Visual Poetry and the World of Words

Today, while reading an article online about a book by a person who read the entire Oxford English in a year, a feat I could never match, I was struck by the illustration the New York Times included in the article. At first glance, it appeared to be the work of Michael Basinski, a Buffalo-based visual poet and archivist (manuscripts librarian, to get technical), whose signature style is all about writing by hand, about filling the pages with letters of various sizes, colors, and shapes. Combining drawing and writing on one plane, he creates always something of an intentional miasma of text.

The article itself interested me, and I’ll probably catch myself buy the book the next time I’m in a bookstore: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. The story is a simple one of obsession: a man trying to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary (certainly the largest dictionary in the world) in a single year, and succeeding. From the article itself, we learn that Shea owns about 1,000 dictionaries, but who doesn’t? which is to say that I own quite a few over 1,000 dictionaries, and that number doesn’t include other words about language—so I understand obsessions with books, with words, with owning books of words. Shea’s obsession, at least, led to the creation of a book. My obsession with dictionaries is merely one to plumb the dictionary for words, thoughts, ideas—to understand better the undefinable boundaries of the language.

Shea takes some joy in finding interesting inkhorn terms in the dictionary, which I can appreciate. In these travels through the multiple volumes of the OED, he even uncovers one of my favorite words, a harbinger of spring: petrichor, the smell of rain on the ground after a period without rain. The smell is abundant in the spring, as the earth is taking liquid back into itself, and that rich ineffable scent captures me, so I’m glad to have a word for it. Alhough I see it as a normal word, one for conversation, one for enjoyment, the book appears to put it with strange words like one for adding urine to ale to give it a better bite. I wonder at what point a dictionary becomes a zoo full of caged animals that bear only a trifling resemblance to the wild beasts that roam the veldt.

Thinking again of the illustration by Steven Guarnaccia, I am forced to identify how this work differs from Michael Basinski’s. First, this illustration merely illustrates; it takes a few of the weird words from the book and has them spitting out of the mouth of a blue man, in an apparent visual manifestation of logorrhea. Second, Guarnaccia’s is a work where the words do not join together to do anything. Many words could replace these without any real diminution of meaning, but all the meaning there is is that there are some weird words in English. Basinski’s works are verbal constructions, complex webs of words, and we have to read through them and pick through them to figure out what is happening within. Third, Guarnaccia’s style is much more sedate than Basinski’s. Michael like the messy, the wild, the expressionistic; Guarnaccia goes for the safe.


Coincidentally, Michael Basinski is being feted this week, in a manner of speaking as the featured poet (in a “Visual Poetry Special”) at Anti-[Poetry]. When I first saw Basinski’s “cover” for the issue on a handheld device that condensed the image into a few square inches, I thought I was looking as some newfound chatoyant jewel. Color infests this piece like rhyme and assonance can in a poem. The huge expanse of yellow in the center of the poem captures our attention, but it is the various sequences of islands and fingers of colors within this space that maintain our attention. Up close, the poem is a swirling mass of text in different colors and shapes. Clearly, Basinski is not Guarnaccia.

And the rest of Basinski’s poems in the issue make that clear as well. I was struck, though, by how Basinski’s style is changing, how his pieces includes so many found items that they almost resemble a standard collage, how his pieces are a kind of manic American poesia visiva, surging with color and conflict, with words and wit. The only problem I see is that a regular computer screen is hardly adequate for viewing a Basinski piece, and certainly the screen on an iPhone isn’t. What we need is an Imax computer screen, a high-resolution Internet for his pieces, an Imax screen for viewing the detail of Basinski’s work.

Or we need to see these pieces in person. There’s much to see here, much to read, and the screens through which we see them just aren’t up to the task.

ecr. l’inf.