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.
“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment