I feel my definition of visual poetry is set. My task for years has been to convince others how sensible that definition is. So today I’m having another go at getting the vispo public behind me.
It seems to me that to properly define a term, one must do it systematically. The first step, then, would be to find some large, significant category to place the term in. To orient you to my thinking, let me say that the initial category would be, simply, “Reality.” I would divide that into “Mind” and “Matter” (and forget about the first because I believe a category containing just one item–with no subcategories under it).
Note: I consider it mandatory that each category split into as few categories immediately below it as possible, preferably just two, and more than three as little as possible. Simplicity is the goal.
To try to avoid getting too confusing, let me now jump several levels down the system to what I call “Human Expression,” the subcategories of which are Visual, Auditory, Tactile, Gustatory, Olfactory and Verbal Expression. The latter of these is understood to be the use of words, and Auditory and Visual Expression to be visual and/or auditory expression of everything but words. I believe that verbality is almost a sixth sense–that we perceive things verbally sometimes–verbally only! Visual expression is the use of “visimagery,” as I call it, or painting, drawing, sculpture, the dance. Auditory expression is music. Tactile expression would be petting, love-making, and the like. I don’t really think there is much gustatory or olfactory expression but suppose a great chef expresses himself in his cooking, as might some creator of scents. Actually, I see no reason why someone might not make an artwork out of scents–a kind of music in which scents replace sounds. Difficult in the past but perhaps simple with computers, either now, or in the not distant future.
At this point we need, in my opinion, to distinguish our kinds of expression in one other way. Otherwise, my experience has shown, things get taxonomically confusing at the lower levels of the system. We have to distinguish kinds of expression according to their intention. Some expression is clearly informative only, some aimed entirely at giving pleasure (music, for example), and some–in my view, significantly different from these two in being neither primarily informative nor entertaining, but in being designed to persuade. In short, we have information, art and propaganda.
I place literature under art. It is a form of verbal expression intended (mainly) to give pleasure. Note well my “(mainly).” None of these categories is for information, art or propaganda only, but just for one of those things more than for anything else.
There are, in my system, two kinds of literature, prose and poetry. I think almost everyone agrees to that. The problem is defining the two. This I’ve done to my satisfaction if not to that of many others. Most poets, for instance, are nulliguists who refuse to accept that their sacred art can be, gasp, defined.
At which point I suppose I need to define “defining.” It is not saying what some X is so well that everyone must agree that anything called an X indeed is, and that there is nothing not called an X that should be. It is not saying that an absolutely valid definition of anything is possible. What it is saying is that everything whatever can be defined sufficiently rigorously for all sane persons to agree that it is sufficiently well-defined to be employed to communicate to any sane person knowing the language used for the definition to know what is being represented well enough for his needs, whatever they are. A simple example: if I define my house as the green structure located at 1708 Hayworth Road in Port Charlotte Florida, it will allow anyone who wants to who can speak or read English to get to my house and recognize it.
It is sometimes difficult to define something more complicated in such a way as permanently to avoid confusion. I simply say that it ultimately is, and that the fact that many definitions are inadequate does not make the process futile, nor does the fact that nullinguists will always refuse to accept definitions, or the fact that the majority of people use the language badly, and reject rational definitions.
Okay, we’re to my definition of “poetry.” It’s simple: poetry is literature that makes significant use of flow-breaks such as lineation. Defining flow-breaks is hairy and I’m going to skip it here as not relevant to the definition of “visual poetry.” At the borblur that every definition must have between it and like things that are not it. subjectivity will always rule. Hence what I said about no definition’s being absolutely valid. The definition of many intricacies will always be tentative at borblurs, but sufficient for the use of the term in almost every important (and unimportant) circumstance. (However many morons use words to try to convince us words are useless.)
I do want to say a little more about the use of flow-breaks to separate poetry from prose. The division is artificial division, but it makes sense because almost every feels intuitively that poetry differs from prose in a major way. Moreover, poetry is expected to be read slowly, all of its words meant to please as sounds and bundles of connotations unhurriedly savored as well as for what they denote, while prose is much more concerned with conveying meanings quickly, of being transparent, and lineations (and the other forms of flow-breaks in my system) must slog a read–while also clearly, rather emphatically signaling that the reader is in something different from ordinary literature.
