Visual Poetry

I have a love affair with visual form and text, how the vocal rhythm in poems can be replicated with visual patterns of the written word, and how prose can combine with imagery to convey meaning.

I started doing more research on the subject of visual or concrete poetry, a movement started around the 1960s. In Italy, visual poetry was an act of rebellion against the pop/ad/culture than permeated society; a reflection on mass culture and consumerism. Artists such as Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti and Claudio Francia used advertising and media devices, such as powerful images and hard-hitting straplines, as a means of expression.

There is a show at the ICA titled: Poor. Old. Tired. Horse which, "takes an expansive look at text-based art practices, inspired by the concrete poetry movement of the 60s which explored both the literary and graphic potential of language." Creative flights of the visual and poetic was occurring in Italy, Brazil, the UK, USA, in many different countries around the world during that time.

Many new forms of modern visual poetry continues with Sue Tompkins, Janice Kerbel and Anna Barham. These artists are represented by text-based pieces, including a film by Barham in which letters are assembled and disassembled by hand.

An interesting article written for the Yale Symposium on Contemporary Poetics and Concretism, states that: "In the second half of the twentieth century the poet is no longer faced with a white page. He faces a complex set of electronic apparatus and their multiple capacities to generate text and images in color and in movement. The page is no longer there nor is it white, not even as a metaphor. Also space is now equivalent to time, and writing is not a score but a dimensional virtual reality."

I've always wondered what form of art, of writing, was right for me. Where would I find the canvas of my expression? I wasn't really moved by the idea of traditional novel writing, yet I always felt it was something I should do. Now, with all my explorations into this fertile playground for written and visual creations, I am really getting a feel for what I want to do, to create. I have a long way to go, but just scratching at the surface is exciting.

It reveals an expansive experimental layer of colors, design, text, typography and video that can combine to create dense nuggets of expression, meaning and experience. This melding of text, image and technological platforms feels like a new language, one I never really considered before in my writing workshops and general literary education.

When I tried to explain these ideas to my writing professor, she said, "Oh, like a child's story book?" This goes beyond matching images with pieces of narration, but using new postmodern landscapes made possible by technology and cultural permutations.

Many pieces in the Biennale can be described as visual poetry. I feel like something is brewing. I'm going to start by getting my body of poetry together, and then editing, growing, morphing and molding the pieces for digital spaces and even gallery spaces. How many ways can poems or prose be extended beyond the page?

Some examples of visual poetry below: