Colored
by my own predisposition for the idea of the non-ocular, I’m afraid I’d prefer
to unsee the visible in visual poetry.
That is, I’d prefer a blindfold test, where the audient can happily
focus on the crisp turning of pages and other less obscure signals.
The
new sentience alive in its calling. Time
to unhook to see.
But
I’m afraid I’ll have to leave the affective mapping, or how visual poems
consciously and unconsciously impact us, to others. I cannot even bear witness, ala Charles
Reznikoff, to things not seen. The truth
is that the impetus for this essay was to try to explain why I’m not a partisan
of the form.
What
intrigues me and what I want to think about here is the ecology of visual
poetry, or the logic of its environment.
The point is to try to understand what makes visual poets matter in
their own ways, rather than trying to generalize the divergent practices of
visual poets. That is, I want to avoid a
general review that looks for potential unity, or that would illustrate what
visual poetry is, or what this anthology represents.
In
short, I have only questions, no answers: what makes visual poets think –
rather than recognize? And how are
visual poets attached to their practice?
The point is not to find some consensus or commonality among visual
poets, for these are intractably subjective questions. How one is attached to a practice relates to
how one belongs and belonging could be thought of as a condition of both owning
and being owned by a social nexus or community.
How does that sense of belonging obligate us in an affirmative way, i.e.,
not in the sense of duty? Maybe this
relates to how practitioners are in debt to their habitat, i.e., not completely
autonomous? We’re not alone in the
world.
After
Mallarme used white space as silence, there’s a mise-en-page that can be
endlessly explored. But visual poetry
continues to be impacted by new technologies:
from Gutenberg to the typewriter to early computers to new digital
technologies -- which provide toolsets that build on the array of prior
toolsets. There is now easy access to
virtually all known alphabets, as well as programs to construct and design (and
deconstruct and redesign) new alphabets, which are themselves easily deployable
via vectors that mathematically describe each point and curve of each letter
form.
There
is a “relationship of relevance between situation and tool.” The “gesture of taking in hand” both produces
and is produced by this relationship. -Isabelle Stengers
Communion
crowds the worker. It crowns her. Queen of finger painting. After alpha blockage, manna stored and
resold.
Anthems and Definitions
The Last Vispo Anthology as a spectrum of the
current state of the art – “documenting the recent surge in visual poetry, ...
[extending] the dialectic between art and literature that began with the
concrete poetry movement fifty years ago.”
“Vispo”
as a separate compact, an abbreviated entity?
Is this a mere Gitmo-ification that mobilizes a term for the digital
era? That's not clear. But the provocative title
("Last...") suggests Vispo is all but in a crypt, or that the editors
feel the practice is coming up against some kind of a pivotal limitation,
perhaps on the verge of becoming other than itself, or in desperate need of a
revitalized or new habitat.
It
swallows the eye -- the all time best hits.
Chasing the non-human toolkits our future presents. What's never excluded, aka the affect that
escapes capture. The emotion celebrates
its lucre, oozing excess. Book reports
that report on the informer.
“Visual
poetry is poetry against metaphor. Scram.
Metaphor is let's make dividends in the boom economy of our
passion. Against Metaphor. Against Description…” -Donato Mancini
Following
Geof Huth’s definition, a visual poet is a poet irrepressibly drawn to the
visual. In an attempt to describe the
discipline, Huth suggests that there are three competencies of the visual poet:
(1) printer’s palette -- or mastery of the visual,
non-verbal;
(2) poet’s pen -- or mastery of the linguistic aspects; and
(3) printer’s fist -- or mastery of the emotive and intellectual value of
letters/gramma, punctuation, typefaces, words, design.
I
use the word “mastery” here, though Huth does not, because of the slippery
slope inherent to the model he sets forth. While Huth may be merely describing what he
believes the qualities of a competent visual poet are, rather than necessarily
ascribing to them, any such model sets up canonical qualities or categories
upon which to judge works of visual poetry.
“Visual
poetry, unhooked from the instrumentality of design or the discursive histories
of contemporary art. Most visual poets
aren't making images, they're making visually over-coded texts that push the
Poetry Master back into pre-school.” -Donato
Mancini
Proposition:
the visual poem as a record of the decisions that happen to the visual
poet. But this proposition only makes
sense if you understand “decision” in the way that Whitehead uses it, where
decisions are what happen to enduring entities or subjects.
“Decision
precedes consciousness and it precedes cognition.” That is, “decisions make cognition possible,
not the other way around… We don’t make
decisions because we are free and responsible; rather we are free and
responsible because – and precisely to the extent that – we make
decisions.”
-Steve Shaviro
Dick
Higgins suggests that both concrete poetry and pattern poetry tell “the story
of an ongoing human wish to combine the visual and literary impulses, to tie
together the experience of these two areas into an aesthetic whole… To those
who attempt this synthesis, something of the picture of the whole seems
crucially important.”
Higgins
goes on to say that pattern/concrete poetry has no single origin. And it is easy to speculate that the
reflexive act of making marks led to a foregrounding the visual elements of the
grapheme in its unfolding or recording.
