When art and text convene, the resulting blur is “vispo,” a portmanteau of “visual” and “poetry.” It’s where alphabet morphs into image and language is reinvented into visual experience.

My reply:
Seems to me we need a term meaning something like “partial loose definition.” That’s what the above seems to me—which does make it acceptable as one of many such definitions. Hyperlogical as I am, though, I believe there is only one acceptable verosophical definition of vispo (if we take it as a nickname for “visual poetry,” as I do, because is unproductively confusing to consider vispo different from visual poetry)—although I wouldn’t disagree with anyone who said we haven’t yet expressed it. Substitute “scientific” for “verosophical,” if the latter bothers you. A verosophical definition would be a rigorous definition as near complete as it is possible to be. Not an exploratory definition however useful that can be, but a final definition. Not something blurred, but something distinct one can go to the blurred from. I rather like the idea of vispo as a locus where visimagery (not “art” since music and other non-visual things are art) and language (because text alone is not language and language has always been considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what isn’t poetry) fuse (rather than merely convene) and increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of whatever expressive potency each would have by itself.
Maybe a good distinction would be between a conversational, and a verosophical, definition of a term.

NICO: Bob, you are probably right – that distinction can be made, but I sometimes wonder if the uninitiated wouldn’t end up confused with somewhat exacting neologist definitions. I’m not inferring that what I said captures the true nature of vispo, but think simplicity, be it conversational or not, is useful. I should also say i do appreciate your work in mapping out the verbo-visual permutations that exist and the time and effort you put into it.

Thanks, Nico. I tried my best to show that what I call conversational definitions are definitely useful. Verosophical ones are, too, but probably only to verosophers—i.e., the very few seriously concerned with the search for truth.

Karl Kempton then chimed in with:

perhaps first usage or the coining of the term vispo / vizpo can add to this discussion. as far as i know, if i was not the first i was among the first in the 1970′s to use this term as a short hand in my correspondence with national and international visual poets. at that time we were freeing ourselves from the term concrete poetry to define our works. also at that time, my spelling was phonetically inclined. some have said i was texting before texting. it was an automatic follow through.

vispo / vispo was a short hand for visual poetry, the first usage of which was of european origin. “visual poetry” there, as a term, was used to free themselves from the restricted and discredited field of concrete poetry, a minimalist fission poetics blowing up language to create new patterns. this process paralleled minimalist painting and minimalist and electronic music. visual poetry was a fusion process taking these new and then newer patterns and textures wedding them with another art form or other forms.

in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s), part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words. this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

I replied to parts of this as follows:

K: in my opinion, demanding “recognizable” language word(s),

B: As no one I know of does. I, for instance, simply ask for something called “poetry” to consist of words, as poetry always has. All this “demands” is that one not call something with no recognizable words in it “poetry.” And here we meet the bizarre belief of many that if “visual poetry” requires recognizable words, one cannot make a work of art without recognizable words. But I’m here with the good news that one can do that. One need only call what one creates something other than visual poetry!

K: part or parts erases, or worse censors, the possibility(ies) of wordless poetic gesture(s) and poetic aesthetic(s), rhythms, lines, pictorial metaphor(s) and countless other poetic terms that can be made visual without words.

B: They can be made musical without notes, too, so let’s call them vismoo.

K: this part of the arena is border blur or the soft membrane or tissue between rigid classically drawn demarcation “scientific” lines separating classifications in the assumption each defined field is as if a dead noun and hence incapable of fluid movement or evolution.

B: Right, Karl. You live in the ocean because there’s no exact way to tell where the ocean ends and land begins.

I’m afraid it comes down to an unending struggle between Snow’s two cultures.

