iv.7.11. VISUAL PATTERNS: SIGN, IMAGE AND OBJECT. GENERAL INTRODUCTION
iv.7.2Oral and written poetry interweave sound, visual, and even haptic, qualities. In oral poetry, with the exception of recorded poetry without any visual presence, visuality remains linked to physical performance and the spaces in which it takes place. In written poetry, both in silent and aloud reading, sound qualities provide tone, timbre and rhythm. Not to mention that sound and visual imagery is usually present in poetic language. Despite the interdependence of these qualities, the focus on visual patterns, the visuality of graphic signs and their objecthood allow us to grasp specific areas where visuality has been emphasised within a broader field of poetry considered in terms of (inter)mediality and materiality (Mediality and Materiality of Lyric). In particular, the focus on visuality confronts the invisibilisation that the visual materiality of poetry – and of literature more broadly – has long suffered, especially in Western cultural history and literary studies.
iv.7.3If literature, poetry included, is considered mainly as an allographic art – a kind of art that can be reproduced on different surfaces and in various media without losing any of its main properties – it is because a progressive abstraction of the perceptual traces of its materiality has developed in the Western world. The consolidation of print book culture in Modernity virtually erased the material aspect of the texts, to the point that for most of modern Western literature the literary work is considered to be a content that is transmitted in a materially homogeneous and indifferent way (Adell 2004, Striphas 2009). However, in pre-modern historical periods in Western societies, visual patterns of texts were relevant. For instance, an illuminated medieval manuscript had of course its interest in what the text said, but calligraphy, miniatures and designed margins were not a mere supplementary flourishment. For some authors, in the Middle Ages illuminations were almost consubstantial with writing itself (Sánchez Luna 2016, 76).
iv.7.4Other cultural traditions based on non-alphabetic writing systems have also been long confronted with the Western invisibilisation of writing visual materiality. Among others, cuneiform scripts, which is the first known writing system developed by the Sumerians around 3500 B.C., or Ancient Egypt hieroglyphics developed around 3000 B.C., using pictorial symbols to represent individual sounds or group of sounds. Although both are logographic – originated as phonetic-semantic compounds – the form of the signs emphasises the visual character of their materiality. The same can be said about Chinese writing, which includes a few pictograms – images depicting objects –, some ideograms – signs that conventionally represent ideas or concepts –, and mostly logograms. The emphasis on visual materiality can be verified by the importance of calligraphy in Chinese and Japanese writing, which is indeed cultivated as an art. Islamic calligraphy, although being part of an alphabetic writing, also highlights the mastering of drawing techniques.
iv.7.5The tendency of Western culture to make the materiality of writing invisible owes a great deal, on the one hand, to the notion of writing as a transcription of orality – contested, for instance, in Jacques Derrida De la Grammatologie (1967) – and, on the other hand, to the notion that the more efficient the transcription – in terms of the number of characters involved and the accuracy of the result– the better. However, as Albertine Gaur states in her book A History of Writing, “This attitude automatically imposes a hierarchical structure […] The alphabet thus becomes a Platonic idea towards which all forms of (proper) writing must by necessity progress.” (1992, 7).
iv.7.6A common theme that illustrates how words and images have been seen as either bound together or dissociated in Western culture is the Latin ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry) used by Horace (c. 19 B.C.) in his Epistula ad Pisones, also known as Ars Poetica, where he states that poetry is similar to painting. Both Horace and Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet several centuries earlier, who stated that “painting is dumb poetry and poetry speaking painting,” (quoted by Lessing 1969, ix), were among those who not only placed words and images on the same level, but also considered them as somehow translatable. Hence the idea of literature and painting as sister arts. However, a major counter-argument arose in 1766 when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, arguing that painting (in general, images) and poetry (in general, texts) are fundamentally different because painting is spatial and synchronic whereas poetry is diachronic, developed in time.
iv.7.7Despite Lessing's argument, verbal imagery, namely, different kinds of rhetorical figures that provide visual representations, build bridges between poetry and modes of perception made possible by other arts, such as visual perception in painting and sculpture, sound perception in music. It is in this ability of verbal language to address and/or represent perceptual worlds that we find notions such as “verbal image” and “poetic image”, frequently linked with the notion of “mental image.” It is also because of this ability that more specific lyric tropes, or even genres, among them ekphrasis – “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (Heffernan 1991, 299) – have become a recurrent topic when trying to understand poetic devices that put hand in hand writing and painting.
