Charles Olson, if you want to see a really--
if you guys haven't been over next door
and toured through the second floor,
there's a whole series of broadsides
done by Chax Press, who is local here,
that are magnificent interpretations
of various Charles Olson poems that are doing things
like this, very much like this.
I could have included pretty much all of them
in this presentation because of how successfully they
problematized, whether it's visual or textual.
Lewis Carroll, a very famous piece.
But again, I think it falls into the same category of,
this is not what I consider to be a concrete poem.
Many people would, I think, call it a shape poem.
But the visual quality of what's going on here,
there's really no other way to present this.
I don't think you could read this out loud.
I don't think you can do anything other than see it.
I think if a person couldn't see this,
you would have no way of communicating it to them.
May Swenson.
This is a really subtle version of what I'm talking about.
But the poem is all about the knife, and the cut,
and the separation, and more, and the cut.
And what you have is this very subtle use of white space that
I think, if you have the time to take the time to read through
this poem, you would find makes the poem in a way that the text
all by itself cannot.
John Cage made mesostics.
This is a piece that must be original.
There's no other way it could be.
And it is comprised of nothing but text, and in fact, nothing
but appropriated text, not even his own text.
Karl Kempton is a California-based visual poet
of some note.
Maybe you're all familiar with the famous Basho poem.
This is yet another interpretation of it.
And again, I think because he's chosen
to translate that frog in sound splash as an exclamation point,
this is a piece that is no longer purely textual,
because what is punctuation?
Is punctuation lexical or visual?
I'm not sure.
I think Holly Crawford is not sure either
and is trying to work through what it could mean.
Here's another poem.
Again, somebody who is sort of serially
obsessed with tinkering with things.
And again, I think it's the punctuation that
problematizes this.
Could you say that this is just a text?
I guess.
I mean, I think this is probably on the alt text side of it,
but without the visual aspect, it fits.
It's not even legible.
This one people love to tell me doesn't belong here,
but what I maintain about this is
I think this poem is structured like a wet, black bough
intentionally.
I see so much in this that Pound did on purpose
for the visual aspect of it.
I find it actually difficult to defend it.
So feel free to not agree with me.
And you're welcome to not agree with me,
but know that, to many people, it does have that aspect.
And maybe it's even synesthetic on some level.
There's something about this that to me is
memetic of what is right.
Apollinaire, of course.
This is a poem about rain.
This is one of mine that, again, I think probably
because of the punctuation, and maybe a little bit
of the anticipatory, that made the other funny.
The only way that this works is--
I shouldn't say the only way.
This is another one that maybe perhaps can be called text,
but there's definitely something about the mechanism that
makes this work that is involved with the visual pause,
provided that [INAUDIBLE].
This is one of the most famous concrete poems of all time.
"Silencio," which if you don't speak Spanish, means silent.
So there's--
[LAUGHTER]
There's that visual representation of it.
But now we're also-- again, we've
got this conflation of the visual and the auditory,
even though what we're talking about is silence.
But silence is an auditory realm phenomenon too.
So tell me what that is, if all my other ones weren't
hard to figure out.
What's that?
It's called a painting, for God's sake.
It's all text.
I don't know.
Is it a poem?
Is it a painting?
Marcel tells us it's a painting.
Should we believe him?