Karl’s response:

not wanting to get into a long history as i have just been hit with a nasty cold, the long and short of it has to do in part with a generational difference as well as o so many single glance, so what concrete works and cliches, some even winding up on greeting cards.  the generation difference is building upon what was done and taking it to the fusion process. there was a possibility of a real jump in multimedia but concrete in general turned off lexical poets, calligraphers, book artists, etc., a ready made audience if there ever was one. there was no embrace because the works failed to match the quality of the painters, musicians, sculptors, calligraphers, book artists, etc. not that there were exceptions such as finlay. phillips, dencker, xenakis and others made the jump to aid in the formation along with the lettrists of visual poetry.

for japan, see karl young’s intro on kitasono . having already run his run of concrete many years before concrete was coined, he did not participate in concrete be rehashing his previous concrete before concrete, but submitted his plastic poems. then the rerun story of mine and others re patchen having composed concrete before concrete then being stiff armed. others as well.

i think dencker edited the first or one of the first visual poetry anthologies, 1972. techen was published in 1978 a year before i switched kaldron from a lexical and visual poetry mix to visual poetry only. concrete works were not excluded from any of this but concrete excluded visual poets, esp the lettrists.

the ocean has no fixed line. where the chumash lived 15,000 to 20,000 years ago now under water. soon homes and cites adjacent to the ocean will receive the same fate because fools thought boundaries fixed. boundaries change. worse than building in flood plains. the wise remain on high ground. we are at 70 feet on what is an old sand dune soon to be an island. but my body will have been turned to ash by then.

out of energy,

karl

What Cathy Bennett then said, and I replied to, was:

1- “increase the expressive potency of the other without any loss of
whatever expressive potency each would have by itself. ”
Bob,
The above section*** is where you are completely wrong… and by saying
it is a “scientific” approach, still doesn’t make it right.

Can’t my (very tentative) definition be okay as a scientific one, Cathy? Do you not agree that a scientific one might have some use? In any case, I was just giving a different take on the long-difficult struggle of our language to produce a definition of vispo.

2- “because text alone is not language and language has always been
considered necessary for poetry, and if we decide it isn’t, then what
isn’t poetry”
is a problem when it comes to “asemic” vispo. “Visual Poetry” is not so self-limiting.

You lost me here. If something consisting of textual elements but no words is called visual poetry, how does that not raise the question of what is not visual poetry? Or not poetry. Or do you agree that something consisting of textual elements but not words should not be called “visual poetry?” Which, by the way, is the one thing I am far from alone in believing.

So you want to limit “text” to “language” and you also want to limit “art” to one media/ I say “NO” to both ideas.

It just seems to me that all poetry, including visual poetry (or vispo) should be limited to language, and that text is not language until it becomes words. I’ll never understand the problem so many have with this simple idea. As for “art” as both visual art and all forms of art, no one agrees with me that that can be confusing, or that it’s demeaning to visual art not to have a name of its own. It’s not at all important, though.

3- The “search for truth” is fine, except when approached in your
narcissistic manner…

Well, you have to admit that at least I don’t think we should call the search for truth “Bobgrummanism” although I have to admit that sometimes I think I’m the only one pursuing it.

you have created your mathemaku and now your definition to define it, but “in truth”-that definition*** can only be applied to your mathemaku, which you have decided to limit to your “balanced two elements”.

So, as far as your posited questions: “Is this acceptable as “one” of the many definitions”– Yes… for Bob Grumman’s mathemaku perhaps, but your mathemaku should not be held up as the highest scientific principle of “visual poetry” towards which we all must strive.

Next, Cathy’s husband, John, said, “ANY ‘definition’ of a phenomenon is necessary a definition or description of that phenom. in the past. As soon as it is made, someone comes along and does something that requires the definition be changed, in order to include it.”

But the new thing done need not be included. It may, in fact, not be a new thing: for instance, Klee and many other painters included text but not words in their paintings; their paintings are still considered paintings the subject matter of which is letters—The Villa R, for instance. No one saw, or even now sees, any need to call Klee a visual poet. The word, “chariot,” still means what it did to the Romans even though we now have the automobile. In the arts, even when definitions change, they keep some main part—e.g., the term “music” is now used for works people a hundred years ago called “noise,” but it retains its main part, which is “an art concerned with sound.” Similarly, “poetry” has come to include free verse—but hasn’t, except among certain visiotextual artists—stopped being consider an art of words. I simply don’t see why it should be. Think what mathematics would be if it were decided that numbers no longer had to be part of its definition.  –Bob

In this particular case, and I believe Karl referred to this issue, is that large body of work called “visual poetry” that has NO explicitly linguistic or lettristic elements in it at all. There is a lot of work being done in this mode in Spain now. It seems to use images as concepts, or “words”; it’s a kind of picture writing.  –John

If the pictures do something explicitly verbal—do more than make a gesture some consider linguistic, that is—then it would seem reasonable to call the works involved “visual poetry.” The big problem is a definition so broad or subjective as to be meaningless. Why, for instance, should ballet not be considered visual poetry? (Except metaphorically, which is completely something else.)  –Bob

Joel Lipman added:

To stir & nurture, not resolve, this periodic thread, here’s Willard Bohn’s definition, suitably the opening couple sentences of his Modern Visual Poetry, Chapter 1:

“For all intents and purposes visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen — poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as a reader. Combining visual and verbal elements, it not only appeals to the reader’s intellect but arrests his or her gaze.”

