Why Write
Visual Poetry When So Few Readers Read It?
How many ways can I
approach that question? Is one answer better than another, touching more truth
than any other? No one way to approach, to answer, to know, to write, but I
have to start somewhere:
Do I Stretch printed language to its full face the
question with my tongue lashing out? I wouldn’t be able to scratch the surface.
I don’t have a barbed tongue, nor do my poems.
Do I run at the question headfirst then, hands clenched, arms swinging,
or hands and arms open? The reader frustrates me, yes, yet I haven’t forgotten
the power of a good embrace. There aren’t many better bridges connecting us.
That gentle contact might get me Visible language somewhere answering such a
hard question.
Do I approach the question on my knees, putting it off guard just before
I kick it in the groin? That hurts, I know; maybe I’ll just trip it up and try
to tickle out an answer. I’ve wrestled enough with it, or have I?
Do I hold back, suave, invisible cigarette cupped in my hand, waiting for
the answer to come to me? I’ve been waiting for twenty years. Since 1981-82 at
Miekal And and Liz Was’ boundary-pushing arthouse in Madison,
I’ve been hammering myself for an answer. I know I’m not alone believing visual
poetry
the
eye’s
tongue
is worth reading and worthy of more readers than those who closely read
the poets in the first two volumes of this anthology. That’s part of an answer:
an audience, even if small.
Do I turn my back, my giving up/giving in the only answer I can offer?
When we’re writing, we all turn our backs or else we wouldn’t get any work
done. But in this case the work itself cannot answer the question, as much as I
would like it to do the talking.
Is the question potential impossible to answer?
I’ll ask another: Why can’t the poetry not out of the throat yet full of
force, the reader, and the act of seeing cohabitate?
The dialectic is short-circuited. From my meter readings, and the meter
readings of thousands of others throughout the world, visual poetry has the
power. I don’t have to troubleshoot there. Yet all too often the charge of the
poetry does not cross over to the reader. She looks, I presume, but she doesn’t
know what she looks at. What wires are crossed, disconnected, or missing in the
act of seeing, the interaction of perceived and perceiver, poem and reader?
The poems register on
the retina. I’ve talked with hundreds of readers, young and old, experienced
and inexperienced readers of poetry, who can Take the lang
out of uage describe what they are looking at in SCORE or other
magazines publishing visual poetry– shapes of words and letters, words drawn,
shredded, photographed, collaged, whelped in innumerable ways on the previously
predictable two-dimensional page. These readers can also testify to the
disruption of their reading habits, and this makes many uncomfortable.
I remember that discomfort, too. I had thumbed through Emmett Williams’ An
Anthology of Concrete Poetry in libraries and used bookstores on Berkeley’s
Shattuck and Telegraph Avenue
on innumerable occasions. But the stuff didn’t get beyond the surface of my
eye. not from the gut yet with courage I thought it was technique
without tectonics. I couldn’t see, couldn’t listen.
My entre came in 1981 through the work of other paradigm-shifting poets.
Ron Silliman’s Ketjak and Tjanting shook up my understanding,
shifting the fulcrum of form from whole to part, expanding what I accepted as
content fitting for poetry. Clark Coolidge, Larry Eigner, and Robert Grenier
showed me the highly-charged, hard-packed poetry in words and phrases, in
particles of words, in the blank space Stretch the
word s t
r e t
c h on
the page. When I re-encountered Aram
Saroyan’s work in the Williams’ anthology, I was ready: the work penetrated me,
and I was electrified by Claus Bremer, Ernst Jandl, Seiichi Niikuni (oh how I
love thee, Seiichi), Hansjorg Mayer, master of the font, and a dozen other
poets from around the world.
Synergy quickly followed: Bill DiMichele, Laurie Schneider, Miekal And
and I created and shared a poetry tongueless but not voiceless that seemed
different from what we knew of concrete poetry. Alphabetic text was subsumed by
other visual elements (in some poems there was no recognizable “text”
whatsoever). We created this work for ourselves, knew no magazine that would
publish it (not Soup, as eclectic and
adventurous as it was, not This,
defining itself narrowly, or Hills … ). In fact, we didn’t even try.
SCORE was born to fill a gap, its first issue bringing out a selection of the
work we had been sharing. Before DiMichele, Schneider, and I knew it, without
thinking much about running a magazine, we had one: four issues in a year and a
half.
When we sent the first issue out, we discovered we were not alone. We
found out that there was a contemporary audience for concrete poetry. One
magazine in particular, Karl Kempton’s Kaldron, printing some of the
most vivid visual poetry from not only the United States but from around the
world, invited us into the bigger world of a poetry until it
is recognizable in a totally unexpected dimension that soon was called
visual poetry. This international community, something larger than self, this
artform that transcends boundaries, mental and political, provided the energy
for much of the writing I did in the 1980s and 90s. I had found a teeming,
thriving world on a path I did not know I was following. It took me to where I
did not know I wanted to go, to spaces on the page I did not imagine existed.
Do other readers want to find such paths, get off into the unknown brush,
the initially unidentifiable flora and fauna Visible language of
contemporary poetry? I’m skeptical. There are far fewer intrepid readers than
there are readers of poetry. There are far fewer intrepid readers of visual
poetry than there are readers of poetry. Diminishing returns? Does the size of
your audience matter or is it what you do with it?
If a reader doesn’t have the grounding to decode visual poetry, do visual
poets have to provide the grounding? from the
back of my eyes to the front of yours How can we ground potential
readers? This anthology can provide conduits for the power of
visual poetry. We’ve flipped the switch. The reader has to be the one to stick
her finger into the current. That, in the end, is my answer.
