Visual poetry is a style of poetry that incorporates graphic and visual design elements to convey its meaning. This style combines visual art and written expression to create new ways of presenting and interpreting poetry.
Visual poetry focuses on playing with form, which means it often takes on various art styles. These styles can range from altering the structure of the words on the page to adding other kinds of media to change the poem itself.
Some forms of visual poetry may retain their narrative structure, but this is not a requirement of visual poetry. Some visual poets create more abstract works that steer away from linguistic meaning and instead focus heavily on the composition of words and letters to create a visually pleasing piece.
Differentiation from concrete poetry
Literary theorists
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries ...
have identified visual poetry as a development of
concrete poetry
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
but with the characteristics of
intermedia
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to ...
in which non-representational language and visual elements predominate.
As the literary and artistic experiments of the 1950s that were at first loosely grouped together as concrete poetry extended further into the ambiguous sphere which
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
described in 1965 as 'Intermedia', it became apparent that such creations were further and further divorced from the representational language with which poetry had hitherto been associated and that they needed to be categorized as a separate phenomenon.
In her survey, ''Concrete Poetry: A World View'' (1968),
Mary Ellen Solt observed that certain trends included under the label ''concrete poetry'' were tending towards a "new visual poetry". Its chief characteristic is that it leaves behind the old poetic function of orality and is therefore distinct from the ancient tradition of shaped poetry from which concrete poetry claimed to have derived. Visual poetry, on the other hand, is to be distinguished by its deployment of typography.
Solt included in her proposed new genre the work of
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
Life
Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent.
He was educa ...
,
John Furnival and
Hansjörg Mayer. Her definition was extended by Marvin A. Sackner in his introduction to the Ohio State University 2008 collection of visual poetry: "I define concrete poems as those in which only letters and/or words are utilized to form a visual image, whereas visual poems constitute those in which images are integrated into the text of the poem". He also separated out artist-generated picture poems and artists' books as an allied category, citing the work of
Kenneth Patchen. Also to be found in the university collection is
Tom Phillips' ''
A Humument'', as well as an assortment of handwritten but non-linguistic texts.
In the light of these assertions, a new genealogy of forerunners to visual poetry emerges that includes
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà ( , ; ; 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Catalan Spanish painter, sculptor and Ceramic art, ceramist. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona ...
's poem-painting ''Le corps de ma brune'' (1925),
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...
's incorporation of
Michel Seuphor's text in ''Textuel'' (1928), and prints (') by
H.N. Werkman using elements of typography. The last also used the typewriter to create abstract patterns (which he called '), using not just letters but also purely linear elements. Created during the 1920s, they anticipated the intermediary 'typestracts' of the concrete poet
Dom Sylvester Houédard during the 1960s that would equally qualify as visual poetry.
Klaus Peter Dencker also stresses the continuity of the new genre in his theoretical paper "From Concrete to Visual Poetry" (2000), pointing out its "intermedial and interdisciplinary" nature. The two are also interdependent and "without concrete poetry the current forms of visual poetry would be unthinkable". The academic Willard Bohn, however, prefers to categorize the whole gamut of literary and artistic experiment in this area since the late 19th century under the label of ''visual poetry'' and has done so in a number of books since 1986. From his reductionist point of view, "Visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen – poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as a reader".
[Bohn, 2001]
p. 15
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See also
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References
Bibliography
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External links
UbuWeb
which hosts a large amount of concrete poetry
The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry
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Genres of poetry