Bohn’s second paragraph particularizes further distinctions: “Where visual poetry differs from ordinary poetry is in the extent of its iconic dimension, which is much more pronounced, and in the degree of its self-awareness. Visual poems are immediately recognizable by their refusal to adhere to a rectilinear grid and by their tendency to flout their plasticity.”

I find this definition grounding and useful, informed about the suggestions and nuances of its language. Its application enables Bohn to write a fine book on the subject, one which is pretty up-to-date, closing a chapter that discusses Perloff’s observations and compositions that explore digitalization’s “multidimensional realm of their own making.”

At some point, Bobbi Lurie and John had the following exchange:

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 1:49 PM, bobbi luriewrote:

Do you consider a piece of visual art, any piece of visual art, visual poetry?
No
Or are there limitations to the definition?
Doubtless, yes. But definitions really don;t interest me very much; I never have anything I can use them for.

If I’m writing an intro to or selecting material for an anthology of something, I’ll use some kind of rule-of-thumb “definition” of what it is I’m selecting, tho it’s often pretty ad hoc, a matter of practicality or limited resources, not something I find very interesting.

Re some of what Bob & Cathy were talking about, I don;t think a “scientific” definition of art is possible or makes any sense. Science is a method, not a matter of absolute categories. A scientific study of the process of artistic creation, however, is quite possible, and could be very interesting indeed.

I couldn’t let that go by unshot at:

As an artist, I care very little about definitions; as a critic, I find them essential, and I need them to be what I consider “scientific”—i.e., objective, logical and reasonably complete (only “reasonably complete” because no definition can be absolutely complete, although the best definitions will be complete enough to satisfy any sane person).

Nico returned with:

you’ll find several responses to THAT question – and others who wont care at all. i think it’s about how you define language and poetry and looking. i wonder about my recent work sometimes, if it’s even vispo anymore. ive done past work where i imbue a piece or series with a kind of rosetta stone inorder to convey how the word can transform into parts of parts of letters. even snippets of letters, thus eliminating traditional MEANING by focusing on letters alone. then my interest shifted into staring my way through a word and into a letter – and that basically annihilated MEANING, and lead to the mere visual aspect of language. is there poetry there? is there meaning there? is it elements or the ingredients of language sitting there like a recipe waiting to be cooked? i think in some sense, yes. but there are other times that i am certain it’s vispo. as language is not only words. though i do relentlessly stare at letters – is a letter a poem? this gets into bob grumman territory. he’d say no. but i think every thing looked at is, why? because our brain does nothing but process what comes across our eyes-in-the-front face. or maybe it’s 2 letters that is the ultimate denominator of poetry. as to me, a letter is an atom and a word is a molecule – and letters are constantly in search of each other to create molecules. my interest in the past few years has been to stop the letter from huddling with other letters to form a word and focus on the letter itself. is that vispo? i dont know. im sure there will be a response. but JMB is right about the spaniards – picture writing – theyre pretty stunning, but is that vispo. does it matter. like hiessenberg – the more you try pinning it down the further down the road you find it.

That stumbled me into this:

I think ultimately it will be easy to categorize these different combinations of graphics and text. Possibly even now there are brain-scanning devices that can tell what part of the brain a person most experiences a work of art. I contend (and—I believe, the certified experts in the field would agree) that so far as visiotextual art is concerned, there are two brain areas involved, the visual and the verbal. I believe conventional poetry will light up the verbal area, conventional painting and sculpture will light up the visual area, visual poetry by my definition will light up both areas about equally, and the works Nico is talking about will do weird things that we need to break the verbal area of the brain into sub-areas to talk about; I think it will mainly light up the visual area but also light up a pre-verbal part of the verbal area. I think the brain (and probably part of the nervous system prior to the brain) subject stimuli to a long sorting procedure, first identifying letters, then words, then grammatical structuring, then the connections of the words to what they denote. The sorting procedure will break down after identifying Nico’s letters BUT certainly give them an aesthetic charge that will make them different from a conventional painting—but, I believe, not enough different to make them a form of poetry, or not painting. The subject matter of lots of paintings will also activate small areas of the brain besides the visual area. Perhaps most paintings do. Needless to say, it’s all a lot more complex than this. For instance, the presence or absence of people concerns in an artwork has a huge importance.