iv.7.8Although one of the most famous examples of ekphrasis can be found in the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, from the last decades of 20th Century to the present the notion of ekphrasis has received a lot of attention (among many others, Gabrieloni 2008; Krieger 1991; Heffernan, 1991, 1993; Monegal (coord) 2000; Steiner 1988). As if a necessity of thinking on images in literature aroused from the very core of contemporary visual culture. W. J. T. Mitchell’s approach provides a basis to grasp not only the concept but the controversies it provokes. He considers these controversies in terms of fascination even charged with opposite nuances (Mitchell 1994): from the “ekphrastic indifference”, based on the assumption that ultimately the verbal representation of a visual image is impossible, to the “ekphrastic hope”, which understands metaphors and imagination as a valid means to surpass that impossibility.
iv.7.9The importance given to haiku in contemporary globalised cultures may also be seen as part of this fascination, in the fashion of an ekphrastic hope which admires the synthetic and simultaneous impulse of a short composition that only by means of words captures the density of an instant while describing nature.
iv.7.10Yet, as important as visual imagery may be in a poem, as important as different ways of representing/picturing images in a poem may be, when considering the relevance of visual patterns, signs and and the objectual condition of a poem, another line of thinking comes to the fore, one that emphasises the concrete materiality of signs and can be seen as a reaction against the notion of literature as a pure intellectual, spiritual or even idealistic realm. Indeed, the type of poetry that contest the most Lessing’s assumption about the lack of spatiality of poetry is visual poetry in all of its forms: from calligrams to asemic – illegible – writing, from concrete poetry to calligraffiti and so on. Hence, this will be specially the focus when considering our subject in context.
iv.7.11Nevertheless, we can acknowledge some literary movements that emphasised the imagistic quality of words without entering though the realm of visual poetry tout court. Imagism and Vorticism in the English-speaking world and Ultraism in the Spanish-speaking world, or even Surrealism (West)world-wide spread from an origin in France, which, each in its own fashion, emphasised the image in a more concrete way than previous modern movements. Although in these three examples the visual materiality of writing is only partially present as in the gradual incorporation of ideograms and unconventional arrangement of verses in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, or in the changes in typography and disruptive layouts in Surrealism and, to some extent, in Ultraism, the main focus is on the effect of a new poetic imagery, and not so much on the material visuality. For example, as Marjorie Perloff argues, in Pound’s poetry, especially in his Cantos, “the role of syntax is characteristically subordinated to that of the Image” (Perloff 1991, 54), creating a paratactic mode that locates the reader in a continuous present (55), and thus disrupts time linearity. Hence, the ideogrammatic method of poetic composition that Pound advocated – inspired by Fenollosa’s essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (2008) – a way of revealing a simultaneous experience, that can also be compared to cinematic montage and visual arts collages.
iv.7.12In addition, according to the first Manifesto of Surrealism, the value of the poetic image remains in the way it emerges from an involuntary approximation between two distant realities: “It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors.” (Breton 1969, 40). Here, Breton speaks of the “light of the image” and the “spark” obtained, using visual images himself in his prose.
iv.7.13In Ultraism, a Spanish avant-garde around 1920, led by Rafael Cansinos Assens, with a counterpart in Argentina, poetry deployed, as Guillermo de Torre notes, “a stream of loose perceptions, a rosary of sensual, plastic and striking images” (de Torre 1967, 172, my translation). Ultraism was influenced by the non-mimetic creationist poetic of Chilean Vicente Huidobro, first introduced in his manifesto “Non serviam” (Huidobro 1976 [1914]), where he argued that poetry should create realities rather than reflect them, as in his often-quoted fragment urging poets not to sing of the rose but to make it bloom in the poem. Soon after, Huidobro moved to Paris, where he was part of the avant-garde journal Nord-Sud, and developed a cubo-futurist poetics. Reading Huidobro’s poem “Expres”, Jorge Schwartz calls it an “ideogram of the cosmopolis” (Schwartz 1993, 46), achieved through “an isomorphic relationship between semantic simultaneity, suggested by urban and fluvial referents, and formal simultaneity, caused by the typographic layout of the page” (Schwartz 1993, 50; my translation).
iv.7.14Despite reading generally tends to be associated almost exclusively with the content, without regard to the “container”, these liminal examples – in which new ways of conceiving poetic images within verbal texts and texts considered in their visual materiality converge – show a very different universe of visuality in literature, specifically developed in poetry, a universe that has traversed the history of poetry since its beginnings. According to Jorge Santiago Perednik’s preliminary study for his anthology of concrete poetry, the importance of this alternative universe lies in its theoretical insights not only into what a poem says, but into what it is: “A poem is a material reality, embodied with phonic, graphic elements that under no circumstances should be considered neutral in terms of meaning.” (Perednik 1982, i, my translation). The author finds that the abstraction of these elements and the distinction between what a poem says and what a poem is (or does) is equivalent to other dichotomies such as “body and soul, form and content, the sensible thing and the intelligible thing, appearance and reality, etcetera, absolutely corresponding to a metaphysical dominant notion, which not only separates what it is actually bonded, but it also subordinates materiality to ideas.” (Perednik 1982, ii; my translation)
iv.7.152. VISUAL PATTERNS IN CONTEXTS
iv.7.16Contexts for the visual condition of poetry require cross-referencing historical periods, different types of visual treatment of writing, and significant poets or movements. From Simmias of Rhodes (c. 325 BC) to contemporary digital poetry, visual iconicity has been present throughout history, often in recurring patterns, whether mimetic or abstract (Berry 2012, 1523). When mimetic, these visual patterns are often referred to in the Latin carmen figuratum (carmina figurata in the plural). But each language has also coined its own term, as in the Ancient Greek τεχνοπαíγνια (Technopaegnia), the German Figurengedicht, the Spanish poemas figurados or the English pattern poetry. Moreover, in his contribution to a special issue of the journal Visible Languages, edited by Dick Higgins in 1986, Ulrich Ernst defines the genre not only in terms of the mimetic aspect of the forms created with words, but also in terms of its symbolic function (1986, 9).
iv.7.17Calligrams are mimetic figured poems insofar as the text takes the form of the objects it represents. In Apollinaire’s calligram “Il pleut”, for example, the diagonal lines of the text resemble the rain. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913–1916), published in 1918, is usually seen as the reintroduction of this kind of visual poetry into modernism, although the book does not only contain calligrams, but also other kinds of visual poetry that play with the layout of the page without any correspondence to the referential content and “discursive” poems without any particular graphic emphasis. Besides, calligram is by no means a modern form of visual poetry, as it has been cultivated in different cultures and times. It is not the matter of giving a historicist overview as if all cases of pattern poetry were exactly the same. On the contrary, apart from attesting to the existence of figured poetry in different periods and places, or even considering it, as Ulrich Ernst puts it, as “an international genre, extending far beyond the boundaries of European literatures to lyric writing in Turkish, Hebrew, Persian, Indian, and Chinese,” (1986, 9), each case can also be studied separately. For instance, modern calligrams differ from most pre 1900 figured poems in that their texts are not usually versified in the conventional way (Ernst 1986, 11). On the other hand, the grid as a geometrical design which allows different relationships between words or letters due to their proximity – very present, for example, in concrete poetry in the 20th century –, was also present in the grid poems of the Roman court poet under Constantine the Great, Optatianus Porphyrius. His poem “Carmen IX” (325 AD) was constructed on a geometrical text-surface in which coloured intexts were set composing a figurative network of words, “in the manner of an acrostic, albeit a highly complex one.” (Ernst 1986, 15)
iv.7.18Abstract figured poems, such as pattern poems in shape of geometric figures – crosses, circles, lozanges and spirals – also recur in the history of visual poetry. In fact, Simmias of Rhodes’ poem “ὠόm” (“Egg”), one of the most ancient figured poems known in Western cultures, participates in both tendencies. Its oval shape resembles an egg in a mimetic way, but it allows it to be read not from top to bottom but “from the centre to the periphery, as a spiral shape, in the way in which the laws of creation were conceived in nature, suggesting with the reading path, at the same time, the form of the egg and the cyclical and perpetual state of this process. For the Greeks, it is worth remembering, the egg was a symbol of the mystery of life.” (Perednik 1982, vi-vii; my translation).
iv.7.19Circles and spirals are literally innumerable in the visual and concrete poetry of the 20th century and have been transferred to digital poetry with the added feature of movement provided by digital multimedia affordances. If we compare the poem “Jaqueca” (“Headache”) by Peruvian Alberto Hidalgo, published in 1923 in his book Química del espíritu (Spirit’s chemistry), with the poem “Bomba” (“Bomb”) by Augusto de Campos, both in its first printed version (1986) and in its digital version (1997), we can easily see the similarity of the circular explosion of single letters. In his study of Brazilian concrete poetry, Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista (2003), Gonzalo Aguilar analyses several post-concrete poems in spiral form by Augusto de Campos, interpreting them as the return of a certain expressionist tendency in de Campos’ poetry, previously present in his book Poetamenos (1953) and absent in the “pure” concrete phase. Aguilar reads the spiral form both as an allegory of caducity (2003, 307) and as producing a hypnotic effect that plunges the reader into the centre of the poem (306). Indeed, circular and spiral shapes in visual poetry are often found in poems that refer to time and caducity, as in the case of “El destino” (Destiny) also published by Hidalgo in Química del espírtu, in the poem “Infinity” (2007) by the Canadian Lionel Kearns or in the poem “Poema Redondo” (“Round Poem”) (2018) by Argentinian Ivanna Volaro. The hypnotic effect is also present in Marcel Duchamp’s experimental short film Anémic Cinéma (1926), which belongs to the cinèpoeme genre, in which nine phrases are superimposed in a spiral pattern on a round black disc. Later, however, the hypnotic effect of spirals can also be found in mainstream mass media, as Aguilar (2003, 306) points out, namely in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and in the television series The Time Tunnel (ABC 1966–1967).
iv.7.20Other types of visual poetry include calligraphic and typographic poetry – where either manual or printed marks are emphasised for the sake of their visual qualities – and even asemic poetry, a kind of calligraphic but illegible poetry that points at writing itself in an autoreferential way. For example, Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache has developed a series of books, letters, journals and postcards in various forms of illegible writing since the late sixties until 2010 approximately, which do not address any reference but the performance of writing itself. A kind of asemic writing that Roland Barthes called écriture illisible in 1971 in a letter to the artist (Fajole 2019, 85). Barthes later developed this argument in his lecture “Variations sur l’écriture”, read in Rome in 1973, where he speaks of Dermisache’s illegible writings or André Masson’s faked ideograms as “fictitious writings”, stating that it is when the signifier loses its link with any signified that the text emerges (Barthes 2000).
iv.7.21Many of the genealogies of the 20th century visual poetry – in particular those oriented by constructivist principles – find their point of departure in Stephane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, first published in 1897 in the journal Cosmopolis. Mallarmé intended to publish the poem in a double page spread, to emphasise the simultaneity of the visual effect of reading, something also achieved by the typography chosen, the three different font sizes and the blank spaces. His poem was also intended to be read as a constellation, a notion that would be central in the concrete poetry of the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer’s in the mid-20th century (see Gomringer 1997). Playing with typography was also taken up by several avant-garde movements in the first decades of the 20th century. Some of them displayed typography in a loose way. This is the case of Italian Futurism or Dadaism, especially in its Zurich branch. Marinetti’s Parole in libertà (“Words-in-Freedom”) is a good example. The author proposed this new “method” of literary composition in 1912 in the “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” and then presented it in several works, for example, in parts of his book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). On the contrary, avant-gardes such as Russian constructivism and later Concrete Poetry highlighted the mathematical interplay of the letters. In regard to Un coup de dés, where the paradox concerning chance appears since the title itself, Haroldo de Campos explained that Mallarmé was concerned about controlling chance, also knowing about the impossibility of doing so. That is the reason why, “he dialectically insinuated – under a relativistic maybe – the viability of that denied possibility, through a constellation-poem” (Campos 1969, 17, my translation). In Augusto de Campos permutational concrete poem “Acaso” (1963), meaning “chance” in Portuguese, but translated by the author into English as “Event”, in favour of the necessity of the compositional rules, the dynamic between chance and rule is shown on the visual surface: the word “acaso” appears only once, contained in the series of variations from a strict permutational procedure that cuts out 60 of the 120 possible variations (as the word "acaso" has two equal vocals, in reality the other 60 variations would be identical to those used). Moreover, the word "caos" (“chaos”) also appears twice encapsulated within the letter sequences. It is worth noting that, visually, the letters appear in blocks of six lines, distributed in an inverted triangle, which, in the interplay between the blocks of letters and the empty spaces, form a grid in the shape of a drawing board (Kozak 2012).
iv.7.22In France, Lettrism is another poetic movement that highlighted the relevance of letters without their connections within words. Isidore Issou’s “Le Manifeste de la Poésie Lettriste”, written in 1942 and published in 1947 in his book Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, attacks the use of words in poetry because he sees them as rigid stereotypes that lead to homogenisation, familiar habit, fixation and fossilisation. In Issou’s perspective, words break rhythm, murder sensibility and destruct sinuosity. Faced with this panorama, he establishes that it is necessary to destroy in order to rebuild. The letter then, which is “debris of destruction”, offers “another way out”, which “will create emotions against language, for the pleasure of language” (Issou 1947, 15, my translation). Also in France, in the sixties, in the wake of Dada and Lettrism, Pierre Garnier and Ilse Garnier called a new experimental poetry movement as Spatialisme and published the “Manifeste pour une poésie nouvelle, visuelle et phonique” in 1962. According to Mary Ellen Solt in Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968, 32): “In general Garnier's statements apply to both visual and phonic poetry, but certain distinctions need to be made. The visual poem should not be ‘read.’ It should be allowed to ‘make an impression,’ first through the general shape of the poem and then through each word perceived out of the whole at random.”
iv.7.23Between Europe and the Americas, we find other experimental groups that include visual poetry. For example, the artists who participated in 1962 at the Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden (Germany), organised by George Maciunas, brought a wider scene of contemporary intermedial art to public attention. The nine participants in the 1962 Fluxus festival – Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Arthur Køpcke, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Karl Erik Welin, Emmet Williams and Wolf Vostell – were soon identified as Fluxus artists, in addition to others whose works shared some common artistic principles based on globalism, the fusion of art and life, experimentalism or chance – Joseph Beuys, Claus Bremer, Robert Filliou, Yoko Ono, Daniel Spoerri, La Monte Young, among others – (see Friedman 2016, 29–31). In An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963), self-published by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Law, visual poetry occupies an important place among music scores, performance instructions and essays on concept art, all contained in a highly experimental layout that emphasises typography, handwriting, diagrams and the materiality of the paper itself.
iv.7.24At the same time, in South America several poets were creating experimental visual poetry and publishing journals, which they usually exchanged building a network that, although aware of Brazilian concrete poetry, went beyond it and proliferated different visual styles. Edgardo Antonio Vigo in Argentina, Clemente Padín in Uruguay and Guillermo Deisler in Chile, were some of the artists who promoted these new visual trends in poetry. In 1969, for example, Vigo curated the exhibition “Expo/Internacional de Novísima Poesía/69” including approximately 150 works by 114 artists from 15 countries around the world, presenting visual, sound, object, concrete and techno poetry, all of which emphasised materiality and participation of the reader in experimenting the works.
iv.7.25Besides calligraphy, typography and page layouts, we can also take in consideration the different kinds of surfaces where writing can appear. In that case, a whole world of visual poetry opens up beyond the book. Catalan Joan Brossa’s urban and object visual poetry is one of the most known cases. Sky poetry as Chilean Raúl Zurita’s La vida nueva, written in 1982 by five planes in white smoke over New York skies, is also a good example.
iv.7.26Given the diversity of its strands and styles, street art has an important place within visual poetry beyond the book. When graffiti uses writing – and it often does so, even in hip-hop “plastic” graffiti because it usually encodes the name of individual artists or crews with specific types of letters such as bubble letters, 3D letters, wildstyle letters – scripts are an anchor that holds the eye and shows the thickness associated with line, texture, shape or colour. Arabic calligraffiti artists win public spaces with inscriptions that reshape and deconstruct letters, taking as their starting point traditional calligraphic practices influenced by Islamic styles such as Kufic and Nasta’liq’s siah mashq, but largely going beyond them (Zarkar 2013). In addition, visual poetry is also present in modern cityscapes through artistic-politic practices with roots in, for example, Situationism and, from there, May 1968 graffiti and other events that bring people to the streets in various contexts. In some cases, verses taken from well-known poems were reproduced on the walls, in other cases words and phrases were invented. Certainly, the meaning of such phrases has its own significance, but the visual quality they acquire when they disrupt familiarised cityscapes cannot be ignored. When people inhabit cities with an attentive gaze, they become readers who can compose ad hoc visual poems by mentally juxtaposing fragments of scattered texts that leave visual traces on the city.
