Comments on: The Poetics of Space?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:52:40 +0000

I’m giving this thread a bump because I think John’s mention of Mallarme deserves more comment: the “performed constellation,” and so on…

By: Geof Huth

Geof Huth — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:46:55 +0000

Philip,
The intermedial arts are often difficult for us to accept, since they do not slip into the neat categories we have created for the world. I accept the knowledge of humans and the art they produce to be deeply intertwingled, incapable of being perfectly segregated into categories, so this confusion of terms is of no concern of mine.
But I’ll note that rare are the complaints that prose poetry isn’t really poetry, looking more like prose and functioning precisely as prose functions. And never have I heard anyone complain that a tone poem is not really a poem at all. Language is essentially illogical, based on accrued history, chock full of idioms, filled with unnecessary words and lacking in necessary ones. It seems to me the poet’s job to work with that mess and make something of it.
So, yes, not all visual poetry is poetry, but some is. And, yes, no teddy bear is really a bear, but the reference to the bear, no matter how tenuous, is still there.
Geof

By: Geof Huth

Geof Huth — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:37:17 +0000

Stephen, I’ll try to answer all your questions, if only for that tuition check. And, actually, I was impressed by your knowledge of visual poetry, especially contemporary visual poetry. You showed that you weren’t at all ignorant of the field, just unsure how to manage the esthetic experience of some of it. Imagine this: a visual poem can be constructed of almost any set of text and any set of visual elements. The visual element may be one with the text (the text itself arrayed in shapes) or it may be a separate element in the piece. Some of the visual elements, thus, work essentially like painting and are susceptible to the same kinds of interpretation, but others are unlike painting and require other modes of interpretation. Most importantly, though, there is always an interplay between the verbal and the visual, but that can work differently depending on the piece. The two modes can support each other or contradict one another. They can be deeply tied together or only tangentially so. They can both be beautiful, or maybe only one it. Don’t expect, or even wish for, a single method of meaningmaking, either together or apart, for the text of the visual. With the Ciccariello poem, what you should do is first understand the visual, since it is preeminent. What does it make you feel? How does that affect the poem as a whole? (Note that I’ll often use “poem” to mean “visual poem.”) Next, look for the legible words. In this piece, many of the words are blurred or overwritten, reducing the percentage of readable text, but there is readable text, even if it consists of nothing but partial words, and those partial words are important, even if most of the text is an illegible ghost text. Coincidentally (or maybe not, maybe you know this), I have written about the book this piece comes from and this particular poem, so you can read what I’ve briefly written about it. Your search for references interests me, but I don’t think it as central a concern as you do. Certainly, any work of art has references to other art, life experiences, history, any number of things, and these references unavoidably ground the pieces and provide hints to the understanding of them. But not all pieces depend on allusion, and it would be boring if they did. That being said, I see referencing in all kinds of visual poems all the time, though not specifically allusions to other works. The choice of typeface can be a meaningful reference in a visual poem. Or take the rubBEings (frottage poems) of David Baptiste Chirot, which are created by making rubbings from street signs and monumental carvings—these necessarily refer to items in the world and to specific means of communicating. And Ciccariello’s work references nothing less than visual poetry’s progression towards textlessness as text, a progression toward a point where the text becomes totally illegible and yet still meaningful. But he does it without succumbing to textlessness. You might be interested in knowing that Peter Ciccariello has recently applied for National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing, meaning that he sees his work as essentially literary. It’s hard to say exactly when conventional poetry (which visual poets sometimes call “textual poetry” to distinguish it from visual poetry) becomes visual poetry. The problem is one of what I call brackishness. Think of textual poetry as a broad muscular river pouring itself into the sea, which is visual art. At the mouth of that river, where seawater mixes with fresh water, the water is brackish, and that is where visual poetry resides. But at its edges some of the brackish water is almost all salt water, and other parts of it are almost entirely fresh, and it’s sometimes hard to say if a tiny tendril of salt water makes the fresh water brackish. Let’s take Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os. Since Johnson removes the evidence of his redacting, he removes that visual element as a necessary component of the poem. He essentially says it is a textual poem. To my mind, a “visualized” textual poem, since the scattering of text is a bit more extreme than in a conventional poem, but still not a visual poem. However, when I take a book like Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow, where the poet specifically shows us the Wite-Out that serves as the little white shadow of the title, then this becomes a visual poem. I wouldn’t call Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.” despite the visual and aural exquisiteness of its title, because all that “L.H.O.O.Q.” does as text is title the piece. All it is is a visual title embedded in a visual piece of art. Stephen, there was nothing annoying about your questions. I hope some of these words help. Geof

