21 - Visual Poetics

Summary

With notable exceptions, poetry as practiced and theorized by Anglophone poets before the twentieth century draws its analogies from music and develops from structures of sound and sequence – often through the metaphor of voice. The metaphors of sound pervading poetic practice are challenged in the twentieth century with the advent of print technologies that make typography and the space of the page newly available as compositional tools. American poets begin to cross the borders of medium and genre as never before, incorporating the visual into poetry and in many cases conceiving of poetry as itself a visually-based art.

For women poets, the stakes are high. If we consider the gendered reception of modern poetry, as well as theories of female spectatorship, a complex and layered counter-history emerges. Often relegated to the sidelines in the avant-garde coteries that championed visual approaches to poetry, women writers explore not only formal innovations but also specifically feminist possibilities of a visually-oriented poetics. In her call for a poetics to defy “the institution of gendered poetry and the male-gendered poetic voice” by writing “otherhow,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis invokes visuality as a metaphor – and a practice – of transgression, urging women to write “through the page, unframed … from edge to edge.” Many women poets since the early twentieth century have created visual compositions precisely to question the gendered politics of the history of poetry, material culture, and reading or performance.

But what is visual poetics? The visual in – or as – poetry can be considered in numerous ways. Links between poetry and visual art may take the form of ekphrasis – writing about an existing artwork. Likewise, illustration of poetic texts is as old as writing itself. Imagism initiated a preoccupation that informs virtually all of twentieth-century American poetry, insisting on the importance of concrete (most often visual) language. Further, collaboration between artists and poets supplies another lens through which to “see” the visual in relation to poetry. Still, these approaches often retain the traditional split between visual imagery on the one hand and symbolic language on the other: we assume that all language (printed, digitized, or spoken) is not a visual medium but a symbolic order, whose content references meaning rather than embodying it.