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ENGL 146EL - Spring 2008,  Rita Raley
Tue, 5/6 Visual Poetry (vispo)

"For me, the dividing line for inventive poetic language in modern times is Mallarme's work "Un coup de dés" (1897), a poem conceivod intersemiotically as a fragmentary structure ("subdivisions prismatiques de l'Idée"), conjoining visual mural and musical score. With the acceptance of that work, it became possible to revisit the experiences of the vanguards of the beginning of the century and conceive of new elaborations. "Sans presumer de l'avenir qui sortira d'ici, rien ou presque un art," the last Mallarme - from Un coup de dés to Le Livre catalyzes and spreads the principal future alternatives of poetic language. In his final period and in the subsequent developments of the historical vanguards, which will be recycled and radicalized by Concrete poetry, one encounters the formal presuppositions of the poetry of the Technological Era, which greatly expands throughout the second half of the century. Besides Mallarmé and the historical vanguards, I would place as direct precedents Ezra Pound (the ideogrammatic method, the collage and metalanguage of the Cantos), James Joyce (the vocabulistic kaleidoscope of Finnegans Wake and its textual polyreadings), Cummings (the atomization and syntactical dislocation of his most experimental poems), and, on a second level, more idiosyncratic and less rigorous, the experimental, minimalist, and molecular prose of Gertrude Stein. In the special case of Brazilian poetry, the Sousandrade of O inferno de Wall Street (The Wall Street Hell) with its precollage epigrammatic mosaics, Oswald de Andrade and the "anthropophagic" instantpoem, the constructivist engineering of João Cabral [de Melo Neto]. In a transdisciplinary mode, I would mention the transformations of musical language from Webern to Cage and of the visual from Malevich/Mondrian to Duchamp. "
- Augusto de Campos, interviewed by K.David Jackson, Eric Vos & Johanna Drucker (Yale University, 1995)

"With visual poetry you don't have to start at the top left hand corner of a page and work down towards the bottom right hand corner. You just start, not anywhere, somewhere. It's not like having to stay on the pavement. It's like being where you want to be when you want to be - though as a maker you will soon find that the visual poem inflicts its own constraints; you do not have freedom. But you can walk through old walls and sometimes hear and see the sounds rising from the page and hear what is marked there without it being performed....
Much of what is going on here may not be writing as that is often understood. It is not painting or drawing, but it is near them."
- Lawrence Upton, Word Score Utterance Choreography: verbal and visual poetry, edited by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton (1998)

Paul Dutton, in Word Score Utterance Choreography: "I think of visual poetry as drawing with the alphabet. I don't hear these poems - not when I work on them, nor after they're done. I've been convinced by friends from time to time to 'read' certain of my visual creations, and some of the resulting sonic interpretations have found their way into my performance repertoire"

Further reading

  • Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916)
  • William Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry: 1914-1928 (1993)
  • Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (1998)
  • Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice (1991)
  • Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1969)


 



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