One Night Stanzas

I recently received an email from Stephen Nelson, a visual poet from Scotland with a great blog showcasing his works. He asked the very good question “ever thought about doing a post on visual poetry?” and I had to admit it hadn’t even crossed my mind. However, I am a huge fan of visual poetry and concrete poetry, so I took up Stephen’s suggestion. Here, then, is a very brief introduction to visual poetry…

What is visual poetry?
Basically, it’s poetry + visual elements, or perhaps more accurately, visual elements + poetry. A standard definition would say that it’s just any poetry that requires visual elements in order to make sense, but this is maybe a bit simplistic. Take the image above for example. The words “shadow partner” are not meaningless by themselves… they’re just not really poetry. Add the cool image and suddenly you have something that’s a lot more like art — and the words enhance the picture as well as the picture lending meaning to the words. Furthermore, technically the stanzas and/or page-layout of a poem could technically be called a “visual element,” which would make all poetry visual poetry — and while important, page layout is not always pivotal to the meaning, either. So basically I’d say that visual poetry is really a fusion of words + visual art of some kind… in which both the words and the visuals add to the meaning and enjoyment of the piece.

What is concrete poetry?
Concrete poetry is a category within visual poetry, really — because concrete poems are made up only of words. The visual part comes from the layout of the words on the page, which form an image. Often, the image is the main point of a concrete poem while the words or letters are just there to form it, although concrete forms can be used as a kind of wordplay, too. I recently wrote a poem which included a lot of Lakeland fell names, and I decided to turn it into a concrete poem by making it the shape of a mountain. Basically, while a visual poem is words + visuals, a concrete poem is words = visuals!

Why write visual poetry?
I recently went to a seminar on visual and concrete poetry, and the whole group — all poets — were quite sceptical about calling visual poetry “poetry” at all. They all very much felt — some more poetic-with-a-capital-P concrete poems aside — that visual poetry was far more art than literature, that essentially it’s just typography and pictures. I can see why some writers might be cynical about visual poetry — words are our only tools, after all, while a visual artist has many different forms and mediums to work with. It’s not suprising that we poets feel posessive of poetry or even of words themselves. But I’m not totally convinced that poets shouldn’t have a go — personally, I don’t see why visual artists should get to have all the fun!
And that’s probably the main reason why you should try a visual poem — it’s fun. It also pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to think about words in a totally different way. They are no longer about sounding good, telling a story or even conveying meaning — they are no longer allowed to band together in their traditional groups! They become all about their connotations, the way each letter actually looks on the page, the instant visual gratification they can give to the viewer. You can mess with what words actually mean by considering ways to present them visually. It’s challenging, it’s fun and it makes you think outside the box. It also helps you to understand the psyche of visual artists just that little bit better!

Where’s all the visual poetry then?
Sadly, visual poetry is a sadly neglected genre — partly the reason why people are cynical about it, I think. Perhaps the most famous visual/concrete poet around (in the UK at least) is Edwin Morgan, whose concrete poems are widely read in schools all over the country. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet and superblogger Ron Silliman is also a bit of a vis-po champion… but generally, there isn’t much widely-read visual poetry out there. I’ve been scouring the web and I’ve found some cool (and very different) examples, but my advice on finding visual poetry is this: just Google around and see what you can find. Once you’ve found a few examples, have a go yourself!

Here’s a great article on vis-po by Geoff Huth // Remember to check out afterlights, Stephen’s blog // This is a gorgeous site fill of monochrome concrete/visual poems // Vis-po groups on Flickr: The Writing & Artistically Illustrated & Exploring Creative Words // Visual poets on Flickr: MiSSShellie & Cat Collier & chirOt zerO & Katilady & eckovision

If you know of any visual poetry sites or visual poets with blogs of their own, please do let me know — I’d love to see more myself, and I’d definitely pass on the info!

(Photo by ChirOt zerO)

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Tags: advice for young writers, introduction to visual poetry, publishing, resources for young writers, young poets

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Inspiration, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.