iv.7.27The audiovisual arts have also been the basis of experiments in visual poetry, as in the cases of cinépoème, videopoetry and holopoetry, although in the latter case without sound. The Portuguese videopoet Ernesto de Melo e Castro states that in videopoetry "verbi-voco-sound-visual-colour-movement is created, a complex and animated image that demands a total kinaesthetic perception." (Melo e Castro de 2007, 179). The Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac, who began his career as a visual poet and performer in the late seventies, experimented with holographic poetry in the eighties, before moving to digital poetry and later biopoetry and space poetry. In biopoetry, he proposes to write poetry through the manipulation of organic substances, creating "poetry in vivo" (Kac 2007, 191), among which we find transgenic poetry, amoeba scripting or bacterial poetics. In space poetry, for example in his work “Inner Telescope” (2017), he created an object poem that, when viewed from a certain angle, reads the French word MOI. The poem did not come into existence though until astronaut Thomas Pesquet made it, following the artist's instructions, in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
iv.7.283. STATE OF THE ART
iv.7.29The appreciation of the materiality of the word, thus its visuality, has been, if not marginal, at least limited in literary studies. Although the book and its materiality are fundamental to some branches of cultural history and literary criticism – studies of the transition from orality to writing and from there to print culture (Ong 1982; Oral and Written Poetry); studies of the history of books and reading (Chartier 1993, 2001), in line with what Anthony Grafton (2009, 143–145) calls a “material turn” in intellectual history; or studies of the more marginal visual and concrete poetry – for most people, literature amounts to what a text or a book “contains”. Thus, literature is often seen as synonymous with the printed book, with a set of conventional signs that refer to a content independent of the sensible attributes derived from its own matter. Nevertheless, as W. J. T. Mitchel points out, writing itself, by virtue of its graphic quality, constitutes “an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the ‘imagetext’ incarnate” (1994, 95).
iv.7.30The relevance of contemporary visual studies (Boehm 1994, Mitchell 1994, Mirzoeff 2004) signalled a shift from the textual paradigm to that of the image, which in recent decades has had an impact on the way of thinking about the very materiality of texts. The importance that W. J. T. Mitchell gives to the neologism “imagetext” in order to grasp the complexity of synthetic works (or concepts) combining text and image is a good example of this. In his Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, rather than focusing on a comparative study of “inter-arts” relationships, the author prefers to focus on the compounds of images and texts both in literature and the (audio)visual arts. He thus highlights the conjunction between words and images in “mixed media” – comics, photographic essays, illustrated texts –, even if he strongly advocates for assuming that “all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels and sensory and cognitive modes” (95). In this book, among “mixed media” Mitchell only once mentions visual poetry, although this would be a productive field to explore his theory of “imagetext”, perhaps more accurately considered in terms of intermediality rather than mixed media.
iv.7.31Concrete poetry theory as developed by Eugen Gomringer’s notion of Konstellation or by the notion of “verbivocovisual” poetry, a neologism that the Noigrandres group retrieved from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Aguilar 2003), including also the aural material dimension, are good examples of the kind of compounds that the “imagetext” notion provide. Brazilian concrete poetry theory is largely developed in Teoria da Poesia Concreta (Concrete Poetry Theory), published as a book in 1965, which includes texts published between 1950 and 1960 in different journals and newspapers, mainly by Décio Pignatari, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos.
iv.7.32An extensive panorama on concrete poetry, also written in the heat of events, is Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), where she covers experiences developed – in this order in the book, due to the parallel uprising of concrete poetry in relation to the Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer and the Noigandres group – in Switzerland, Brazil, Germany, Austria, Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, England and the United States. The book gives an account of an international scene after more than a decade of continuous exchanges between poets from different countries and thus presents a provisional balance by the time when “pure” concrete poetry was coming to an end, giving place to other visual, sonic, objectual experimentations in poetry. Perhaps this is the reason why, despite its title, the book offers also examples of visual (and sound) poetry not necessarily considered as strictly “concrete”. It also includes, for instance, typographic poetry previous to the international concrete poetry movement – such as Italian Carlo Belloli’s Testi-Poemi Murali (Wall textpoems) from 1943 – or mentions a sort of asemic poetry by Spanish poet Julio Campal “made by writing in a beautiful but illegible hand in purple ink on a page of the newspaper turned upside down” (Solt 1968, 43). In both cases, we can find a concentration upon the physical material from which the poem is made, but not the constructivist impulse of the composition based on basic elements of verbal language following factors such as proximity and similarity. This kind of distinction between visual poetry in a general sense and concrete visual poetry in a restricted sense can be found in Gonzalo Aguilar’s book, Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista (2003), a comprehensive account and analysis of Brazilian concrete poetry published in Spanish in Argentina and translated into Portuguese in Brazil.
