viz. - Concrete and Visual Poetry

A Day for Love and Wit

Calliope — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 05:18:23 +0000

Image Credit: salon.com

Today is National Eros Day. If all goes as planned couples everywhere will exchange love tokens, consume chocolate, and passionately express their love for one another. Even if we poke fun at them, these are some of the conventions of Valentine's Day just like grilling and fireworks are conventional for the Fourth of July. But Valentine's Day is a peculiar holiday because many of its conventions--and certainly its iconography--are literary (instead of religious, nationalistic, or folkloric). To my knowledge it's the only widely celebrated holiday that, simply by virtue of its subject matter, has its own well-established poetic tradition and form: the tradition of courtly love poetry and the form of the sonnet. I ask the reader to accept this slightly shaky premise as I make the claim, just for fun, that Valentine's Day makes us all into poets.

I didn't say good poets. The Valentine's Day-inspired "poems" I will discuss here are hardly traditional, and perhaps not very clever. But poets have always insisted that their declarations of love are bungled and artless. Renaissance sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney says that idolizing one's love in verse is for fools "who fare like him that both / Lookes to the skies, and in a ditch doth fall." Yet, like Sidney's devoted Astrophil, fools cannot ignore Love's call to "bend hitherward your wit" (Astrophil and Stella 19). On Valentine's Day especially that call is deafening.

The illustration (above) to writer David Henry Sterry's Salon piece about finding the love of his life and simultaneously his muse, got me thinking about the symbiosis between poetry (loosely defined) and the institutionalization of love. The image depicts what looks like a concrete poem, a piece of writing in the shape of its primary subject or theme, emerging from a typewriter. Because of its shape (that of a heart) the viewer cannot help but view the poem as a valentine. The tradition of sending these cards, poems, or epistles to one's sweetheart is as old as the holiday's association with romantic love, dating to the 15th century. The Renaissance cult of courtly love partly explains the origins of this practice. But why do we still turn, on this day, to puns and emblems to celebrate our romantic relationships?

Image Credit: missionbicycle.com

I'm not quite sure, but maybe if we look at another concrete poem of sorts we'll get closer to an answer. Payam Rajabi, the cyclist who sent this valentine to his long-distance girlfriend last year, created it by taking a heart-shaped path through the streets of San Francisco and tracking his route by GPS. The resulting screenshot is a spatial metaphor for his love. The map hyperbolically implies the magnitude of his affection (his love for her is a big as the city); the location evokes romance; and the shape of the route encourages a metonymic relationship between the place, San Francisco, and Rajabi's feelings (in other words, S.F. becomes a kind of shorthand for Rajabi and his deep affection for his girlfriend). Now what kind of boyfriend wouldn't aim to impart all of this on Valentine's Day with a single, poetic gesture? Maybe one who dislikes the idea of biking up Lombard Street.

SF hills aside, I think Rajabi's valentine illustrates that the holiday can serve as a sort of challenge for our wits, a poetic call to arms. For centuries, we have delighted in the challenge of transfering our profoundest feelings into the confines of a little poem or keepsake. As Donne writes of this magic trick, "we'll build in sonnets pretty rooms." Happy Valentine's Day!

Encounters with Concrete and Visual Poetry (IMG_2123.JPG)

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:15:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post Encounters with Concrete and Visual Poetry.

Encounters with Concrete and Visual Poetry

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:36:36 +0000

Image Credit: Ubu.com

It seems obvious that sight would be a natural starting point for any analysis of the mixed-mode of expression known as “concrete” or “visual” poetry, in which elements such as typography, pattern, word-arrangement, and text-image juxtaposition replace more conventional techniques of rhyme, syntax, and meter. Over the past week, however, two separate encounters have compelled me to think about how the tactility and transience of this form is possibly more fundamental than its appeal to sight. One of these experiences pertains to my discovery of Ubuweb’s fascinating archive of film in the field of concrete and visual poetics. The other has to do with my subsequent meeting with a local artist and concrete poet, who gave me one of his 3x3 trading card compositions. This unplanned, uncanny coincidence has made me consider how concrete poetry might encourage a shift from the scrutiny of the eye (the surface-depth model of close reading) to the gestures of the hand (holding and retaining, offering and receiving).

