Welcome back, everybody.
Thanks for coming back.
This is-- I'll give you a little bit of history.
I will tell you that the other times that I've done this,
I've done it in much smaller groups
with a goal of instigating some conversation,
and getting people to talk about what their responses
and reactions are.
So I encourage that, even in this much larger space.
Please don't be shy.
Feel free to speak up, to raise your hand if you need to.
But otherwise, this is an exercise in identification
and how sometimes classification can be more
difficult than other times.
This started when Poetry Magazine had a special issue
on visual poetry.
And a couple of months later, a gentleman
sent a letter to the editor which I took umbrage with.
His letter said, in part, look, let's call visual poetry
what it really is.
Visual art.
Some of us are in love with language
in the way in which words, just words, can be put together
in relationships that say something.
Let's not continue to water down the concept of poetry
anymore than it already has been.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
Thank you for laughing, because that was my initial response.
Because, I thought to myself, when is a poem ever that?
When it's in your head, sure.
That's what it is when it's in your head.
But once you put it into any transmissible format
it becomes an object, and that object
has qualities which can be manipulated or exploited
for poetic intent.
Now, I've never been the kind of person to curse the darkness.
I would rather try to light a candle.
So what I did was, I put together a series of pieces.
Like I said earlier, the continuum
between the visual and textual is vast.
I mean, there are some pieces that are clearly--
there's no text involved in this at all.
This is-- I shouldn't say nothing,
but this is solely a visual piece.
And there are other pieces that you can look at,
and you can say, this is just text.
And then there's some pieces that are
text with the visual component.
And there are some pieces that are visual
with the textual component.
But it really gets interesting to me when you get to this spot
where, well, I'm not really sure what that is.
This is a guy named Bronek Konarski.
This is a poem.
This is the whole poem.
"Waves lapping against a shore.
Waves lapping against a shore."
Is this visual or textual?
Personally, I mean, yeah.
It's all text.
And I suppose it works auditorily,
but I don't think it works anywhere near as well
auditorily as it works visually.
I think this is a piece that the visual component is inseparable
from the textual component.
So I would have a hard time, myself,
saying whether this piece is purely textual.
And please chime in and call me an idiot, a liar,
if you think I'm wrong.
This is a piece that's a double acrostic.
Because it's been done with a fixed pitch font,
every line is the same number of characters and or spaces
which allows you to make it acrostic on both
the left and right side.
It's not intended to be printed with the ends colored.
I've just done that so that you can
see that, as you read it down, it says,
"Every good question is written in the down.
The answer isn't written in the down.
Every good question is well hidden, sir."
A poem like this, again--
I think it calls into question whether it is visual
or not, or purely textual.
EE Cummings, prime example--
What I love about this particular piece,
and why I included it, is for the title,
which is "Grasshopper."
But to me has always called to mind--
And if you've ever stumbled on a grasshopper in the grass,
they just sort of explode out when they come.
So if this were sort of a type of structure
that may look exactly like a grasshopper,
I would have no problem saying this piece is primarily visual.
But because he's done that with it, that, to me,
hearkens or calls to mind the echo
of an action that's happening.
I'm not sure that this would work otherwise.
FT Marinetti.
Futurism.
Is this a piece of visual art?
Or is this a text?
It's certainly not a readable text.
Well, I mean, i think it can be.
There's people who actually do perform text like this,
and Joerg Piringer is a guy who does do that.
They take these as scores for auditory poems
which problematizes it even further.
Is it textual?
Is it the score for something auditory?
Or is it visual?
TypeScript?
Type scrapped?
Another bpNichol piece.
"Along the horizon grew an unbroken line of trees."
I don't know.
Is that a text, or is that a picture?
It's a landscape.
This is another Jim Andrews piece
which I'm going to show you.
This is called "Nio."
"Nio" is a tool that anyone can use.
It has nibs.
And the nibs you can draw with, so you could--
Right now it's sort of in free mode showing you what it does.
But you can-- These are all tips, nibs that you can take
and you can draw with, if you wanted, yourself.
Because the text is so visual, I can't really
tell you which it is.
Donald Finkel.
"My arm sweeps down to pliant arc whatever
I am streams through my negligent wrist:
the poem uncoils like a whip, it snaps softly
an inch from your enchanted face."
It's the bubbles in champagne, by the way.
Kind of a favorite poem by Aaron [? Shurin. ?]
For the amount of money, it earned him a grant.
This is my grandfather, actually.
"Roses are red the violets are ready for plucking.
I'm fresh out of high school and ready for college."
But I think the same mechanism that
makes this work is the same mechanism that makes this work.
I guess that expectation of the line, which
is a visual construct, it's an effect on the page.
But this is a quadruple acrostic because--
Excuse me?
Yes.
But that last one also just reminded me of stand up comedy.
But the oral quality of--
Visually, it's simulated.
And that's the timing--
Yes.
That's exactly right.
--of that?
But I don't necessarily know that it's native to the visual.
To me, that seems even more about recording audio,
in a sense.
I assume there's an anticipatory--
Right.
What makes it funny is that you're
expecting something else.
Right.
And you're expecting a rhyme, which is sonic.
I agree.
But the sonic--
Well, that's a good question, too.
Is rhyme a sonic function?
It's a really good question because there's irony,
for sure.
And then there's also this notion that,
even imperceptibly to ourselves, we are vocalizing when we read.
There's been studies that show that everybody, when they read,
is moving their lips even if it's not visible, so to speak.
So the question is whether that is auditory or not.
I think it's a great point.
OK.
So this is a quadruple acrostic.
Again-- Because we're working in a fixed pitch font,
as long as we make the lines the same number of characters
and their spaces, it gives us the opportunity
to make it say, "other lovers" and then,
"escape their others alone or so they say."
How do you see that?
I don't see that.
The first letter of every line is, o-t-h-e-r l-o-v-e-r-s.
And then over here, where there's this break,
because this is a chunk.
The last line of this chunk, the last letter of each line is
e-s-c-a-p-e t-h-e-i-r, and so on.
More of the same--
But as you multiply it, does that
change the amount that the visual aspect
is required for this piece to function as it does?