A Few Questions and Answers about Visual Poetry

Anne Wallace, a correspondent of mine, sent me a request almost a month ago for me to answer a few interview questions to help inform her MFA thesis. I mulled over these questions a bit over the past few weeks and wrote the following marathon response today.


How would you define visual poetry?

Precise definition is impossible but necessary—and I mean this of everything. (As an exercise, try to define “table” in such a way that it omits no tables and admits no other objects.) “Visual poetry” is, however, a bit more difficult. When working with a term that describes something on the border between two concepts, there has to be a bit of confusion. Maybe it’s best to begin defining and then work our way through the process to an understanding. Visual poetry once consisted of the sum of poetry and visual art; at its birth, visual poetry was lineated text given some essential visual characteristic. Stepping back for a moment, all poetry has a visual characteristic, but in visual poetry that feature is essential to meaning and esthetic effect.

With these ideas in our minds, we might assume that visual poetry is poetry with an important visual characteristic, but clearly visual poetry evolved beyond this possible definition years ago. Even in the concrete era, visual poets created typescapes that examined the visual properties of letterforms without resorting to the use of syntax. The concretists actually accelerated the movement of visual poetry beyond the realm of language. Apollinaire, the Dadaists, and the futurists all worked to liberate language from the strictures of typographic form and tradition, but all or these artists depended on syntax (if only sometimes in bursts) for their artworks. The movement of visual poetry has been from syntax, to words, to characters, to imaginary letters, to the suggestion of letters. The defining feature of visual poetry finally is an interest in the visual presentation of written language for esthetic effect. The focus here is on language—even if only represented by slivers of characters—not on type (as in typography). Visual poetry is interested in the miraculous ability of arcs and lines of type to mean.


Can you categorize the different types of visual poetry?

Types of visual poetry go by many names, and I could list those at this point, but that list would provide no direction and elucidate nothing. What seems more valuable is to provide a rough guide to the territory between poetry and visual art—between the poles that bookend visual poetry.

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literature that grew out of singing and other oral performances of text. Because of this, aural effects are common in poetry. In print culture, poetry became a lineated form of text because of the need to confine language to the limits of a musical line that often enough ended with intentional rhyme.

Visualized and Illustrated Poetry

Since the twentieth century, conventional printed poetry has played with the concept of the line through by indenting lines for visual effect. These visualizations of the text were important to the poems, but not essential to them. Earlier in time, emblem poems combined poems with images, but these two parts of the artwork remained separate. They did not create an individual whole so much as a connected duality.

Shaped Syntactic Poetry

The real birth of visual poetry was with shaped verse (also known as pattern poetry, among many others). Shaped poems were syntactic and usually conformed to the general prosodic effects of the poetry of their time. What made these poems visual poems was that they were in shapes—usually shapes that defined the subject of the poem, thus combining the illustration and the text in one conceptual whole.

Shaped Nonsyntactic Poetry

The concrete poets, though preceded by the example of Carlo Belloli, took the concept of shaped verse but played with it. They reduced language first to phrases and finally to non-syntactic structures: words or strings of words that didn’t cohere into syntax. Certainly, a visual syntax replaced the syntax of the spoken tongue, but this visual syntax is a totally different beast.

Poetry with Non-Textual Images

Starting in about the 1500s, visual poets began to insert visual images (those not created by the text) into their poems, but this feature did not become common until the birth of poesia visiva in Italy in the 1970s. This was a collage-based poetry that combined the visual with the verbal in often disjunctive ways.

Asemic Poetry

The ultima Thule of visual poetry is asemic poetry, a form of writing that is completely without semantic content. Visual poets create asemic poetry out of invented alphabets and handwriting or nonsensical combinations of real letters. The sense wrung out of such writing comes from the reader’s ability to interpret the documental form of the piece or to intuit the meaning of splashes of ink.

Visual Non-Textual Art

At the end of the spectrum, we have visual art that is devoid of text or at least devoid of text afforded any vispoetic significance.


Is visual poetry abstract art?

Visual poetry can be an abstract art, but there is no requirement that it be one. Insofar that visual poetry is about text and presents text, visual poetry is the most concrete of arts when it is simply about itself.


What do you think are the current and future visual poetry trends?

The most obvious trend in visual poetry today is towards the asyntactic presentation of shards of letters. This is a clear feature of much of the work of Nico Vassilakis, Scott Helmes, and Andrew Topel. This atomization of the letter is about as far as visual poetry can go towards the visual, and it is most obvious in work of the late Bob Cobbing, who almost entirely obscured the letter in his later xerographic poems.