Image Credit: Getty.edu

Last Thursday I viewed Sara Sackner’s excellent documentary, Concrete! (2006). The film tours Ruth and Marvin Sackner’s private collection of “over sixty thousand objects” of concrete/visual poetry. Since 1979, the Sackners have been gathering books, artifacts, and artworks that render language visible and words material. In the film, they recount their acquisition, aesthetic interest, and personal fondness for pieces contained in their Miami Beach home. At certain moments in the film, it actually becomes difficult to distinguish where the poetry ends and the house begins. Examples of this include the refrigerator photography-poetry that organically overflows onto the walls of her kitchen, or the submerged concrete imitation of Andrew Marvell’s poem, “The Garden,” which is embedded in the color-coded blanket that appears in several scenes.

http://www.ubu.com/film/sackner_concrete.html

Image Credit: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/

While poetry pervades the house, the books in Sackner’s library resist literary apprehension, possibly because their pages consist entirely of scribbles, or because these have been clipped, painted over, or altered. Unlike poetry in anthologies, the Sackner’s archive resists a standardized form of presentation. Not surprisingly, Marvin relates his common fear of neglecting pieces hidden in the packages he receives from artists and poets around the world. He shows one such piece, entitled “Do You Read Your Garbage?”

Image Credit: Surrealismin2012.org

In their narration, the Sackners focus on such topics as the smell and texture of the works, their classifications of in an ever-expanding filing cabinet, and the memories and associations that each work invokes. By immersing poetry in the material objects and images, this poetry emphasizes tactile and transient qualities of things, which one desires to hold and maintain. It is perhaps fitting that Sackner’s Concrete! introduces the genre from the perspective of two collectors. Many of the works draw attention to our embodied, phenomenological, and subjective interactions with poetic language. They challenge the disembodied eye of literary criticism—particularly the one practiced when the first manifestos in concrete and visual poetry appeared.

Image Credit: Ubu.com

Even more sight-centric media in the field of visual/concrete poetry emphasizes the concrete and phenomenology contexts of reading. An example of this is Michael Snow’s film So Is This (1982). Snow’s film presents a sequence of individual white words, which appear at varied intervals onto a black screen that is occasionally backlit or obscured by static. The process dramatizes the scanning of the eye over a line, but exaggerates the tactile quality of grasping and fixing upon individual words in the otherwise automatic scansion of a line. As Snow’s technique of divulging individual words restricts the audience’s bird’s-eye perception of line and page, he manipulates the relative flow and accessibility of text, while also playing upon audience expectation and uncertainty. Sometimes the audience must grasp for words that arise and disappear almost imperceptibly, while other times they are forced to linger on single words. Occasionally, the duration of a word suggests a dramatic aside unmarked by punctuation, or the size of the font suggests shifts in tone. <http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_so.html>

Image Credit: arttorrents.blogspot.com

By about midway through this silent film, one discovers that the short text is actually a prose digression on the hazards, benefits, and affordances of his projected model of group reading. Snow addresses censorship just before flashing a brief (almost imperceptible) string of obscenities that intensify the tension and dangers of each subsequent following word. The film concludes with summary of the text’s general argument: “Flashback:/ Writing/ in/ the/ 4^th/ century/ B.C./ Plato/ has/ Socrates/ say:/ “You/ know/ Phaedrus/ that’s/ the/ strange/ thing/ about/ writing/ which/ makes/ it/ truly/ analogous/ to/ painting./ The/ painters’/ products/ stand/ before/ us/ as/ though/ they/ were/ alive,/ but/ if/ you/ question/ them/ they/ maintain/ a/ most/ majestic/ silence’./ This/ film/ will/ seem/ to/ stop/ T.” The Ars Poetica conclusion is effective, I argue, because of Snow’s prior demonstration of the tangible potency of isolated, unmoored, and even withheld words.

Image Credit: wendtroot.com

Over the past weekend, I met a local concrete/visual poet named Del W. In our brief conversation, he gave me one of the trading card poems he was handing out that night. Del. W states that he has been influenced by the surrealist poetry of Robert Desnos. He also explained he and his wife shared affection for Guillaume Appollinaire (above), and once left flowers for him at Le Pont Mirabeau. I enjoyed my conversation with Del W. and am grateful for his gift of a 3x3 inch thin paper poem. Del W. is past the age of retirement, and continues his work in Austin, Texas. Below is a digital snapshot of the poem:

Image Credit: Digital Snapshot, Del W.