Calling attention to itself and aware of its own motion – the record of
the grapheme in motion becomes a sort of proprioceptive trace/gesture, a
constructive practice and extension of the body.
Vispo’s Dog Ate My Homework
1.
This convergence of literary and visual impulses has something to do with the
problems in the reception of pattern poetry.
Rather than creating singularities that diverge and are somehow beyond
comprehension, the image unified with its content was dismissed as a visual pun
– a naïve version of reality, simply not complex or serious enough to tackle
enlightened notions of the “truth” that art was supposed to express.
2.
As Higgins writes of pattern poetry: “it was never the predominant mode and…
there were violent attacks upon it in each age in which it occurred; since the
history of any poetry is always to some extent the history of responses to it,
the antagonism which it aroused continued great during the colonial era, so
that it fell into disrepute in one literature after another, eventually, by the
19th century, surviving only in comic, folk, or popular verse.”
3.
Ben Jonson dismissed it as “a pair of scissors and a combe in verse.” Montaigne claimed the pattern poem’s means of
composition displayed subtleties which are “frivolous and vain.” Perhaps Montaigne's objection was that it
seems to turn poetry into a mere parlor game.
Divorced from the pursuit of truth, he disparages it as novelty, a mere
amusement. Visual puns generate mere
iconic effects that don’t obligate us to think, and that violate the ideals of
platonic form.
4.
Another explanation for the poor reception is that visual and/or pattern poetry
is non-modern and violates a sense of decorum or the tradition that privileges
the purity of art forms.
5.
“Thus the visual poem claims to abolish playfully the oldest oppositions of our
alphabetic civilization: showing and naming; representing and telling;
reproducing and articulating; imitating and signifying; looking and reading.” -Michel
Foucault
6.
Visual poetry is a constructive practice, it both shows and names, both
represents and tells, etc. Visual poetry
stands outside these oppositions – they are irrelevant to its concerns.
7.
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno
Latour describes a world full of hybrid combinations of social and natural
objects & subjects. Humans were
never divorced from nature. Modernity
attempts to purify the human and the natural realms, privileging the human
realm, including language. “The
proliferation of quasi-objects [viz. the industrial revolution] was… greeted by
three different strategies:” first, the ever-increasing separation between the
poles of nature and that of society; second, the autonomization of language or
meaning; third, the deconstruction of metaphysics. [my
paraphrase]
8.
Elias Canetti on the dangers of mixing mediums: “the separate arts should live
in the most chaste co-habitation.” It’s
as if the non-platonic intercourse between the word and the image would close
up the space in which the reader can breathe.
Welcome to the Kama Sutra school of interconnection.
9.
As Whitehead said: “life lurks in the interstices…” The reader constitutes herself in the
gaps. But there's no reason to think
that visual poems necessarily clog these interstices – even when they do aim at
unity. The reader’s faculties are not
harmonized by an encounter with a visual poem.
10.
The argument may really be about maximizing intensity and affect. That a unified or closed hybrid object lacks
allure. To unify is a kind of
destruction of possibility.
11.
Since the world isn’t pure chaos, then there must be some pre-established harmony,
even if that’s just a common ground for disagreement.
12.
Friction is an adventure. The
autobiography of a stone. But there are
no marriageable metaphors in a world of physical comedy.
13.
“There is no science of the beautiful, but only critique.” -Kant
14.
The divorce of art and science, where science becomes fixated on efficient
causes. But don’t art and science need
each other? Tools with which to think
and make marks.
15.
Poetry and other art forms are attached to human interests – they’re attempts
to make alluring artifacts. On the other
hand, science demands answers that can be detached from human interest; science
wants to eliminate artifacts of subjectivity (i.e., all traces of subjectivity)
from the experimental apparatus. Science
wants to find reliable facts, to discover or explain mysteries of nature.
16.
This said, art and poetry have always deployed technology or tools – much like
science, e.g., the alphabet, the hand.
And science can never completely purify itself of the human
artifact. The experimental apparatus
also attempts to uncover alluring facts, which might be precisely those facts
that seem to have an alluring lack of human artifact.
17.
The real source of this apparent contradiction may be the notion of human interest. The hybrid objects or assemblages produced by
visual poets are facts, regardless of how alluring they are to others. Perhaps it's a question of what’s reliable
(recognition, emotion) versus what allures (or what generates thinking,
affect)?
18.
“...tools for thinking are then the ones that address and actualize this power
of the situation, that make it a matter of concern, in other words, make us
think and not recognize. When we deal
with practices, recognition would lead to the question-- why should we take
practices seriously as we know very well that they are in the process of being
destroyed by Capitalism? This is their
'sameness', indeed, the only difference being between the already destroyed one
and the still-surviving ones. The
ecology of practices is a non-neutral tool as it entails the decisions never to
accept Capitalist destruction as freeing the ground for anything but Capitalism
itself.” -Isabelle Stengers
Posts