Which is where the discussion was today t around 3 in the afternoon here in Port Charlotte, Florida.

Diary Entry

Monday, 26 December 2011, 2 P.M.  About the first thing I did today was run a mile.  My time was again, over eleven minutes, which is horrible.  I can’t understand why I’m not getting better, although my not having run much for months, and not having run since last Friday (or was it Thursday?) may well have something to do with it.  Later in the morning I gave my latest SPR column a once-over and put in into an envelope with the reviews I had on hand.  That is now in my mailbox, awaiting delivery.  Just now I also wrote a new Poem poem.  I spent less than five minutes on it, but its central idea was one I’ve been thinking about for over a week.  It’s nothing much, at all, but probably worth keeping.  I used it to take care of my blog entry for today.  I haven’t gotten going on what I think of as my final major chore of the year, the response to Jake’s essay.  I think all I need to do is find a way to arrange what I’ve already have from what I wrote over a month ago, and several blog entries that seem relevant, and the little next matter I’ve written, and polish it, but . . .  I keep waiting for the surge I used to feel whenever I was really ready to tackle a writing project, but it’s no more anywhere in me than my ability to run a bad mile instead of a horrendous mile is.   

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Carson City NV Singles

I’m pretty tired, this time for the legitimate reason that I only slept a half-an-hour last night.  I didn’t feel particularly edgy, for I wasn’t anxious about the procedure.  Maybe my body was.  Stress affects it much more than it affects the part of my brain the brain calls “me.”   As is often the case when I have insomnia, I had quite a few ideas.  One of them was a refinement of my long-held belief that it’s unfair to hold an innovative poem to the same standards of clarity a conventional poem is held to since the former is likely only clear because one reading it has been educated in the reading of such poems since nursery school or earlier, and has (probably) not been exposed to anything like what he needs to have been to find an innovative poem clear. 

 The refinement is a new term: “the clarity-to-exposure ratio.”  Or how clear a poem is to an engagent on a scale of, say, one to a hundred, and how much exposure he’s had to poems of its kind on the same scale.  Hence, a poem by Frost may have a clarity rating of 95, but an exposure rating of 95, as well, because of what school teachers have taught him about formal verse, and his memory of nursery rhymes, and much else.  One of my mathemaku may have a clarity rating of 8 (because it will have understandable words and recognizable mathematical symbols and, perhaps, recognizable graphic images).  It may have the same c-to-e ratio as the Frost poem, though, if its exposure rating is only 8,which it could well be because no such poems will have been taught to its engagent. 

Offhand, I would say a poem approaches ideal clarity to the degree its clarity-to-exposure ratio approaches point nine.  After its exposure rating has reached 100.  I make point nine (or some such figure)  the ideal because perfect clarity is boring.  That I consider a fact of aesthetics, not an opinion.

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Western Union

               Skips

               one bus,
               said of certain places

Here’s the first skip: “one bus” will not strike many readers as being something likely to be “said of certain places.” But it can make sense for places isolated so having only one bus in and out each day (or week?). In any case, an image of a bus stop entered my mind.

               which may, at sites, be
               or, for such as certain sites

26 October: At this point we can be sure we’re in what I call a syntax poem, which is a kind of language poem (in my poetics).   A syntax poem, to put it simply, a poem whose syntax is goofy.  Gregory, I’m sure, has a different name for it. “Logoclastic poem,” I think may be it. A terrific word (like so many of my neologies are, but suffering, like them, from being too idiosyncratic). Gregory would also consider his poem “cubistic,” which it can’t be, for what an artwork becomes cubistic mainly by showing a scene from two or more angles simultaneously, which words can’t do.  Gregory is probably presenting his scene like Stein presented many of hers, with fractional objective and subjective (often, to my taste, too subjective) descriptions repeated many times in varied form.   A kind of Jamesian hesitancy to be direct.  When effective–as here, I believe–it can make a commonplace scene take on enough obscurity to allow the reader the eventual joy of solving it.  Or coming close enough to doing that.