The second big trend is the use of computers in the creation of visual poems. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a visual poet not working with the computer in the creation of poems, and many visual poems are now created for the computer screen rather than the page.

This latter trend points to the future, where visual poetry will more and more be digital, aural, and kinetic. Given the relative ease in making visual poems that move and speak, more and more visual poems will be designed for computer environments rather than books. These poems will interact with their readers, who will be required not only to interpret the poems but also to create them.


How many years have you been creating visual poetry? Give a brief biography of your experience.

I began creating visual poems in about 1976, when I was living in La Paz, Bolivia. My English teacher taught a unit on concrete poetry where she had us create concrete poems. None of those early (and truly awful) concrete poems of mine survive, but their creation inspired me to continue with the form. By the mid-1980s, I had discovered a set of contemporaries working on visual poetry, and that discovery led directly to my growth as a visual poet. I have been creating visual poetry for three decades.


Who are your mentors?

I have never had any mentors for any endeavor in my life. This is probably because I don’t often express any need and I rarely ask for help. But it’s also fairly unlikely for a visual poet to live near another visual poet and, thus, have a chance to develop a mentor and protégé relationship.


What artists have inspired and influenced you?

My original inspiration came from the concrete poets in general, but Eugen Gomringer (the Bolivian-born German) was a particular influence. Gomringer created a concrete poetry that was gracefully visual and authentically literary, and I appreciated his style. Much of my early work yearned towards his model, without ever achieving his quality of work. Recently, I’ve felt some influence from Scott Helmes. His work teaches me about the limits of visual poetry all the time. In general, though, I try to keep track of modern visual poetry and allow myself a chance to be influenced by everyone.


What books/articles/websites/blogs in your field do you find technically excellent and/or creatively inspiring?

I find inspiration everywhere, in places too many to list. I’m not sure how many technically excellent books, articles, websites or blogs there are related to visual poetry. Almost no website devotes itself to visual poetry, but two sites (“Light and Dust” and “Ubuweb”), both includes good quantities of visual poetry. “Light and Dust” wins the contest between the two by including quite a bit of new writing about visual poetry. “Ubuweb” primarily reprints older writing on the subject. Books on visual poetry are rare. Willard Bohn has written a few books on visual poetry, and they’re valuable for their insights and close readings. These suffer a bit from too close a reading, too close a focus on individual poems and not enough about the range of visual poetry. Also, Bohn focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, but he’s a serious scholar in the field. Any blog besides mine that focuses on visual poetry focuses primarily on reproducing visual poems of the blogger, so those might be great but not excellent in a way I would prefer.


Talk about the evolution of your work. What challenges you today and what directions would you like to explore in the future?

My work has evolved towards greater minimalism and smaller size on one hand and increasing verbal content and physical size on the other.

Today, the most common from of visual poetry I produce is the fidgetglyph, a doodlelike visual poem. I have created over one thousand of these since about 2002. Each is a fairly tiny thing that isn’t particularly ambitious, but taken together these form a serious body of work.

Over the last few years, I’ve also created a number (though many fewer) of poster poems. These are large poems I create by laying the text of almost-conventional poems over enlargements of digital images. Often, I increase the size of the image until the pixels in the image appear as crystals on the page.

I am beginning to create digital videopoems. These combine animated visual poems (or other verbo-visual documents) with my chanting of an extemporaneous sound poem.

What I would like to do in the future is learn to program some more technically difficult digital poems, as I used to do back in the mid-1980s, but I’m not sure I’ll have the time to devout to learning a programming language.


Describe the creative process that shapes your work.

My creative process is fiddling. I am not usually inspired to create. Instead, I begin creating (using some particular technique) and allow the process of creation to take me down other paths. I often take inspiration from what is happening around me, so it is not uncommon for me to create visual poems surrounded by a group of people. I might snatch a word out of the air and use that as the kernel of an idea for a poem.


Do you ever combine images with type?

I am more and more combining images with type. Strangely, I find this technique the most difficult, because the results are often too staid, too much like an advertisement, too “clean.” I have to guard against that tendency whenever working in that form.


Do you include “readable” phrases or sentences?

