Visual
Poetry Collaborative Book Project
Introduction
to Edition #2
By
De Villo Sloan
During the era of the global Asemics 16 book project, Cheryl Penn and I also coordinated the creation of two collaborative visual poetry (aka vispo) editions using the assembling zine model that has been so successful for Cheryl. You are reading the introduction to the second edition.
In December 2011, Cheryl Penn (South Africa) and I placed a call through the international mail-art network inviting artists and writers to contribute a chapter each to a new collaborative book project we were coordinating. Responses were enthusiastic, warm and generous: We soon announced this second edition.
On the pages ahead, you will find innovative work by members of the international visual poetry community including Nancy Bell Scott (Maine, USA), John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA), Rosa Gravino (Argentina), Samuel Montalvetti (Argentina), Marcela Peral (Argentina), and Tic Tac (Germany). Fluxus is represented by contributions from Reed Altemus (Maine, USA) and Svetlana Pesetskaya (Russia). We were pleased to be joined by veteran mail-artists CT Chew (Washington State, USA), Angie Cope (Wisconsin, USA), Skybridge Studios (Indiana, USA) and Svenja Wahl (Germany).
Co-coordinator Cheryl Penn – book artist, painter, visual poet – has done graduate research on artist Ray Johnson and his New York Correspondence School, which in the 1960s established the foundation of today’s thriving global mail-art network. Based on mail-art’s shared values of inclusive and collective activity, Cheryl has developed and refined an effective process for making highly individualized artists’ books. Her concept that each contributor’s chapter would be an homage to a favorite artist or visual poet provides thematic coherence.
The work in this edition reveals that visual poetry, a synthesis of the visual arts and literature, has emerged as a new and vital mode of expression that is inventing new forms. Approaches to visual poetics in these pages reveal great diversity. Tic Tac (Germany), for instance, draws upon minimalism that focuses on single letters and words to produce brilliant irony and complex narratives. John M. Bennett’s chapter is a flawless integration of text and image that offers both new ways of reading and seeing.
The visual poetry concept, for most of us, is best understood from the perspective of painting, photography, collage, video and similar genres: Contemporary cultures program us to be adept at reading visual images, image sequences (from montage in film), and visual syntax. We can readily accept the notion that written and printed language is part of the larger visual image landscape. Thus, it is plausible that text and image can be integrated to create metaphor, rhetoric, lyricism, narrative, non-linearity, form and even visual prosody – elements associated with literary tradition and the notion of the poetic.
What is less apparent, but revealed especially by the work in this edition, is that the “Great Tradition” of poetry has evolved in such a way that visual poetry is now a viable, if not a desirable, genre in the post-literature of the 21st century. Poetry was an oral as well as visual tradition long before it was affixed in the printed word or quarantined as something called literature; it had forms, rhythms, and symbols that made it vital long before scholars froze and sought to create systems of measure and evaluation.
The Age of Literature and the printed word are only part of a far greater continuum stretching back into prehistory. Poetry will very likely endure as an essential human activity long after literary canons have been forgotten, certainly in spoken word form, but also in visual form outside the limits of definitions accepted today. In addition to forms of digital visual poetry, the handmade books – such as this edition – are increasingly viewed as object and haptic poetry themselves.
Central to poetry in the 20th century was a sustained engagement with the image and its refinement into image structures within the poem. Arthur Rimbaud in the 19th century, whose work is a precursor to Modernity, foresaw not only the rise of the image but the possibility of visual poetry in his sonnet “Vowels” (1872):
A black, E white, I red, U
green, O blue: vowels.
I will tell you, one day,
of your newborn portents:
A, the black velvet jacket
of brilliant flies whose essence
Co-mingles, abuzz, around
the cruelest of smells,
Wells of shadow; E, the whitewash of mists and tents,
Lances of glaciers, albino
kings, frost-bit fennels…
Rimbaud’s poem can be read as notes for the construction of a visual poem. Individual letters are isolated from words and given color designations, melding word and image. The color-vowels generate a sequence (montage) of associative images that provide content. Many of the poems in this visual poetry collection are a realization of Rimbaud’s vision, using image as language and language as image.
Several decades later, Ezra Pound’s Imagism established a foundation for Modernity. The imagist agenda called for economy of language, a paring of rhetoric in favor of image primacy and a belief that the image by itself can convey meaning and provide lyrical expression. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) is an example of Imagism that also foreshadows visual poetry:
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black
bough.
The economy and precision of the poem helped pave the way to minimalist poetry. The structure is two images, separated visually on the page with line breaks. Again, this piece could be translated into a visual poem. The primacy of the image expanded and increased from Modernity into the Postmodern.
William Carlos Williams and later Robert Creeley further refined poetic minimalism and use of the image. Visual poetry took root elsewhere, of course, and in different ways. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is an experiment in language-painting. New York School poets sought to create a literary version of abstract expressionism and action painting. In the meantime, DaDa and Fluxus (among other avant garde movements) produced text-image hybrids, including concrete poetry, through anti-art that ran counter to Modernity. In the last quarter of the 20th century, these efforts evolved and coalesced to make the concept of visual poetry possible.
We have an occasion in this edition to experience visual poets engaged together in exploring a terrain that is still largely uncharted in using the recognizable form of the book. While their work is still labeled avant-garde (a term that is now essentially meaningless as are so many other similar designations), they draw heavily upon the tradition of literature (which after all remains a rich vein) following a charge to poets made a century earlier: “Make it New.” We find beauty, lyricism, and above all else, an affirmation of the power and need for human expression.
De Villo Sloan
Auburn,
New York, USA
April
21, 2012
(revised
August 1, 2024)
-sSs-
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