               a, saying, or, for standing
               a, may be holding places

I still feel like I’m at a bus stop, or maybe even in a bus station.  But, helped by later sections I’ve now read more than once, I find the poem discussing language, too.  One reason for that is that so many of these kinds of poems do just that.  But “saying” is what language does, as well as a word (or close to a word) for “so to speak.”  Using words or phrases in this double way is, of course, a primary activity of poets, but language poets tend to be more interested in doing it than other poets–enough to warp their poems’ syntax to help them do it.

At this juncture I’m taking a break until tomorrow.   Hey, I could say more, but I think I’ve given you students enough to think about for this session!  (Note: I can’t resist putting in another plug for the value of close readings–I find it as much fun to discover something in someone else’s poem, which I feel I’ve done here [for myself, at any rate], as it is suddenly to discover something I can use in a poem of my own that I’m working on.  I really feel sorry for those who can’t appreciate close readings.)

               and doubtless other combinations
               one bus.

               and if it is but agreeable
               a hand or glove or calendar

               as, he was
               but not in certain places

               which, when sounding
               just above, and, sounding just above

               are gone, or, for some time
               by rote or involuntary action

               between highest and lowest
               is present, and absent, is gone and when

               that aspect, to be events
               alike, in which they are alike

               between highest and lowest
               the features

               perceived or thought about
               seem suddenly, to fit

               also spelled insight or solution
               the use of, or, as means his present station

               and doubtless other combinations
               which are themselves

               his means
               the skin, the hair, the coat

               are fairly, then, it matches, either of the two
               in which, unfit variations

               are discarded
               are held at mutual right angles, say

               as when a new hat
               or sometimes used as synonyms

               is part
               or,

               as a rule, a new hat
               is considered of involuntary action

               or,
               in respect to suspended judgment

               in which, a measure of degree
               they are, so alike

               being highest, possible highest
               the skin, the hair, the coat

               an irrepressible action
               or

               due to lips
               and doubtless other combinations

               attained by involuntary action
               as when a new hat is considered part

               of one’s coat
               or rival, or station

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Jet Blue Airlines

Why?  What’s wrong with defining poetry objectively as having lines, prose, including “prose poems,” as not having lines?  If a prose poem is a poem, what isn’t?

 

(Actually, my own definition of poetry is slightly more complex than “having lines” because of things in some poems like internal li    ne breaks, so I define poetry as language having flow-breaks—as I said many years ago here.)

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Cash Advance Loans

Yeah, for almost forty years now I’ve been defining and re-defining visual poetry, often returning to old definitions.  Believe it or not, I’m trying to come up with one others will accept–without letting it go as “undefinable,” or–worse–infinitely-definable.  I think I may
have it now–but I always think that when I advance a new definition.  This one is only slightly new.  What’s new is the sub-categories I split it into.  Okay, here goes:

Visual Poetry is an artwork containing a verbal and a graphic constituent in which part or the whole of the semantic meaning of the verbal constituent and part or the whole of the representa-tional meaning of the graphic constituent each makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

It comes in two varieties: visiophorical and visiocollagic poetry.  Visiophorical Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent acts as a metaphor for part or the whole of what its verbal constituent denotes that makes a centrally significant contribution to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

Visiocollagic Poetry is Visual Poetry part or the whole of whose graphic constituent combines ametaphorically with part or the whole of the semantic meaning of its verbal element in such a
manner as to make a centrally significant contribution (in the view of a consensus of informed observers) to the core aesthetic effect of the work.

An awkward set of definitions but necessarily so.

I’ve decided a main reason it’s taken me so long to get a final set of poetics definitions is that I’m treating poetics as a verosophy–or attempt to come to a rational, objective understanding of some consequential large-scale aspect of existence sufficiently close to full for any reasonable person–and there are very few people (especially in the arts) interested (or, probably, qualified for) such an undertaking.  Those few who are, are off in their own wilder-nesses, not mine, or involved in a group effort as most of the sciences are.   In short, I’m basically without help–although occasionally I have gotten useful feedback.  I’m also over-extended–which is my fault.

