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
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
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.
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