By: Philip Nikolayev

Philip Nikolayev — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:10:46 +0000

How meet and sweet would it be to have a visual poetry that is “sometimes” at once neither visual nor poetry — that would clear everything right up, or at any rate alleviate any further concerns…

By: Stephen Sturgeon

Stephen Sturgeon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:01:35 +0000

Hi, Angela. I agree that approaching a work of art is done “with what one brings to it,” but I’m not sure why a memory of other poems, novels, painting, sculptures, &c. doesn’t qualify as something we bring to the encounter. I really do feel that I came off as too pedantic in my last message, but let me justify some of the points I made before I abandon them. There are many artists of the twentieth century that work on a viscerally artistic level and don’t need a large amount of scholarship to be appreciated deeply. In the world of poetry, among these I’d place Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Wilfred Owen, Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Keith Douglas, John Wieners, even Ronald Johnson, and on and on. There are however other poets who, although the entireties of their poems do not totally depend on a larger knowledge of the form and its history, often enough do not “read” in a coherent way, or even in an effectively ambiguous way, without your knowing a little extra. The poets who come to mind in this class are Pound, Eliot and Zukofsky, though there are others too, John Berryman and Geoffrey Hill among them. Some say it is a fault of twentieth century poetry that this development occurred, but it is nonetheless a fact. To tie this in with our discussion of visual poetry, I have drawn a blank on both fronts: I can’t access much of it viscerally, and so I’ve wondered aloud here whether there is a referential aspect to visual poetry which would enable that kind of visceral access.
As for simplistic “morals” and “deconstruction”, I’m opposed to both. These things are more at home in the world of advertisements and propaganda than they are in art. That said, I have a hard time thinking you are really opposed to finding out what a work of art is talking about when it is obviously talking about something that might be beyond your immediate frame of references. The beauty of a piece of art most of the time stirs us to investigate the parts of it that may be beyond us, and that’s a good thing. What’s wrong with being curious? This investigation never leads to the discovery of a simplified and reductive moral — it always, if it’s a good work of art, makes things more complex, more beautiful, more exciting, more neverending. I don’t think your strawman figure of the academic who is only interested in morals, and gets frustrated when they aren’t to be found, actually exists.
I have much more to say about this (the prose of Samuel Beckett working so finely on two very different levels at once is something to go into), but I’d like to concentrate less on the theoretical side of things — would anyone want to look at some visual poetry together, and discuss what we get out of it, how we read it? I suggest this piece by Peter Ciccariello that I linked to before: http://photos1.blogger.com/photoInclude/hello/186/968/1024/xerolage_38_proof_Page_12.jpg
Geof, if you’re still reading, your participation in this would be overwhelmingly welcome (if you could address the idea of referentiality in visual poetry — if it even exists — that would be very good too!). But I know, there are other things to do . . .
Anyone want to get us started? If another piece of visual poetry would be a better starting point, please suggest it.
Stephen

By: Angela G.