Probably most of my works includes readable words. Some focus on letters or parts of letters, but words are central to most of my poems. Phrases and sentences, however, do actually appear in plenty of my works. Some of my visual poems include swaths of conventionally poetic text.


How does your work differ from graphic art typography?

Typography is about the esthetic presentation of text. My visual poetry, and all visual poetry, is about the esthetic presentation of visible language. Certainly, that language is textual, but the focus is on meaning (even if that meaning it damped down or difficult to fathom).


Do you see a connection between your visual poetry and graffiti?

Not often, but my handwritten visual poems sometimes show a tenuous affinity to graffiti. In this country, graffiti art is fairly rigid in its presentation of text. There is little variety there, whereas I’m interested in giving text many different visual forms. Some visual poems I carve into the environment: sandglyphs, snowglyphs, pollenglyphs (poems written in sand, snow, or pollen). And these replicate the urge of graffitists to mark their territory. The main difference is the content of our works and the relative transitory nature of most of these works of mine.


I am curious about your thoughts on communicative intention. Do you deliberately intend to not encode semantic content? If so, what then is being communicated? Is it some kind of emotional ‘metadata’?

I almost always intend a specific meaning. Sometimes the semantic information in the poem is present but obfuscated or occluded by other information. Much of the meaning of my visual poems is based on semantic content, but others depend on the visual significance of letters or the almost mystical sense of significance felt in meaningless characters. Your term “emotional metadata” is an apt one for this sense of significance, which I believe is an important component in the appreciation of many visual poems. I wonder what word besides “emotional” I would use, however, since that word is a little too narrow for my purposes, but you’re on to something here.


Describe a little about your work habits. How do you create your pieces? What media do you use?

My habits are various and not well exploited. I tend to create merely to entertain myself, so I try to work in various ways. I draw visual poems with pens, ink them with brushes, find them, scan them, paint them, carve them. Creation is an intellectual process, but I like to work with my hands and in various ways. I have, for instance, a large bottle of walnut ink, which makes an erratic variegated pattern on the page, but I also like to use that because it smells of walnuts. The creation of walnut-ink poems with my large steel brushes is, thus, a sensual experience for me as well as an intellectual activity.


Do you work primarily in black and white or color? Why?

In the past, visual poets worked primarily (but rarely exclusively) in black and white, because reproduction would rarely be in color. Now, most visual poets work in color and black and white. I am more likely to work in black and white even now. The contrast of black on white still appeals to me, and many of my poems are fidgetglyphs that I create in meetings or on trains, and it is simpler to stay with black and white. However, color allows for greater artistic expression, so I tend to use color whenever I can. Ever since I started creating visual poems on computers back in the mid-1980s, I’ve depended on color for some visual poems of mine.


I saw some of your work online. Often there was a large white background space with the “visual text” centered. Can you discuss the role of the mise-en-page?

Mise-en-page is simply the layout of elements (type, images, lines) on a page. The page (even when converted into the screen) is the locus of creation for the visual poem, and the meaningful arrangement of information on the page is the job of the visual poet. Just as a director must control the mise-en-scene of a film or a play to help make the point of a dramatic presentation, the visual poet must control the mise-en-page. Visual poets usually create tension or connection or significance through the mise-en-page without realizing it, but if forced to think about it they could probably explain why they didn’t put a particular scrap of text is a different corner of the page.


How does a piece created digitally compare to one that is handmade?

In many ways digital pieces are the same as handmade pieces. If created by the same person, they both come out of the same imagination. They both use visual language visually enhanced to make their esthetic points. But there is a difference. Handmade pieces tend to have more variation, less absolute control. Digital pieces can be perfectly precise if need be, and they can dance or sing if called to do so. The digital world allows for speed over the handmade. In most contexts, it makes little difference to the viewer how an image was made, but I’ve noticed that handmade visual poems in exhibits tend to have a certain quality people find appealing: uniqueness.


What are your thoughts on the role of new media and visual poetry?

Visual poetry is about possibility, and new media allow new ways for visual poems to mean. All of that is good for visual poetry. I think that visual poetry will continue to be made without the intervention of the computer and with, but I also believe that the computer will come to predominate. I don’t believe this will diminish visual poetry, but it will give a different character to the product.


Does the electronic reproduction of a handmade piece diminish the art? If so, how?

Reproduction of any kind is not the original, so in that way every reproduction is a diminished form of the original. But it is impossible for anyone to see all originals, so reproduction is important. In some cases, there will be enough loss of information between the handmade original and the reproduction to change the esthetic experience significantly, but this is fairly rare. However, the experience of an original and that of a reproduction will always differ to some degree.