iv.7.334. CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES, METHODS AND DEBATES
iv.7.34In contemporary practices of poetry, the concern with the allegedly immateriality and paradoxical invisibility of the perceptual quality of signs has been strongly addressed in studies on experimental poetry – sound, visual, object and performatic poetry – and digital poetry which roots in the former (among others, Aarseth 1997, Funkhouser 2007, Glazier 2002, Hayles 2009 and 2010). This kind of textual art in programmable media (Cayley 2002), materially overflowing from the book and its material, symbolic and cognitive processes, implies an articulation between “perceptible” materiality through the senses – sight, hearing, partly touch – and “intelligible” materiality, the information contained in the computer code, the code itself being an articulation of perceptible aspects – its visual signs – and intelligible ones – the mathematical relations it implements – (Kozak 2015, 93). Some of these studies (Kirschenbaum 2008, Bootz 2012) warns of the need for critical investigations that address digital materiality beyond the phenomenologically apprehensible surface. In Philippe Bootz's terms, beyond the “text to be seen” – the surface that directly interpellates the senses of the “reader” – and the “observable transient” – the multimedia event produced in the execution of the programme – (2012, 32). Thus, he argues for a theory of the materiality of digital literature that involves both the observable transient and the software and hardware, including the technological framework of the epoch (33). In the same vein, Kirschenbaum (2008) establishes two types of materiality in digital environments: “forensic” materiality that rests on individualisation (given that no two things in the physical world are ever exactly identical, with the right tools traces of those differences can be found); and “formal” materiality that, although it may seem a contradiction in terms, is a sort of “manipulation” of symbols, even when the general misplaced tendency of hegemonic digital cultural is to pretend to be a pure immaterial realm (Kozak 2015, 94).
iv.7.35With regard to the idea of a “text to be seen”, we can pay attention to one genre of digital poetry name as kinetic poetry. Due to digital affordances – the relation between any given digital object and its possible uses – , including movement, changes of size and colour, interactivity, among other possibilities, letters and words often gain a protagonist role as in the cases, among innumerable others, of Canadian Jim Andrew’s “Enigma n” (1998), Argentinian Ana María Uribe’s Anipoemas (1997-2004), Spanish (living in England) María Mencía’s Wordy Mouths (2000), Another Kind of Language (2001), Vocaleys (2001), and Audible Writing Experiments (2003) or Austrian Jörg Piringer’s visual poetry gifs and in general all his kinetic typographic poetry.
iv.7.365. TOPICS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION
iv.7.37The very notion of “visual poetry” has been discussed as not precise enough by Lars Elleström from a semiotic perspective in his article “Visual Iconicity in Poetry. Replacing the Notion of ‘Visual Poetry’”. His argument is based not only in that the term visual poetry refers to many kinds of poetry, but in that it mixes a sensory category, visuality, with a semiotic one, iconicity. While written texts are always visual, they do not always present some degree of visual iconicity: “The visual is a sensory mode and the iconic is a semiotic mode; that is, meaning created by way of resemblance.” (Elleström 2016, 449) It is important to take notice, however, that in this approach resemblance involve not only analogies to concrete objecthood but, in a wider sense, the capacity to more or less address “abstract notions such as tension, distance, and movement within the represented world” (Elleström 2016, 441). The differentiation can be productive in order to study the creation of meaning as a compound of cognition and sensory perception, that is to say, articulating sensory perception to something else. However, and although the author acknowledges different degrees of iconicity in what is commonly called visual poetry, the notion of resemblance, even to abstract concepts, remains also quite imprecise. Does asemic poetry, for example, resemble writing itself? We could say that it addresses the idea of writing, but we could also say that it better addresses the practice of writing, which is not the same. The differentiation promoted by Elleström (2016) opens an interesting line for new investigation.
iv.7.38Further investigation may concentrate in each of the numerous key words already presented here. While especially since the beginning of the 20th century visual poetry embarked in globalised trends and styles, local and regional specificities should necessarily be taken in account in particular investigations.