Entry 469 — A Personal Problem
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 . . .
note term in title– intermedia
SHE
walking down Houston
in a wet-dress clinging
to that image with-in
& with-out
in a single word:
pure-poetry-in-motion
not a single need/want to cut-&-paste
I admit I was thinking of your show as a collection of visual poetry, Karl. I fear most people will mistake it as such. But my problem is not with it but with the extremely wide-spread notion, which I fear your introduction to your show does little to address, that an artwork need not have words or even textual elements to be a visual poem.
Ed: a poem can be a metaphor for a woman but it can’t be a woman.
yeah & thank Gawd
(whoever she may be)
for the difference
or
in the immortal words of
(what’s her name) :
“I never saw a poem as lovely as a tree”
the last time I kissed “her” I got a mouth-full of wet oil-based paint
of
a Blood-Red persuasion
so
I called her bluff and named her DIOTIMA
525 pages later she turned from ink into stone …
full moon
I think I’m in love
with a rock
bob,
given the wide spectrum of modern and post modern art, your demands are older than 100 years in the rear view mirror. look at art and music on the experimental frontiers: single colored canvases over 50 years ago, music scores of one note hours long over 50 years ago. films of a building days long . . .
u forget poetic gesture (jest), accent, etc not being words but very poetic. u r being very literal and o so very non visual. can not fractured sounds of speech be made visual with broken letters not words . . .
also y i am now using “sound illumination” to get away from nit pickers.
is not the actual heading of the entire collection “illuminated script”? it is a door wide open to possibilities to illuminate mind(s).
Just saw this post of your today, Karl. Not sure what you’re talking about. You have a bad habit of avoiding specifics.
Of course “fractured sounds of speech” can “be made visual.” So what? If they do nothing semantic, they are not poetry, by everyone’s definition of poetry for thousands of years. Sure, gestures can be “poetic.” So can kangaroos. Which means any word can be used metaphorically. But in verosophy the purpose is to define things objectively, unmetaphorically. Only then can words be used to communicate knowledge.
I continue not to see what “sound illumination” or “illuminated script” mean–without definitions attached.
–Bob