Textual Objects of Contemplation

In a few weeks, I’ll be giving a small poetry reading in Somerville, Massachusetts, and I’m planning to read mostly visual poetry. Since contemporary visual poetry rarely includes syntax, I might find it a bit difficult to give much of a reading. I mulled over my options a bit tonight while my children and I attended a Fountains of Wayne concert in Albany’s Empire State Plaza. (The secret to my life is doing more than one thing at once. Right now, I am writing this sentence, watching the series The Office on DVD, and talking to my children.)

Sometimes, the solution a visual poet uses in a reading is to display and explain poems, but I cannot imagine that this would be a successful technique to use through the entire reading. People attend readings to experience poetry, not to explicate them or to hear poets expound on the meaning of their poems. I wouldn’t want to visit an art museum just to hear artists explain their works. I’d want to see the art. Also, I’m suspicious of poets who understand their work. The best poetry keeps every reader unbalanced, even the one who wrote the poetry.

Other visual poets use their poems as a score for reading. Sometimes this leads the poets to declaim their poems, discovering the dramatic sound poem within each of them. The poems actually might increase in size during the reading as the poet repeats words more frequently than they appear in the text.

Or I could merely recite the text of a poem as if the words did form a sentence. Imagine this: shoot shoot woof loom warp and weft: the weave. It seems unlikely that I could find an adequate aural form for such a visual text, though a more direct reading like this would be possible for some of my poems. I will have a leaflet of my pwoermds to hand out at the reading, but I can’t imagine that a one-word poem will work when read aloud, without being seen.

My last option is to show the poems and say nothing, to allow each poem to represent itself visually—just as it would have to do out in the real world.

Alone, none of these options is satisfactory. I will have to use different options for different poems. Sometimes, I will have to yell and gesticulate. Sometimes, explain. Occasionally, I will have to permit the poems to speak for themselves, to allow the room to fall silent.

I must, in the end, teach the audience that visual poems are textual objects of contemplation. They are meant for reflection. The reader needs to examine their visual form and verbal manner. The reader must slow down, must consider carefully, must let the mind go blank so that it can fill itself up again with the poem.

Geof Huth, "shoot" from water vapour, 2004
(a textual object of contemplation)
ecr. l’inf.

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