I have read that historically visual poetry was linked to political activism. Is this still the case? Do you consider your own work politically charged?

Clearly, some visual poets still produce much political work, but this is much more common in Europe and Latin America than in the US. The Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín is the best current example of a committed political poet of visual persuasion. In the US, there is some political visual poetry, but very little. Two years ago, John M. Bennett and Scott Helmes released The June 30th Manifesto, a collection of political visual and textual poetry created to memorialize the date the Coalition Provisional Authority (dominated by the US) planned to hand over “limited sovereignty” to the Iraqis. Most of my work is not politically charged, but some of my poster poems (large-scale visual poems that overlay text on found images) definitely are, including my fairly well know visual poem, “My Death is Just.”


Do you sign your works?

Rarely. A signature changes the mise-en-page, so I don’t include one unless it is meant to fit into the structure of the poem. Otherwise, it is an annoyance, an unnecessary bit of information that gets in the way of the poem.


Do you copyright your works?

I do not register my copyright, but copyright not applies upon creation of all works, so my works are copyright by law if not registration. I don’t worry too much about copyright, though. After all, visual poems are not of much value in the marketplace of esthetic creations.


Do you exhibit works in galleries, museums, and/or online and if so, where?

I’ve exhibited my work in different shows for almost the past twenty years. I once had a one-man show of my visual poetry, handmade publications, and dictionaries (the major forms of my art) at the Art Center of the Capital District in Troy, New York. And I had a visual poetry installation on the risers of a staircase in the “Family” exhibit at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Beyond that, I’ve participated in many exhibits in North America, South America, and Europe. Online, I’m represented in a copy of exhibits, most importantly in Kalligram and the online version of the exhibit of the 2005 show at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami.


I was reviewing some of your pieces from Vispo at Durban Segnini Gallery. I am interested in how the background interacts with the foreground. I was wondering if you prefer clean backgrounds that do not “fight” with the main text. You seem to prefer working with type.

I am, by my nature, a creator of “clean” visual poems. My poems tend to be neat, rather than messy, and they tend to deal with stark contrasts between background and foreground. For this reason, yes, my backgrounds tend to be clean. This tendency of mine is probably a weakness rather than a strength.


I have attached an image of your “drunken e” piece. I love the color interaction and the element of transparency. How did you achieve such a flat look with all the layers? I like that you can still see the edges of the layers, giving the piece more dimension.

The layers in “The Drunken e” are both real and virtual. This is from a series in progress called The Colors of the Alphabet. Essentially, I take cardboard letters and arrange them into a verbally minimalist visual poem. Next, I scan that poem (after carefully positioning it upside-down on a scanner). So the real layers of the poem come from my overlaying letters upon one another. Finally, I take the resulting digital image and manipulate it with my computer, playing with the color and the shape of the piece, and always overlapping partial images of the poem upon the poem itself.


Is this an example of the “artist's palette”?

Yes. The visual effects of that poem require an artist’s eye to determine how to balance the image, control the color, and replicate depth.


How many font styles do you usually work with?

It depends on the piece. In some pieces, I’m interested in paragonnage (the use of various typefaces and type sizes in one piece). Other times, I’m interested in simplicity, and I stick with one typeface. I have hundreds of typefaces on my computer and many ways to create other forms of letters (handwriting, typing, stenciling, etc.), so I have the means to choose the form of a bit of text that I think fits the need.

I also try to use the “best” form of the letter itself. Often in my fidgetglyphs I use different forms of letters to created a kind of calligraphic paragonnage.


I like the sense of drunken floating chaos. Do you title your work after it is completed or did you come up with the title concept and then design accordingly?

Life is different for different situations, and art conforms to that practice. Sometimes, I begin a piece with a title and create something around that title. I must admit, though, that I usually title pieces after they have been created.


Are there two or three images of your personal favorite work you would be willing to share with readers?

I have chosen the following pieces almost at random, after a brief scan of some of the poems I have stored on my computer. I chose them because of the various methods of their creation.

“The Spiritual Arc”



“o’face”




“iceshine”




“afro dITes”



Do you have a photo of yourself you would be willing to share?

This picture is a few years old, and I have a little less hair now.


Geof Huth in Stuyvesant Park, New York City (10 Jul 2000)

ecr. l'inf.