Angela G. — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:59:57 +0000

Once in answer to a question, Gertrude Stein asserted that her art was for the printed page only (followed by the comment that she never expected people to converse or exchange ideas in her style). Obviously, she wrote her poems for the page, and yet she read her poems aloud. And of course, Stein is credited as having brought a new musicality to modern poetry.
Poetry can be experienced through both sight and sound. Poetry audiences are called “poetry readers” — not “poetry listeners,” although there is nothing like the experience of hearing poetry read aloud. I believe that most people, though, after hearing a poem they like, want to see it in print.
Poets compose their work on a page; most do not pick up a voice recorder of some kind and compose poems that way (although some sound poets do). Writers want to see the words on the page, see the line breaks, see how it “looks” on the page. But they also read it aloud, or in their heads, as they compose.
One could also delve into the historical evolution and traditions of poetry — spoken, passed down from generation to generation, etc., followed by handwritten, transcribed, and, after the invention of the printing press, printed. Much of contemporary poetry — both visual and otherwise — is highly influenced by, if not directly the result of, the printing press.
Some people are more visually oriented, and some are more verbally oriented (especially when it comes to learning).
I suspect people who are more verbally oriented have a harder time understanding or “getting” visual poetry and “getting” visual art in general.
Or is it a rebellion against the crossing of strictly defined genres of poetry and art — a stubborn clinging to a definition of what “poetry” is and isn’t, and an aversion to the discomfort and frustration one feels when he or she cannot “properly” “read,” “understand” or “interpret” a work of art? This is an notion steeped in a 20th-century academic approach to literature and art that people must be able to deconstruct a work of art (poem, novel, painting, dance, film) and point to the moral of the story. (”What is this writer/artist/piece trying to tell us?”, hence, Cliff’s Notes, etc.) A reader or audience must be able to define the moral of the story for there to have been a work of art that exists in the first place.This seems to be the basis on which a work of art is deemed “accessible.”
Is art of an act of self-expression to be experienced by others or an act of creating a “message,” to be “gotten” by others?
I disagree with the statement that you need a “sufficient” background steeped in study of earlier writers or artists in order to be able to “read” a work by Eliot or Picasso. Certainly, someone with this background will be able to appreciate, enjoy and pick up on those historical references, influences, homages, etc. But isn’t it enough to approach a work of art — whether it be a poem, song, visual work of art, dance performance, etc. — with what one brings to it and simply experience the work as an encounter in and of itself?

By: Stephen Sturgeon

Stephen Sturgeon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:46:56 +0000

