The New Visual Poetry

The New Visual Poetry

Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View

As we now move through our daily lives, our eyes are literally assaulted by designs of one kind or another. Every box of food we pick up or don't pick up in the super-market is covered with words and more or less enticing visual images to make us want to pick it up. Every cigarette we smoke against scientific medical advice was advertised into our consciousness. Every chair, table, knife, fork, spoon was designed by someone as an object for practical use, although some of these things are very beautiful. Our clothes, our cars, our appliances are designs. Some of the designs in our world are excellent, but their content is trivial. In some designs the content is insidious.

If the new visual poem has found ways to use the materials and methods of presentation of the designer's world (mainly typography), ways to give them significant human and spiritual content; if it can find poetry in the designed world of our daily lives, then we should rejoice and stop worrying about the oral tradition. The plain fact is that the oral tradition neglected the visual power of words.

Great functional designs seem always to be related in some way to nature. The airplane, a mechanical bird, is poetry when it flies, but not a poem.

The poem is made of language and partakes of human nature.

Garnier speaks of the design of the visual poem as "interior." The visual poem as a functional design can humanize the materials and techniques of the mass media of communication, can make them available to the human spirit.

The poem comes alive once again in the world it has been assumed would destroy it.

derek beaulieu
from SWARMS (avantacular press, 2010)

derek beaulieu (the lower case, I do believe, is how he prefers it), is prolific, and I enjoy seeing what’s new in his visual work. The poem above, published in a 20-page chapbook in August, is a wide-screen (it’s presented across two pages) Letraset wonder. It reads as an aerial view of a geography traversed by language-trails bordered by amusement parks and energy centers (the dots and other circular “structures”). Alternatively, I read this as some sort of guitar, or musical instrument – the upside down run of W’s acting, at first glance, as a kind of neck – that plays a wild melange of tunes.

http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

Nico Vassilakis
from STARINGS (Xexoxial Editions, 2010)

Here’s a poem that presents the mysteries of H, S, G, and O, some of them largely inverted. The great John Olson wrote of this poem, “Little ‘h’s dribble down from big ‘H’s, bending like willow branches in a light breeze. A mound of S’s, enlarging then diminishing like a Doppler shift in an arc over a junkyard of tumbled g’s and o’s, lifts then drops one’s eyes in a tickling sibilance of insinuation.” I also see thoughts, the soup of thought, with ideas just starting to bubble, or trailing off. Olson used “wild,” frenzied,” and “explosive” to more generally characterize the poems in STARINGS, and I agree.

http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

The New Visual Poetry

Rectangle 2 - derek beaulieu

Concrete Poetry - A World View

Andrew Topel Y