My standard arguments against the application of the term, “visual poetry,” to works without words, or without words that contribute significantly to their central aesthetic meaning have long been: (1) expanding the coverage of the term to just about any conceivable somebody or other wants to call a visual poem–which, of course, renders it worthless as a tool of description; and (2) it breaks with the practice of several thousand years of considering poetry a literary art, and therefore requiring words; why change a meaning so drastically that’s worked so well for so long?  With regard to (2) let me add that, yes, the meaning of “poetry” was expanded to included free verse, and just about all such terms need to be at least a little flexible, but free verse poems continued to use the majority of devices that metrical verse did, and remained a literary art (and as such, I claim, continued to achieve its most important effects in the verbal area of the human brain, not elsewhere in the brain, and certainly not elsewhere in the brain and not in the verbal area of the brain).

I have a third problem with what I consider the misuse of the term, though–a personal one.  It is that as people encounter works like many of those in the new (excellent) collection at Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia that are called “visual poems” although they are without aesthetically significant words or even textual elements and are thus conditioned not to expect anything called a visual poem to be verbally meaningful. Ergo, unless I call my combinations of words and graphics “visual poems containing significant words,” those encountering them will take them as perhaps pleasant designs but not trouble to work out what they much more importantly are due to their words. In short, my own works will suffer because of the way others mislabel theirs.

True, few will care about my works even after alerted to the fact that the words in them are not just graphically-designed into them.  Still . . .

.  .  . I think McHugh’s right–if I understand her point, what she’s talking about is not a particular technique but an effect reachable by various means at various times, one of those first principles that I referred to before.  The high modernists, who were crazy about collage, were in this light not inventing anything entirely new so much as finding a fresh path to an age-old destination.

(All worthy destinations are age-old?)

This principle of disjunction, then, is visible in Whitman’s whip-saw juxtapositions, Stein’s fracturing of syntax, Eliot’s fragments shored against the ruins, the electric leap in a haiku, surrealist imagery, and so forth, right up through more recent instances such as Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox” and Ashbery’s ruminative ramblings.

I’m just thinking aloud here, and no doubt overgeneralizing, but it occurs to me that there is at least a kinship between poetry such as Dean Young’s and a lot of language-centered poetry with which it wouldn’t normally be compared.  Rather like Ashbery, Young employs utterly conventional syntax, image, and figure; but the results are most slippery and unparaphraseable.  He doesn’t fracture language itself, but there is plenty of disjunction and fragmentation at the conceptual level.

If you focus mostly on the easy binaries (style/theme; free verse/meter; traditional/experimental) you would naturally miss recognizing this sort of kinship.  If, for example, all your definitions of poetry focused relentlessly on
purely technical matters such as the handling of syntax.

My response: “I suppose if you focused all your consideration of poetry on the techniques objectively distinguishing each kind from all others, you’d possibly miss as much as ten percent of the things you’d miss if you focused it only on the trivial kinships that can be found between any two kinds of poems.  (Note: there is more to appreciating poetry than defining it, although that’s the most important part of intelligently appreciating it.)”

In a second post, I opined that “all worthy destinations are much more age-old than new, but never not-new in some significant way.”

But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere.  Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at.  Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem:  suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend.  For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness.  That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once  I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.

To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much.  But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story.  Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine.  I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to.  It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.

I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:

But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly–  one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once.   Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness.  For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.

Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:

In this poem the F suggests to me  a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point.  So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text.  Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives.  And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been.  Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world.  In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.

So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.

Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory.  It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often.  Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.

84. Lie

Does the voice make a lie of the poem? Because a good voice can make a weak poem seem strong and a poor voice can ruin a great poem. Is the poem isolated on the page (the screen) the most accurate version of the poem, true to itself, or does the voice we use to read it in our heads also ruin great poems and resurrect the dead ones?

It comprised his blog entry for Friday.  Here’s my reply:

Interesting question.  I lean toward considering any poem on paper to its completion as the printed score of a musical composition is to its completion.

I can’t see a bad reading spoiling a good poem or good reading rescuing a bad poem, for me, but that’s because the conceptual area of my brain is much stronger than its auditory area.  So, for me, what a poem is on paper is something like 95% of what it is, completed.  For others the percentage will be lower or higher.

