dbqp: visualizing poetics

I received the latest issue of modern HAIKU the other day, and I have little to say about it since I haven’t read the issue yet and since the only visual poems within it were a couple of small ones of my own. It seems worthwhile, though, to take a few minutes to comment about how frequently visual poets are also haijin (haiku poets).

Lee Gurga, the current editor of Modern Haiku, is the engine behind the magazine’s expansion towards verbo-visual works in a haiku mode. Gurga remarked once in a letter to me that haiku is a ghettoized form of poetry.

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[Move your trackball up and down.

The Norman Conquest scrubbed English clean of many of the complicating features of language, the traits that mark languages: declension, most conjugation, grammatical gender, the distinction between the singular and plural concept of you. English is a stripped-down language. It rarely ever uses diacritical marks, relying instead on the memories and intellects of its readers to determine how to read its unmarked characters.

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For the past half a century, visual poets have increased the visual aspect of their work while reducing the verbal aspect, all while still claiming these works were poems. Over an even longer period, writers working under various banners (modernism, Fluxus, Oulipo, language poetry, minimalism) have endeavored to create spare emotionless works of conceptual writing that use only the slenderest kind of suggestion to enlighten us.

Even at rest, I am never at rest. Constantly, I fidget with my hands, my voice, my mind. It is movement that places me, stabilizes me, within the universe. Fidgeting is my Cartesian proof of the universe, which is the evidence I need to fight the struggle against solipsism.

This little book accumulates the random wordoodles I almost constantly make.

In an example of strained synchronicity and as a follow-up to my story of first learning of the world of concrete poetry, I must point out that Eugen Gomringer, one of the many fathers of concrete poetry, was actually born in Cachuela Esperanza, Bolivia, a village in far northern Bolivia, half the country removed from La Paz.

He wrote his very first concrete poem, “avenidas,” in Spanish, his native tongue.

In the 1970s, concrete poetry was in vogue for English teachers in the U.S.—in the same way that playing Beatles’ records and discussing their lyrics were. These two forces of hegemonic popism converged for me in Mrs Moomaugh’s English class at the American Cooperative School in Calacoto, Bolivia.

In retrospect, I’m amazed at how much of the American way of life we transported to the Andes without even knowing it.

Today, we try to uncover the true meaning of the term “visual poetry,” the definition of which is in some dispute. My years of research indicate the reason for this is obvious enough: people use the term in different ways. Most words in the language, after all, are polysemous to some degree or another, so it’s not surprising that the term “visual poetry”—which has been in use in English since at least the 1960s—has more than one acceptable meaning.

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