Visual poetry
Visual poetry is a unique form of artistic expression where words, letters, and symbols are arranged to create patterns or images, often conveying deeper meanings or emotions beyond their literal text. This genre includes various styles such as concrete poetry, where the layout of the text forms a visual shape that resonates with the poem's theme, and pattern poetry, which has historical roots dating back to ancient Greek compositions designed to reflect their subjects, like altars or mythological figures.
In contemporary practice, visual poetry has expanded significantly due to advancements in technology, allowing poets to utilize digital media, collage techniques, and kinetic forms that incorporate movement and sound. This modern visual poetry often challenges traditional reading methods, inviting readers to engage with fragments of text or abstract designs that evoke a range of interpretations. Notable examples include works that utilize multimedia elements or unconventional structures, such as letters intertwined or texts shaped like objects, encouraging a more interactive experience with poetry.
From children creating emergent poetry to established artists exploring diverse techniques, visual poetry remains a dynamic and evolving art form that continues to inspire creativity and reimagine the boundaries of written expression.
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Visual poetry
Visual poetry is poetry in which words or letters are arranged to form a pattern or an image. They can also be presented in a way that conveys additional meaning or emotion. Common types of visual poetry include concrete poetry and pattern poetry. In the twenty-first century, poets can create collage poems, works written as mathematical equations, holographic poems, and xerographic works that comprise letters instead of words, with an emphasis on the shapes and scripts at play with the open spaces. In some cases, the poems cannot be read linearly; the reader must find connections between the words. Modern technology, such as desktop publishing software, has created novel opportunities for writing and experiencing visual poetry.
Background
Greek pattern poems are some of the earliest known types of visual poetry. These works were typically pastoral or bucolic compositions arranged to form shapes such as altars, eggs, and wings that related to the theme of the poem. Only a few examples of these works, which date to about the third century BCE, have survived. Several are related to mythology. For example, “The Axe” is about the mythological soldier Epeius of Phocis, who was credited with making the wooden horse that was kept in the temple of Athena. The poem, which is in the shape of an axe head, is believed to have been inscribed on a copy of Epeius’s axe. Like some other Greek pattern poems, the lines were meant to be read in a specific order rather than as they appear. The top line is the first, while the bottom line is the second. The lines continue to alternate from next to top and next to bottom, and so forth, until the final lines in the narrow center. While some Greek pattern poems clearly reference the shape in the text, in other cases, the reader has to understand the connection without it being stated. For example, “The Wings” is structured to resemble wings but makes no mention of them. However, the Greeks understood that the gods associated with love and sexuality were the winged Erotes, such as Cupid.
Altar poems were another ancient form of pattern poetry that reproduced the shape of their subject. These were popular in Persia in the fifth century CE. Centuries later, the genre caught the fancy of European poets of the Renaissance. The best known of these are “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” by George Herbert. The latter poem’s two stanzas are each structured to resemble wings. “The Altar” is shaped much like a capital I, with longer lines at the top and bottom and the central portion of the work narrower like a pillar.
The popularity of pattern poems waxed and waned frequently. In the early twentieth century, poets were influenced by Modernist artistic movements and free-verse writers. They began producing what was called concrete poetry. Such notable poets as Dylan Thomas and E. E. Cummings were part of this movement. The most well-known pattern poem of the twentieth century is likely Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer,” in which the first six stanzas are shaped like diamonds and the seventh through twelfth are hourglass-shaped. Cummings became known as much for his words as for his experimental style. For example, he wrote and illustrated poems with charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor.
Throughout the twentieth century, poets used multimedia to create concrete poems on materials ranging from glass to stone. Subgenres such as emergent poetry, semiotic poetry, and kinetic poetry developed as new media allowed for greater opportunities for molding words and letters. For example, French artist/filmmaker Marcel Duchamp included puns in his 1926 film Anémic Cinéma. Kinetic poetry often drew public interest because it was always at the forefront of developing technology. In the twenty-first century, with the widespread availability of digital media tools, kinetic poetry mostly appears in digital form.
Overview
In modern times, visual poetry is not always easily published or read. For example, kinetic poetry conveys layers of meaning, including aural, literary, and visual layers. Poets create these works using celluloid film, computers, holograms, motorized sculptures, and video, among other media. Writers also produce performance pieces. However, some forms of visual poetry are created by even the youngest writers; for example, children are often led to create emergent poetry by using a word or name—MOTHER, for instance—in which each line begins with a word that starts with one of the letters:
Mommy you are
One of the best
Things in the world.
How can I say
Everything I want to?
Remember—I love you!
Modern visual poetry frequently defies reading in a traditional sense. Works may include text, but often these are fragments of words, words that do not relate clearly to those around them, or artistically rendered letters. Geof Huth’s “jHegaf,” for example, consists of these six letters superimposed on one another. The open hooks on the e and the a are entwined through the two closed loops of the g. Parentheses at the upper right and lower left enclose the composition.
Some artists create collages that contain snippets of text. For example, Gustave Morin’s “toon tune” collage poem includes sixty-three portions of text in jigsaw puzzle shapes fitted together with background colors and patterns. The text is typical of comic book exclamations such as “CRACK!” and “ARRRGH!” Some portions of the work are missing, and reading the poem aloud would be difficult should the viewer wish to do so. However, simply seeing these word portions creates a jumble of sounds in the viewer’s head. Scott Helmes works in collage and other art forms, including mathematical poetry. His “haiku #62” is visually shaped like a haiku. It is composed of three lines, with the center line slightly weightier than the others, as would be the case with a 5-7-5 syllable haiku. The various colors of magazine scraps he fits together for this work contain fragments of text using multiple fonts.
Individuals may create visual poems using almost any method involving text. For example, a writer could create a poem about the sun by writing in a spiral pattern or splaying words on the page like rays of light. A pattern poem about a star might begin with a sketch of a star to define the length of the lines of the poem. The writer might also use the words to trace the outline of the shape. Computer programs that allow text to be stretched, squeezed, reversed, twisted, flipped, or altered in other ways may also be used.
Bibliography
Huth, Geof. “Visual Poetry Today.” Poetry Foundation, Nov. 2008, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69141/visual-poetry-today. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
“Pattern Poems.” Theoi Classical Texts Library, www.theoi.com/Text/PatternPoems.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
Scheltema, Gwynn. “Visual Poetry.” Writescape, May 2021, writescape.ca/site/2021/05/visual-poetry. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
Seiça, Álvaro. “Kinetic Poetry.” Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities, pp. 173–2020. doi:10.5040/9781501363474.ch-015. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Venell, Andrew. “On Visual Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, 1 Sept. 2022, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158477/on-visual-poetry. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
“Visual Expressions and Concrete Poetry.” Web Exhibits: Poetry through the Ages, www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore‗21‗visual‗background.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.