Since I can’t read music very well, a musical composition on paper is likely less than 15% of what it is, completed, for me.  For Beethoven, in his final years, it would have been 100%.

Similar thinking applies to the font-shape and color of a poem’s print, and the color and texture of the paper.

All this is out the window for sound poetry and visual poetry–well, not all of it for those of us for whom poetry is a verbal art requiring completion by being spoken, whether internally by the poem’s engagent or externally by either the engagent or someone else.  No more than half out the window, I would say.  For me, a verbally effective visual or sound poem can be neither completely spoiled nor completely rescued by its extra-verbal visual or auditory components–but it could be one or the other by its verbal content–as a poem.

Hey, thanks, Geof.  I’ve just written my blog entry for Sunday.

–Bob

Still later comment: I wonder if it’s possible for a bad poem to be read so well it becomes, or seems, a good poem. It seems to me that if it can be read in such a way that its sounds good, it must be good–it had whatever is needed to be beautifully voiced.

.            Poem in last the Where Yellow

.            When sky Poem club over
.            sundry conniving. chain Last; exceptions.
.            Witheringly so so so, so example for
.            doesn’t? It. instants and below.
.            shifted candy bellowing bulge ‘s, s,o
.            with her wristle
.            exceeds which whistley love.
.            Parties never part am he.

I realized that it was a genuine experimental poem–as many poems called “experimental” are not.  That, unsurprisingly, put me into my defining mode.   My first reason for deeming my poem experimental was that in composing it I had devoted myself seriously to doing something significant as a poet that I’d never done when composing a poem before.  Or at least couldn’t remember having seriously done.  First simple insight–that, for me, a poem I made could be experimental even if what I did as a poet was something others had done.  Such was the case with this poem, for I’m sure language poets have made poems with the intention of avoiding any suggestion of sentences.  Conclusion: there are two kinds of experimental poems, endo-experimental poems and exo-experimental poems. Poems experimental for their composers and poems that are experimental for the world.

There are also–those in which a p0et does something as a poet new for him that he claims is therefore experimental.  Like trying out a new rhyme-scheme.  But if it would seem to almost every knowledgeable person that a poet’s endo-experiment is at the level of the “experiment” almost any poet must carry out when composing a poem, since he must make a poem different in some way from any previous poem of his, his poem is pseudo-experimental.  Else all poems are experimental, and the term has no meaning.

As I’ve opined before many times, in one way or another: a genuine experimental poem can easily, mostly likely will, be a failure as a poem, but it will never be a failure because one must learn from it.  So an experimental poem that fails as a poem is as worth making as a non-experimental poem that succeeds as a poem, unless that latter succeeds majorly.

The main thing a poet might learn from an experimental poem of his that fails as a poem is that whatever it was that he did differently was unproductive, and not worth repeating.  Better, he might see variations of his experiment he could try.  There would remain the possibility that some variation of the experiment would yield a valuable new kind of poem.  If not, he will have learned of a path not worth following.  He might also end not only in learning in detail why that path was not worth following, but with a raised understanding of the non-experimental things he could do as a poet, and be able to appreciate and employ them better than he had.

So, what Have I learned from my poem?  I’m not sure.  Nothing definite, for sure.  Just a few inklings that certain details may have potential.  I like “instants and below,” who knows why.  Ditto, “”example for doesn’t.”  The “‘s” is outside the avoid-sentences experiment but makes me think an apostrophe in front of a single letter or maybe two letters might be artfully mysterious, if the letter or letters were not arbitrarily chosen.  Something to let the under-conscious bat around.  A word like “so” repeated for no apparent reason (except here I thought of “so-so,” and the fact that “so so-so” did make sense).  “To part am,” somewhere in my head doing is something.

Another thought: that doing everything in a poem purposely wrong can help shake one out of the habit of doing everything purposely right, which I feel will almost never lead to a good poem.

A question: if I make a variation of the endo-experimental poem above will the result be an endo-experimental poem?  By my definition, no.  My first experiment will have to have been my only significant experiment.  I wouldn’t be doing more than changing a rhyme-scheme.   That, however, would make experimental poems too rare to bother naming, and no poet would qualify to be an experimental poet.  So I would extend my definition to include as experimental poems in which the poet devotes himself seriously to doing variations of something significant he has never before tried as a poet.

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