Entry 119 — Defining Visual Poetry Again
In a month or so, John Bennett’s and my selection for a gallery of visual poems in The Pedestal should be appearing. John and I each will be providing a preface for it, as I understand it. In any case, I started thinking about mine last night. Once again I returned to my obsession with defining “visual poetry.” This time, though, I wasn’t concerned with my main definitional obsession, the requirement of visual poetry to contain words, but with a lesser obsession, the requirement that a visual poem be more than an illustrated poem, or poetically captioned illustration–because of an excellent submission I got consisting of several arresting visual images, each with a haiku running across its bottom.
Dogma#1: a visual poem must consist of a significant graphic element significantly interacting with a significant verbal element. Dogma #2: a reader of the poem must experience the poem’s graphic and verbal elements simultaneously. There will come a day when neurophysiologists will be able to detect this simultaneous experience. Thereupon we will have an objective way of determining whether a not a given work is a visual poem–for a given person.
This simultaneous experience seems to me the whole point of visual poetry, difficult though it be to provide it. My “Nocturne” demonstrates how it is done, so that’s the poem I’ll be using as my “Editor’s Poem” for the gallery. It’s based on the simple idea of dotting all the letters in “night” to suggest stars, then doing the same with “voice” to indicate a voice with stars in it. Very sentimental, but a favorite of mine. For some reason, though, I can’t find it in my computer files, so apparently have not yet saved it digitally.