Visual / Poetry (Day 1) -- An essay on my title

by guest blogger Karen Schiff            

Warm greetings, “bestampo” blog readers! This week, I’ll be posting on the theme of “Visual / Poetry.” When I signed on to blog here, I declared my theme the way I make sketches: by riding an impulse, not by calculating a plan. The topic felt rich & confounding, & the words emerged without hesitation. So for this first post, I’d like to dig into my title a bit: what could “Visual / Poetry” be? How do I mean this phrase; what will I be writing about this week; & what can this pairing of words suggest about poetry itself, & about artwork?

First: the punctuation. My title sprang to mind complete with that virgule (slash) between “Visual” & “Poetry.” The virgule looks like a delineation (hey -- that word has a “line” in it!), a separation between visual & verbal.* Though neuroscientists say that we process visual & verbal input using different parts of the brain, people with head injuries do rewire (& I wonder how synaesthesia works). So I doubt that hard & fast separations are required. Anyway, I don’t want my virgule to create a thorough barrier between visual art & poetry...it could be more like a barrier reef. 

I think “text” is always already a kind of image: reading is a visual activity. (Line breaks and white spaces can make poetry especially visual...) There may be tensions or apparent incommensurabilities between visual & verbal modes, yet even these signal some assumed common ground against which the “gap” is measured. So I could also say that my virgule is a low tennis net over which the “Visual” & “Poetry” can play back & forth...& each can even sometimes leap into the other’s court. A net is not a wall: it’s porous & flexible. And a barrier reef is alive.

I’m not yet sure what all of this implies about artwork and poetry. The idea of jumping the net can create a context for the phenomena of poetry getting read in galleries, & artwork getting published in literary reviews. I’m jazzed to say that I hadn’t thought of the tennis net or the barrier reef before I started writing this! I’m also relieved to learn that my thinking on art & poetry has relaxed since the Spring, when I wrote an essay for Art Journal (“Connecting the Dots / Hijacking Typography”). There, I worried over the infiltration of poetry into the visual arts. I do still wonder if visual art offers something -- generative ambiguity? palpable immediacy? -- that verbal arts can’t touch, though perhaps on these measures, poetry is art’s nearest cousin among written genres. I’ll let all this percolate...

One other punctuation detail will tip my hand... In this blog, I’m using an ampersand instead of the word “and,” so I can trick myself into writing more casually. I use ampersands in e-mails & texts; I think blogs require a similarly off-handed rhetoric. But ampersands also serve to interrupt the flow of reading, by shifting into the visual: as you move along reading the letters of the printed alphabet, you suddenly encounter a tiny drawing. This drawing is in fact emblematic of the abstract, visual quality of any letter: the alphabet is a series of drawings we have habituated ourselves to inhale as “verbal” text. Handwriting is especially drawing-like (and lovely!). I love the visual forms of ampersands: the ones in in Baskerville Italic & Caslon Italic have florid & fanciful curlicues, while the ones in Garamond Italic & Hoefler Italic are surprising & squat. 

                            

 

 

 

By now, it should be clear that my theme of “Visual / Poetry” will not bring a week of concrete poems. Nor will I hold forth on Imagism, or ekphrasis, or poems about art. (The latest exploration of that theme that I know of is Raphael Rubinstein’s compendium, "The Active Voice: 12 Poems on Contemporary Art," in the summer issue of Art in America.) Further, I don't plan to find "poetic"-looking art (um, what would that be?), or art reviews written by poets (though I love Barry Schwabsky's Artforum article on Ann Pibal -- he grapples with her cryptic titles, & his conclusion about abstraction made me want to stand up & cheer).

Instead, I’ll write about language-related visual art that I’ve seen recently, including some exhibitions by poets. (I think my definition of "visual / poetry" is different from the "visual poetry" in the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry. Though I couldn't find a definition on their website, watching their documentary "Concrete!" I heard Marvin say that artwork related to language is not concrete or visual poetry, but it was simply artwork with language in it.) I'll explore some ideas that relate to "Articulate Anti-Articulations: Illegible Handwriting & the Artist's Inscrutable 'Pulse'" (a presentation I'm due to make next month, at the "Art = Text = Art" exhibition at SUNY/Buffalo). And I may write about some of my artwork that involves language, in preparation for this weekend's Gowanus Open Studios, on Saturday & Sunday afternoons (you're all invited!). 

Also, I must say: the phrase “visual / poetry” keeps making me think of the lyric, "poetry in motion," from the 1982 hit, “She Blinded Me With Science.” (In Dolby's song, “poetry” is tied to intense moments of seductiveness, but a similarly themed 1960s hit called “Poetry In Motion” figures poetry as the beloved’s body altogether: even ordinary movements could be alluring.) Why on earth did this phrase -- or rather, this snippet of music -- become such an earworm? I think it’s because it argues for the physicality of poetry. And that sense of physicality relates very closely to the making of art. 

It turns out that the word “poetry” derives from the Greek word poeiein, meaning “to make” or “to create” -- the OED even says the Greek origin of “poem” is a word meaning a “thing made or created” (my emphasis). Maybe this is old news to poets. But I found it suggestive for my theme, because I think of artwork most often as a material, physical creation. Unlike “story,” which derives from “history” & therefore signals a timeline of events, “poetry” is a thing, an object outside of chronology. Webster’s also says that poeiein is somehow akin to the Sanskrit word cinoti, meaning “he heaps up.” A “heap” feels off-handed, & maybe even caused by gravity; this association implies that the conglomeration of poetry can be provisional, impulsive, & a bit lumpy. Words might fall together in ways that feel magnetically, gravitationally necessary. (I'll stop here, before I get carried away with making too many unfounded generalizations about poetry, & about art for that matter...)

What happens if our sense of reading, or of writing, gets completely cut off from the physical senses? Or can it?

I look forward to seeing what the week brings! 

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* I’m not the only writer to look to punctuation for help on this subject. I’m sure I was partly channeling (& challenging?) W. J. T. Mitchell, who writes in his 1994 book, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation: "I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate "image/text" as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term "imagetext" designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. "Image-text," with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal" (page 89, note 9). I think the words "image" & "text" are tricky: a "text" can be visual as well as verbal, & visual art need not include any images as such. Still, I appreciate what Mitchell's trying to do, & I doubt I could come up with any non-slippery words.

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