Dear Geof,
I won’t admit to fears (nevermind spirits) so much as to questions and hesitations, both of which you have very generously addressed. I don’t mean to presume, but I imagine that, to you, some of my comments might sound steeped in a naivete comparable to the sort I’d find in a voice asking me “What’s with these poems that don’t rhyme? I mean, doesn’t it need to rhyme to be a poem?” So, thank you – not nearly prolix enough, and altogether helpful.
“Visual poetry is not always poetry.” This statement helps me a great deal. If you’ll bear with me, this is how I’ve been going about considering the task of accessing visual poetry: I have thought that a visual poem might be a hybrid of the ways we read paintings and poems, a complementary interplay between words and images that bounce off of their likes and unlikes inside of the piece as well as outside of it — the words nudge the words but also the shapes, and the shapes nudge the shapes but also the words, each shape and word bringing with it the associations implicit in their designs. This hasn’t taken me far, and maybe this is why, because “visual poetry is not always poetry” and so shouldn’t be approached like it. With art, and especially art of the twentieth century, the referential aspect of language to other language, that of both symbols and words,is especially important. By this I mean that you can’t properly read Eliot’s “Sweet Thames, run softly, til I end my song” without having read Spenser, nor can you properly read a lot of Picasso without having some exposure to Egyptian art, nor Paul Klee without having seen some Aubrey Beardsley, nor Zukofsky without ever having heard Bach, &c. In most of these cases, the non-referential aspects of the pieces in question remain locked until they are tinted with the pitch, the mood, the logic, whatever you want to call it, of the referential aspects, where even a little bit of unpacking tends to help a great deal. With this in mind, I’ve asked myself how does one read Peter Ciccariello? and, when looking at a piece like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/186/968/1024/xerolage_38_proof_Page_12.jpg I’ve not been able to figure it out.
But now I think of Ronald Johnson’s concrete poetry or Ian Hamilton Finlay’s and realize that I don’t use the same “referential aspect” of language as it plays out in the above examples (a referentiality of source and counterpoint) as I do with the concrete poetry I appreciate (I don’t know what I’d call it — maybe a referentiality of form emulation, but that’s pretty pretentious of me). And indeed the first type of referencing plays little part when I look at Cezanne or Van Gogh. My problem might be that I have been applying irrelevant techniques to reading visual poetry, though in my own defense the type of referentiality that plays a part in my readings of concrete poetry don’t seem to apply to the works of Ciccariello either. So, this leads me to my first question for you, Geof: does this conventional sort of referencing that we see so often in paintings and poems not apply to contemporary visual poetry? If it doesn’t, does some other type of referencing take its place, or has this been a blind alley I’ve been going down?
Granted, there’s a hell of a lot more to seeing and enjoying how a poem or painting works than keeping up with allusions, and the emphasis I’ve placed on referentiality here is, I’m afraid, boxing me in as pedantic — all I mean to say is that when a work of art seems impenetrable, figuring out what’s gone into its making can unveil very large portions of its fabric that were previously invisible, and I’m having a difficult time finding similar doorways into visual poetry. Geof, for the Ciccariello image that I’ve linked to above, “Imaginal Landscapes, tenth view”, can you propose a place to “start”, so to speak? Or is this notion of “reading” a misguided one in these circumstances.
In the interest of not making this chronically overlong, I’ll just skip to a couple of more questions for Geof: so far we seem to be discussing instances of visual poetry bleeding out into areas that may no longer be poetry, but I’d like to approach this for a moment from the opposite direction and ask, when does more conventional poetry start to become visual poetry? Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os, for example, can be read successfully even when you don’t know that it is the result of redacting a specific amount of Paradise Lost, yet its shape, how we go about identifying Radi Os as a poem (I agree that we identify poetry basically by its shape) has been constructed by the removal not necessarily of words but of text (a distinction I am glad you made), and this subsequently makes the remainder not so much lines and words but more like the text that remains. Does a construction that can disguise itself as more or less conventional poetry qualify as visual poetry, or do the visual and straight-up textual elements have to be so pronounced that there’s no mistaking it?
Also, would you call Duchamp’s L. H. O. O. Q. a visual poem? If no, fair enough, no explanation needed, but if yes, I’d very much like for you go into why.
I hope all of this is coming across to you as an opportunity to educate the unvisualized masses, and not as too much of an annoyance. Thanks many times over for your last post — if you don’t have the time to respond to this, I’ll nevertheless still be grateful for your generous introduction to visual poetry from last time.
s
PS Hello, Don. Yes, Davenport’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard turned into Cities on Hills. His MA thesis at Oxford was on Joyce (the first one for that university), tho I’m unsure if any of his essays on Joyce in the collected volumes came out of that — don’t know what it takes to order an MA thesis from Oxford and have never tried to figure it out, lazily.
Thanks for initiating this thread. I’m grateful for a space where I can air my amateur notions concerning vizpo in a not-too-embarrassed way and expect to pick up some information meanwhile. If Geof replies, I’ll be inclined to send him a tuition check, with you to blame. I hope you’re well.
yrs
Stephen

