dbqp: visualizing poetics

Hampton Inn, Room 305, Richmond, Kentucky

I never know what I’m doing when I’m creating a visual poem. I start with a shape, which might be the shape of a letter or a shape that could feed into a letter—and I move from there.

My shapes could be the typographic shapes of a computerized avatar of a letter. My shapes are often the handwritten shapes of letters I write out myself, twisting each to imbue the letterforms with additional meaning—because we know that shape has meaning: otherwise, we could not read. I sometimes work with foreign or invented alphabets, taking advantage of the structural similarities of those letters to letters of the Latin alphabet, creating a hybrid language, readable (just barely) in English but nonsense on their native pages and tongues.

Assuming the world is finally ready for it, I recently completed the first-ever anthology of pwoermds, &2: an/thology of pwoermds.

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.

If a visual poem consists of both textual and visual aspects, then the visual cotext is the visual element of the poem. This cotext serves as an interlocutor for the text and might be an image (or images) within the field of the visual poem. The visual cotext might also be entirely integrated with the text itself.

I slept about five hours last night. (I always use the term “last night” to refer to what is properly this morning.) Since five hours was the most I’d slept any night this week, I was ready for my 8-hour drive from Arlington to Schenectady—except that all I had to eat today was a small Danish and a few mini-chocolate bars. Somehow with that sustenance and a quarter-filled bottle of water, I survived the day.

Marriott Key Bridge, Room 438, Arlington, Virginia

Tonight, I returned ever so briefly to my past. I visited a friend of mine from the American School of Tangier, someone I hadn’t seen since June of 1977.

It is strange to think that Michelle and I had never before met on this continent, but that we still carried with us shared memories of a place and the people residing there.

Marriott Key Bridge, Room 438, Arlington, Virginia

It is not the gnail you use to make the vishual poemn that creates reverberations in the mind, nor the woould you make it of. Rather, it is how you use the hamner to drive that gnail intwo the would.

ecr. l’inf.

Kensington Court, Pennington, New Jersey

Since the shape of letters is a crucial element in many visual poems, the creators of these poems must understand allographs.

An allograph is merely a certain way of writing a particular letter. For instance, on this page, you see one common allograph of the minuscule a. This allograph is uncommon in handwriting, but it is quite common in print.

I am not an outsider artist.

I am, instead, the product (or the counterproduct) of years of writing workshops, years of criticism or praise, years of understanding or misunderstanding, years of sitting at a little pupitre and talking about other people’s poems and stories.

So why do I almost never write merely verbal poems anymore? In search of an answer, let’s look to the past.

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