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a clipblog collecting blogged thoughts on visual poetry

Saturday, June 24, 2006

The Limitations of Imagination

via Jeffrey Side:

It could be argued that visual poetry is, indeed, semantic. I agree to a point. For instance, Ernst Gomringer's 'WIND' (which plays with associations such as the words "in" and "win" contained within the word "WIND") and Augusto de Campos's 'CODIGO' (which contains the word "God" as an anagram and alludes to "cogito ergo sum") do, indeed, operate semantically. Nevertheless, their semantic operations are extremely meagre. With 'WIND' the associations come to only two words: "win" and "in" (perhaps also the word "wind", as in to wind a clock). The same limitations can be seen in de Campos's 'CODIGO'. Apart from a reader's fleeting appreciation of the novel aspects of these poems their affects are exhausted no sooner than they are recognised.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Visual Poetry from the 1500s

via PK's BibliOdyssey:

Among his many writings was an interesting collection of poetry - De Laudibus Sancte Crucis ('In Praise of the Cross') - "a collection of twenty-eight encrypted religious poems, rendered before 814 AD. He was said to be the inventor of a cyphering system of 36 lines containing 36 letters evenly spaced on a grid. In this grid, Maurus included figurative images, putting the poems in visual terms. The poem filling the cypher grid was enriched by these smaller images, as most of the letters contained within them created tiny individual poems." Thus his writings could be appreciated at least on one level by the largely illiterate populace.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

A Vain Attempt: Concrete Poetry vs Visual Poetry

via Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera:

Speaking of "concrete poetry," I recently saw two definitions of it at Dan Waber's website. They made me want to put my own two cents in about what it is. I differ from the two definers at Dan's site, and most definers of terms like "concrete poetry," in that I try to define them intelligently rather than historically--that is, by how the terms have been used by the general population, or even by the specialists in the field the term popped up in. I also (sacrilege!) ignore what coiners of terms say they mean if they ignore the meaning of the words they create their terms from.

One More Time: Defining Visual Poetry

via Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera:

A visual poem is an artwork aesthetically dependent to a major extent on both elements that are semantically stimulating to a significant degree and elements that are directly stimulating visually to a significant degree.