance of which forms the basis for a structural pattern of bipolar oppositions within the repeated subject-verb-prepositional phrase sentences: animate/inanimate, abstract/concrete, fly as verb/fly as noun, italics on/italics off.

     Bob Cobbing, a central figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 60s and 70s, presents the reader with a composition in the shape of a sort of jack-o-lantern grin in which the word grin slides without warning into grim, flashes back to “gay green,” a sort of springtime cheer, and then into the more ominous “gray green,” “gangrene,” and “ganglia,” rather as one’s life experience may pass from pleasant to horrifying.

(Here, too, the reader may need to seek a better image of Hollander's "Swan and Shadow.")

     John Hollander’s “Swan and Shadow,” while it is concrete in form, is conventional in content, sketching a picture of the bird and then tracing its receding reality in the lower half. The spaces between neck and body are functional on both halves with the center line signifying the present moment. With his virtuoso technical abilities, his considerable erudition, and his university positions, Hollander may be seen as fully integrating the techniques of visual poetry into the academy with his book Types of Shape in 1969. While his work is popular and often taught, the reader may judge whether acceptance has strengthened or weakened the impact of visual poetry.