Column004 — December 1993
|
Visual Poetry Today
Small Magazine Review, Volume 1, Number 7, December 1993 A couple of years ago I and some 200 other visual poets throughout the world received copies of a 2-page questionnaire from Crag Hill and John Byrum, poet/editors of magazines highly- regarded in the field. About half the questionnaire concerned visual poetry as a career; the rest had to do with its nature and function. Hill and Byrum got responses from some sixty poets, mostly North Americans but with a sprinkling of Europeans and South Americans (some of whose responses are in their native tongues). These they've now published as Core. This is important for everyone interested in visual poetry, for there has been no large-scale compilation of commentary on the genre since 1978 when Peter Mayer and Bob Cobbing brought out concerning concrete poetry in England--and no compilation ever with material from so many practitioners. It should also be of interest to the world outside the narrow confines of visual poetry as a fairly full-scale overview-from-within of what it's like to be an otherstream artist in the contemporary Western World. As an amateur psychologist, I found it fun to divide the respondents into "rigidniks" and "freewenders", the former conscientiously trying to answer the questions as directly and fully as possible, the latter wending widely, and wildly, astray. Among the rigidniks I put Karl Kempton (whose contribution has 34 footnotes), myself, Geof Huth, Wharton Hood, David Cole, John M. Bennett, Jonathan Brannen. More fun are such freewenders as Andrew Russ, who--under a pseudonym--defines poetry as a capital I, and visual poetry as a dotted capital I, then answers the rest of the questionnaire with various arrangements of i's--and eyes; Avelino De Araujo, who does similar things with a little circle; and Bill DiMichele, who simply overprints the questionnaire with what appears to be two pieces of scrap paper, heavily splotched, and with part of some kind of educational hand-out text on one of them. There are also Spencer Selby, whose answers consist of amusingly pertinent found graphics--like a drawing of a little girl at the top of a ladder trying to reach the bottom limbs of a tree as an answer to a question concerning whether or not the government should subsidize visual poetry; and Daniel Davidson, whose response consists of a page containing a boxed text that says "NONONONONON/ONONONONON/..." on one side and a similarly boxed text on the other side that says, "ONONONONONO/NONONONONON/..." So Core is, among other things, an intriguing collection of visual poems. The respondents took three positions on the nature of visual poetry: (1) who cares; (2) it is just about any form of art that combines text and graphics; and (3) it is a rigorously ascertainable subset of the preceding whose characteristics vary slightly from critic to critic. The first two were by far the most popular of these. My (abridged) answer to those who took position 1 is simple: all intelligent people care, because to define is to make meaningful communication possible, and communication is sharing, which is A Good Thing. Karl Young, I think, stated the second position best: "Visual poetry is a type of poetry that depends to a significant degree on its visual form. It cannot be fully understood if read aloud to someone who can't see it, no matter how many times it is read, or how it is read, or explained, or glossed." Except that I'd use "experienced" in place of "understood" (because I think it possible for one person to tell another enough about something visual for the latter to understand it without having to see it), this seems sensible. But it can't deal well with such mixtures of the verbal and visual as illustrated poems and collages whose textual matter everyone would agree is poetic. Poems with fancy lettering (can mere calligraphy make an ordinary poem a visual one?), and paintings that have minor bits of text in them (that someone somewhere might contend are poetic) would present problems for it as well. In short, it's too loose for me. That's why I for a long time worked out of position 3, defining a visual poem as a mix of verbal and visual matter whose visual matter acts as a significant metaphor for its main verbal matter. This hasn't caught on. Consequently, I've backed into position 2--and made up the term "illumapoetry" from "illumagery," my word for visual art, and "poetry" to stand for combinations of verbal and metaphorically-active visual matter. This, I know, will never catch on! As for the function of visual poetry, my impression is that the respondents mostly agreed with Geof Huth that "visual poetry, as art, brings pleasure to the world--pleasure different from that possible through other artforms," though some would add remarks like Harry Polkinhorn's that "visual poetry should promote clear thinking and fresh perception, always needed in the world we inhabit." From others of the conscientious replies we learn (without surprise) that just about no one makes any money from visual poetry. This doesn't seem to faze any of the contributors to Core, though I'm sure that most of them have a normal amount of extra-aesthetic ambition and hope, as I do, to one day become established--without becoming establishment. It will be interesting to see if so substantive a publication as Core will be much of a step toward Credibility in the Big World for visual poetry. If the volume starts getting cited by the academics (as I notice some of Richard Kostelanetz's long disregarded essays on the avant garde are now beginning to be with an almost frightening alacrity, if not yet with much genuine comprehension), and inspires follow-up anthologies of various kinds, visual poetry could at last enter the mainstream. If so, it will be fascinating to see if it then becomes the first movement to avoid the defensive tunnel- vision of all previous literary establishments.
|