Visual and Digital Poetry, Week Five

VISUAL POETRY - WEEK FIVE

As much as anything, the rise of modern visual poetry reflects a new awareness of the printed page. For various reasons recent criticism has stressed the physical dimension of the text, seeing its words as autonomous entities. According to Jacques Derrida the written word is an object in its own right, its different meaning detached and deferred indefinitely. Wolfgang Iser and others consider modern literature to be a series of self-conscious exercises design to engage us in the process of reading. For Iser the increase emphasis on reader participation marks the demise of the classical quest for the meaning of the text, the significance of which is located in our interaction with the words on the page.

What characterizes modern literary experience, then, is the reader’s attitude toward the printed page, the reader’s consciousness of its formal qualities. The same observation applies to the text’s attitude toward itself. In the twentieth century as never before, form call attention to itself; the text flaunts its means even as it pretends to ignore them. Words no longer are perceived as transparent signs, but assume the shape and destiny of objects. To be sure, the current interest in the phenomenology of the written word has its roots in observations by earlier authors. So too the concept of the page as visual statement has had an interesting and varied history. As early as 1864, Stéphane Mallarmé strove to “peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit” (“paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces”). This statement, which reveals the close affinity between his words and painting, was to culminate in a famous (if isolated) experiment with visual form 33 years later: Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). Describing the poem as a “simultaneous vision of the Page,” Mallarmé noted the visual impact of the white spaces and stressed their rhythmic function:

The white spaces indeed take on importance, are initially striking; ordinarily versification required them around like silence . . . I do not transgress this measure, only disperse it. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others.

Mallarmé’s concept of visual silence, which creates a privileges space for the text and its individual images, has been adopted by a wide variety of authors sine its appearance. Arguing that the blanks determine the type of reading the reader will perform on the text, Gérard Genette makes it the fundamental condition of poetry. Form him the poeticity of a given work, its presence and intensity, depend on the “margin of silence which isolates it in the middle of ordinary speech.”

-Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry

It Quacks Like a Duck

The classical inspiration for writing poetry is the humanist moment—the urge to communicate a classical ‘truth’ about the human experience—love, memory, heartbreak—through now familiar poetic diction.

Poetry, now, has become an indicator for “what looks like poetry”—if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be confessional humanism.

The poem as finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection (the poetry norm) underlines mass-culture and political sameness; it does little to question or confront how language itself defines the limitations of expression—both personal and critical.

Writers that emphasize the classical and humanist definitions of poetry without considering the work being done in alternative forms of writing do little to further the writing of poetry as they offer only what is most palatable to the most conservative of audiences.

The accommodationist official verse culture” of personal confession and reflection has been flattened into a sameness of subject, form and structure. In striving for universality it instead degenerates into an implicit support of sloganeering, advertising and suburban consumerism.

Neo-Conservative writing continuously underlines the relationship between power and language. To resist and undermine this commodification, poetry must become a “granitic, endemic loss”, for as Steve McCaffery stated, “language […] functions like money and speaks through us more than we actively produce within it.”

A number of contemporary writers distance themselves from the humanist trope by finding inspiration in found and manipulated texts. These texts allow the author to move writing out of its confines of the confessional, and into areas of language which are not typically seen as “literature.”

The concrete poetry which I endorse—and which stylistically is of most influence on my own work—is a poetic without direct one-to-one signification.

It is rhizomatic in composition, pointing both to and away from multiple shifting clouds of meanings and construction, where writing “has nothing to do with signifying […] it has to do with surveying [and] mapping” (Deleuze and Guattari 7).

A rhizome is a non-centered, supportive system—an “antigeneology” resistant to the type of the modernist situating within a historical framework to which concrete poetry is so often subjected.

Instead of a single, arborescent historical and critical framework, rhizomatic writing is “a map not a tracing”; and as a map it has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the ‘same’.

The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged ‘competence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 12).

The writing I foreground in these “multiple entryways” is that which focuses on excess—the leftovers, the refuse, the waste.

Writing which overflows the container of the hegemony.

Concrete poetry, as Steve McCaffery argues, embodies an “interplay of forces and intensities, both through and yet quite frequently despite, language” in a flow of “non-verbal energy.”

This flow, McCaffery argues, is composed of “forces oppositionally related to the signifying graphism of writing” which struggle against the “constraint mechanisms of grammar.”

I believe that this movement rejects the “valorization of the representational” in favor of an economic interplay of meaning and eruption.

http://traumawien.at/stuff/texts/Beaulieu%E2%80%93Derek_Seen%E2%80%93of%E2%80%93the%E2%80%93Crime.pdf