With that, I’m finally to “visual poetry.” (The great difficulty in persuading even the best readers of what one is saying about something like this is that close argument is unavoidable to the extent that one wants to be unassailably right.) Visual poetry, at that most superficial level, is simply poetry that makes significant use of visual elements.
Remember that in my system, words are not visual, they are verbal (to the extent that they are used denotatively and connotatively and not as visual images that happen to have a verbal function in some contexts).
I place visual poetry under poetry because that’s the best place for it. I arbitrarily presume that a person experiencing something more or less equally visual and verbal will attend to its verbal meaning more than to its visual meaning. Words, for me, are the most important kind of human expression. I believe that most philosophers would agree with me. Anyway, it’s one of my dogmas.
Also, I’m speaking of visual poetry. When a term consists of an adjective and a noun, the noun is taken to be the determinant, finally, of what it more is.
So, I place it under literature, not under visimagery. Where else, I ask, might I place it? The only possibility is not to place it but give it its own category. I simply don’t think it’s different enough from previous kinds of poetry to rate a separate category. It is like drama in this respect–drama is also a combination of the visual and the verbal yet considered a kind of literature, not given its own category. To be fair, ballet, a form of auditory/visual art (but not drama because not verbal), does seem to have its own category. Although I would call it visimagery–visual art with a strong component of music.
I would only say, that giving visual poetry its own category makes sense, but that I just don’t like it. As a critic of what I call visual poetry, I always discuss it as poetry before turning to what it is and does visually. The words of a visual poem tell us its meaning, its colors and shapes are secondary to that. With that I leave this phase of the argument, certain that a neutral observer would not be able easily to decide whether I’m right or not.
My need now is to deal with those who won’t accept that a “visual poem” need to have anything to do with “poetry,” in spite of my proceding arguments. Such people want it to cover . . . well, Im not sure what–just about anything on paper someone wants to call visual poetry, it would seem. One of my taxonomical problems with this is where to place this category in my scheme, or any scheme. Is it literature, visimagery–or something that is neither.
My opponents in this controversy never say. Basically, they merely say that visual poetry need not have words. None has yet answered my frequent return question, “Why isn’t it?” I can only repeat that I prefer a taxonomy with multi-element categories deferred as long as possible. That is to say, I want to wait as long as possible before giving a category many sub-categories. In this case, I want hold my art category to . . . four categories, visimagery, music, literature and visceraltainment. Okay, dumb, but the best I can do right now. I mean cooking, perfume-creation and the like all together.
Let’s keep all mixtures out of this level.
Whatever level we put visual poetry as just about anything on paper, it leave the need to subdivide it. We will have to distinguish kinds of visual poetry. The process has in fact begun with people defining “visual poetry” that lacks significant verbal content as “asemic writing.” But they don’t say what “visual poetry” that has significant verbal content should be called. Why not call it “visual poetry” in the first place, and this other stuff “asemic writing?” Or “Textual designage” as I term it?
A pr consideration seems important to me here. So much art called visual poetry that lacks words is being attacked by academics and average people for not having words. It is understandable that people would expect words in something called a poem and be disappointed and frustrated at not finding them. Why do this to them when you don’t have to? Why give them reason for ignoring everything called visual poetry because you don’t want to name it rationally? This prevents them from coming to terms with both verbal visual poetry, which word-people may very well like, and textual designage by whatever name, which even word people might like if not coming to it with the idea that they need to be able to read it.
In self-defense against a common charge that anyone trying to define something intelligently is some kind of fascist, I want to say that obsession with convincing everyone that mine is the best definition of visual poetry has nothing to do with some kind of egotistical desire to impose my will on others but with a desire that the definition flow smoothly and logically out of a rational system–that it seem right not only considered by itself but as a piece in a larger whole. Hence, it is that I sneak up on my definition beginning high above it with my definition of literature as a form of verbal expression intended to cause aesthetic pleasure (rather than intended to persuade or provide information, the two other kinds of verbal expression in my taxonomy of modes of communication).
Whew. This turned out to be a monster of a job. I don’t feel at all satisfied with how I’ve carried it out. I am satisfied that I’ve made a pretty good start toward what I wanted to do.