By: Geof Huth

Geof Huth — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:31:16 +0000

Let me respond a little, especially to Stephen's comments about visual poetry, though not necessarily to calm his spirit, maybe only to confirm his fears. Stephen is definitely right when he notes that visual poetry does not necessarily conform to the basic requirements of poetry itself. As he's noted, it is abundantly obvious that visual poetry does not always focus on the word. The focus is on text, which is a visual component of the word, not on the word, which is an oral component translated into a visual component. A little history: Although we can make arguments for earlier examples of visual poetry, the most usual point at which we mark the advent of visual poetry is during Classical times, with technopaegnia and carmina figurata. See my exceedingly brief timeline of visual poetry here. There earliest visual poems did two things not usually seen in otherwise "normal" poems: they presented the poems in shapes approximating the shapes of the subjects of the poems themselves and they gave hints as to the reading of the poems--so that, unlike with a regular poem, these poems were not necessarily meant to be read line by line. Strictly speaking, emblem poetry is not visual poetry, since the visual element is always separable from the textual element. However, it does have its interesting verbo-visual effects. The putative illustration of the emblem poem serves sometimes only vaguely as an illustration, thus requiring some imagination of the reader to tease out the connection, and thus making the conjoining of the verbal with the visual a bit more electric. And often in my readings of emblem poems I read the text as actually also serving as an "illustration" of the illustration itself--a way to help uncover meaning in an otherwise hermetic bit of didactic engraving. Happening concurrently with the popularity of emblem poems was the popularity of pattern poems, both thriving during from the 1500s to the 1700s. Pattern poems, like Herbert's few (which occurred closer to the end of this era), were true visual poems, meaning that the textual and the visual elements were not separable. In general, we can say that pattern poems are poems in shapes, but they took many many forms. Some were shaped as their subjects, some were set up in grid patterns, some integrated non-textual visual elements (a lute, Jesus on the cross, whatever) into the poems. Herbert was clearly one of the best writers of pattern poetry, and "Easter Wings" is his masterpiece, where the words, the text, the shape, and the sound all come together to form a remarkably cohesive whole. But there were other successful visual poems before him, my favorite is Eustorg de Beaulieu’s “Gloire à dieu seul” (“Glory to God alone”) from 1537 (about a century earlier than Herbert's work in the field). Note that de Beaulieu's visualization of the text is not metaphoric; it doesn't merely reflect the shape of the subject of the poem. Instead, it suggests a shimmering reading of the words of the poem, a single phrase. It suggests chanting and ecstatic religious experience, but rather than discuss it, as in "Easter Wings," it presents it. So for a few brief comments on contemporary visual poetry: Visual poetry is not always poetry. Some visual poetry is clearly poetry with an added visual element, but many visual poems of today do not have sufficient verbal content to count as poems. For instance, plenty of visual poems are created out of nothing more than punctuation marks or letters that do not form words or fragments of letters or invented scripts. The focus of these visual poems is on text and how it means even when it might not mean in the same manner as text classically does. Even if we extend the term "visual poetry" to those pieces that use fragments of words, we still might not have arrived at a place where a visual poem is a poem. Keep this in mind: visual poetry is a hybrid form, using elements of writing and elements of visual art, so it exists within a continuum of practice. At the near end, works of visual poetry include words and even syntax and are clearly also poems; at the far end, we find works that have such a reduced textual element that some readers may not even be able to perceive it. That being said, a few comments on the poets Stephen brings to the table. Jessica Smith's work is actually the most like "normal" poetry, but the least like contemporary visual poetry. Her work most generally harkens back to gridlike pattern poems that went under the name "labyrinths." Lanny Quarles work is sometimes visual poetry, but much of it is simply quite accomplished digital visual art, often with the feel of collage. Peter Ciccariello's work, though, is fairly standard visual poetry for our times. He presents remarkably visual pieces that include disrupted textual elements. He actually begins with a poem already written out and drapes fragments of these over the digital landscapes he creates--so we cannot read the original poem anymore. We are left deciphering meaning from those words that remain visible, and that is the particular reading experience intended. These seem reasonably enough like poems to be considered poems, and I think of them like the work of someone trying to emulate not Sappho's work itself, but the fragmentary nature of those extant pieces of her works. Which brings us back to the visual presentation of a poem and how it means. Traditionally, we believe that a poem's visual characteristics necessarily effect the reading aloud of the poem, and sometimes that is the case. But I've heard enough poets read through their own linebreaks as if they did not exist to consider this questionable in at least some cases. I think, most importantly, the visual look of a poem is meant to effect the silent reading of the poem. Think of it this way. Poets are apt to extol the virtues of the spoken word and claim that all poetry is aural. Fine, but I'd contend that most of the poetry we experience we experience as text subvocalized in our own head, not as words sounded in the air. Poetry exists, and has for centuries, as a textual, as a visual, medium, and the mere look of a poem on the page tells us it is a poem. For instance, how many times have you looked for a poem in a book of prose merely by flipping the pages, merely by looking for the look of a poem on the page to tell you it was a poem? The most basic way we identify a poem (prose poems excepted for the moment) is by their shape, by the fact they are broken into lines. In modern practice, the breaking into lines has nothing to do with conforming to regular meter and marking the space for inserted a rhyming word, it has something to do with how the poem should be read aloud, but it has everything to do with telling us something is a poem. And all the linebreaks, indentations, visual caesurae, and other visualizations within a text often have less to do with how a poem should be sounded and more with how they should be experienced on a page. I'm assuming here, and without empirical evidence, that a long thin poem is more likely to be read off a page as a choppy syncopated text than it would when read aloud by most poets. I'm assuming that a poem that spreads itself in islets of text across the page will be read by the eye, and experienced by the reader, more as a kind of symphonic construction of words than it can ever be experienced by the ear. Modern poetry, despite our best efforts to prove the contrary, remains a textual experience. We do not experience all of our poetry via the recitations of scops. Fewer people attend poetry readings than read poems to themselves. Value is conferred upon poets by the printing of their poems. We haven't abandoned the oral and aural experience of poetry, but the textual experience still reigns, and poets write for that king. They create their poems for the page, even when they are (even though they are) also clearly written for the ear that might never hear them. Sorry for being so prolix, but I came into this conversation at the end of it, and with too much to say. Geof

