Poems Approaching the Visual

A problem with poetry—a benefit of poetry—is that it tends inexorably towards the visual. Prose naturally fills the space surrounding it, while poetry changes shape: clumping up in a corner, spreading wide and fat, atomizing across a page. Prose is water; poetry is steam or ice or water. Prose is a stable element; poetry changes form to suit its purpose and the conditions of its environment.

Once poetry escaped from the realm of sound alone, once it found a foothold upon the page, it became something of shape. First, poetry divided sets of its words into sense and sound units: here is a length of a breath, however long I can speak before I gasp again and then can continue; here is a length of words ending in a word that has a rhyme elsewhere, this rhyming word marking that end.

Then poetry divided sets into larger sets: lines into stanzas and strophes, couplets and quatrains. Visually, these were sometimes the equivalent of paragraphs, but grammatically these divisions might be meaningless. Their visual form—as the tesserae of the poem—was their main purpose.

Finally, writers fashioned the words of their poems into mimetic visual forms. The classical writers of technopaegnia wrote poems in the shape of eggs, axes, altars—usually the shape replicating the subject of the poem. At this point, poems became visual; their visual form was as important as their verbal one. The height of this fusion of the verbal and the visual occurs in George Herbert’s powerful “Easter Wings,” where the visual form controls and empowers verbal expression. But most poems never achieve this deep visual power. Instead, they use visual elements (visualizations) to enhance the words, but the visual element is passing, inconstant, a surprise, yet often effective.

Choosing three poets probably no-one else would, I will examine a few ways textual poets visualize their poems.


Hayden Carruth

Ah, why choose Hayden Carruth? Probably because he was a teacher of mine and often wrote in a muscular demotic I find compelling. Also, many of his techniques are slightly rococo, subtly outrageous. He writes just as I would hope to write, because poetry is not meant to be invisible words that leave no mark on the brain. Instead, poetry should cause surprise, linguistic surprise: surprise in sound and shape and sense.

Let’s take Carruth’s “North Winter” (first published in 1963) from his book, For You. A long poem, “North Winter” presents itself as 57 sections and an afterword. In 1963, a much younger Carruth than the one I knew created something of a “57 Ways of Looking at the North Country Winter,” using a variety of techniques, most somewhat visual:

He has decorated the text with hyphenless agglutinative spellings and coinages: birdsfeet, snowapparelled, threejointedly, lewdword, ninefootsquare, goodandevil, longdrowned, icecolored.

He flooded the poem with esoteric vocabulary: venature, briary, frazil, vitrescent, gravamen, milliard, groovy.

In one section he enjambs lines not in the middle of patterns of thought or syntax but from the middle of words, unhyphenated:

this springing
wolf this down
fall this ab
solute extinct
tion this deton
ating godhead
this wind this.

He does not use punctuation at all, save for periods at the end of each section and the occasional three points (three periods, les points de suspension): …

He moves words away from the base of the text to stress certain words:

jays huddle say
nothing and
ooooooooooendure.

And, most importantly, he uses various shapes in different sections: long and thin, blocky, stepped, and one a large Z of text moving right to left diagonally and counterintuitively across the page, forcing little bits of accumulating sense into our unready heads. And then there’s this remarkable unexpectation:

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooi
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonof
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooe
Snow’s downstrokes climb softly up the cooooor.

Somehow, this doesn’t work for me yet it does. Though the poem tells us that the snow climbs the conifer, we know it is falling down; though we know the poem suggests upward movement, it also suggests the downward inevitability. (David Franke, once in Syracuse, stood before a class of us fellow student-poets and pointed out the “stupidity” of this trope, drawing it on the board in case we couldn’t imagine it ourselves—finishing his work with a swift swipe of the chalkboard eraser before Carruth arrived to teach our class.)

These techniques help to emphasize part of the text, achieving the third level of visual cotext. That is probably the end of the road for textual poem unwilling to transmogrify themselves into fully visual poems.