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:36:21 +0000

Hi, Stephen, and thanks for all this! The Davenport on Pound was actually his Harvard dissertation, as I recall... yes, out of print, sadly. You and other folks might be interested to know that we've got Geof Huth on board to help us assemble a section of visual poetry for a future issue!

By: Stephen Sturgeon

Stephen Sturgeon — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:51:07 +0000

Hi Jennifer. Thanks very much for your insights and the snippet from your interview with Rankine. What she says reminds me of Pound’s frequent placement of Chinese ideograms in the Cantos, as well as his practice of throwing in Greek written in Greek, and then the same Greek transliterated into the Roman alphabet, and then the same Greek translated into Latin, and on . . . It takes an array of our “senses”, though in this case most of the senses at work reside within our larger sense of language, to see the effects, to engage with things that are in their contents almost identical but in their forms are totally disparate, thanks to many different factors: paucity or strength of cultural memory, historical knowledge, literary knowledge. That’s one of the stranger things about the Cantos — they are, in many people’s words, “challenging” and “difficult”, but Pound has infused the same “information” into the poem in so many different ways (so that they can and should be accessed in a mulitplicity of ways), you’d think there would be a door for everyone to enter eventually in there. But there isn’t, each and every door has its locks.
The Chinese ideograms in the Cantos, I’m told now, have never been positioned according to Pound’s instructions, nor have they ever appeared in the sizes he wanted them to take. Ron Bush’s forthcoming critical edition of the Pisan Cantos (Oxford) tackles this (so I hear) and sets all right (so I hear).
Your Rankine quotation also makes me think of the Cantos because of the way Guy Davenport proposed to read them. His book “Cities on Hills” (it can’t be found anywhere but in a university library unfortunately) is a Canto-by-Canto instruction of how to read the poem as a series of ideograms set side by side, ideograms constructed of chunks of english words, different bits here and there forming a radical which interacts with other nearby bit-radicals until an entire Canto can be read by what the words look like as well as by what they “mean” — a way of making images “go even if they don’t go” as Rankine says.
As to your question, “Do we need to define?” I say “Hell NO!” unless of course you are an editor. I find discussions of genre definition by and far taxing and nearly useless to me when taken up in a theoretical way, but since this thread was motivated by Don’s wondering how one should properly go about producing an issue of visual poetry, the boundaries of visual poetry seem to be relevant. The magazine is called “Poetry” after all, and not “Stuff to See and Read”, and so my comments were provoked by imagining how an editor would go about figuring this out — how to represent properly a kind of poetry that effectively and consistently blurs the line between poetry and the other arts in a magazine that is called simply “Poetry”.
What do you think of the Smith and Basinski images?
s