Mark Lamoureux

A smaller book that carries unexpected echoes of Carruth’s “North Winter,” is Mark Lamoureux’s chapbook City/Temple. This book tells almost a story in a set of unnumbered untitled sections. The protagonist of our story, our recurring character, is the enigmatic Jin, who sees and ponders and hears and speaks. He exists in a half-real world much as the ones of Ted Hughes’s Crow or Bob Grumman’s lesser-known Poem. Jin—certainly, this cannot be an accident—is almost djinn, the source of genie, a magician, an entity more steam than flesh, and occasionally his world’s poems are visualized for us:

Lamoureux begins with the standard visual vocabulary of contemporary textual poets. He might indent a strophe to the right of the rest of the poem, creating an island of text for our eyes to rest ever so slightly longer upon, allowing our minds to contemplate a half-beat in excess of what they would otherwise. Strophes range from one line (a droplet of magnified thought) to thirty-nine (a waterfall of information). Lines lengthen and shorten to control the breath and breadth of thought. Stanzas are long and thin (barely a word wide) or broad.

& he uses the ampersand in place of the and. The replacement of grammalogue for word is certainly a minor visual tic, yet it hits our eye. The ampersand swings across the text, ready to fly off the page. It suggests brevity, encoding, glyphic incongruity, informality, visual shape and beauty.

The most noticeable visualization is a stichomythic exchange separated by a bold vertical line. In this dialog, two people trade sentences, sometimes reusing or reorganizing each others’ words. It is a haunting conversation between a student and a sphinxlike sage. Certainly, one is Jin himself. But is this section of dialog just an extract from a playscript? Not quite. In the first place, the stanzas take shape, sometimes one side reflecting the other, sometimes each voice in a unique contrasting visual manifestation. Second, the layout suggests both a give and take of language and a simultaneity of sound—both speakers talking over one another, each expecting and responding to the other’s questions as those questions arrive. Third, the vertical line separates the speakers; they do not come together, even if one speaker expected (as he did) to find the other.


Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu, in her Equivalences, produces prose poems or poems in regimented shapes (couplets, tercets, quatrains) or poems with mimetic visualizations. She manages to live with a variety of shapes of poems, a few of which we might mention:

“Kites”
The words spread across the page, return to the left, flow right, back left, a hesitation, then a final long pull left to right diagonally down the page. This steppingdown of words and phrases gives a staccato emphasis to the lines and controls the sound. Additionally but centrally, it replicates the tension and pull the wild swings of a kite pulled up and away, over and across, beyond and below, by an invisible force that can pull our arms out of their joints.

“Feedback”
Here words pull apart showing spaces within their letters (“p u l l”), lines progress determinedly across the page horizontally even as they break apart vertically, hyphens cut words into smaller bit, words drop one by one down the page in a line, and the text of two words (magnified, up) increase in size as compared to their cohorts. The poem is both a visual simulacrum and a score for reading.

“Jump”
This poem—a brief mention—recreates the conifer in Carruth’s “North Winter,” but with a little more panache: italics, and the word doesn’t form a isosceles triangle but a less definite more dramatic shape.

“De Stijl”
My favorite of these few, “De Stijl” also exists as a small printed card. The text of the poem is a meditation on Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” describing (amazingly enough) his art’s movement from mimesis to abstraction before mimetically recreating the abstraction of that ill-yclept painting of Mondrian’s: Pai presents the colors to us in alternating spaces (red, blue, white, yellow, black) before discussing the lines of the painting, where in the words “lines drawn,/crossed out” are drawn then literally crossed out on the page.


A cliché in visual poetry criticism is that all printed poems are visual. What we have to realize, however, is that the degree of visualization of the text differs wildly in textual poetry. Some are modestly visual, like a Petrarchan sonnet; others are forcefully visual, emphasizing the text and tentatively moving towards the hinterlands we call visual poetry.

__________

Carruth, Hayden. For You. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Lamoureux, Mark. City/Temple. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003.

Pai, Shin Yu. “De Stijl.” Massachusetts: Anchorite Press, 2004.

__________. Equivalences. Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2003.

ecr. l’inf.