vispo

Cia Rinne

If there is one concern in my work, it is to reduce the form to the minimum necessary in order to visualize a thought or idea. Tomas Schmit put it like this: “What you can say with a sculpture you do not need to build as architecture, what you can do with a drawing you do not need to search in image, and what you can clear up on a piece of paper does not need to become a huge drawing; and what you can make up in your mind does not even need any piece of paper.”[1] This is something I can definitely relate to.

Antología poesía visual

Five Chilean visual poets

Visual poetry is an odd egg: it never seems to extinguish. It continues at the periphery, way back in the corner of our literary eye. Possibly surprising is that many poets around the world have a thriving fascination with text as visual material. Perhaps vispoets stare at words longer than most, but their work is enmeshed in the design elements found in the alphabet and in symbols generally.

Page, don't cage me

The visual poetry of Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse (in) between page and screen.

reading from Between Page and Screen
reading from Between Page and Screen

Dear Reader, open the pages of Between Page and Screen. Nothing but elegantly simple AR (augmented reality) codes. But then you point your browser (and here, Reader, I think of you, too, as browser) at the book’s website and hold the book within range of your computer’s webcam.

Where is the text? The text is a (g)host.

In Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen, the text literally hovers between page and screen. But of course, this, too, isn’t quite true. It only appears to appear in the virtual air between the reader and the website.

Squaring the vowels

On the visual poetry of Judith Copithorne

Square Vowels by Judith Copithorne
Square Vowels

A reading journal: 

Letterforms turned to smoke or swirl. Letters become flame. Fire. Perhaps the almost image of a face?

Vowels: a hoop, an O. The water-shimmer of another O, like a tree reflected in a  lake. Perhaps a Hebraic glyph.

Blue flame in the centre. An O, a droplet, a throat, a thought cave. The rippling of water is the flicker of fire. An O and an O and an O: round vowels enclosed in this squared frame.

Eye plus eye equals H

Temporal Flux in the visual poetry of Karl Jirgens

Heraclitus by Karl Jirgens
Heraclitus

OK, let’s keep this moving. I want to discuss the traditions of visual poetry with Karl Jirgens as well as his own work, and his poem, Heraclitus, seems a perfect place to start. Everything flows. 

What is here? How should we read? Let’s start from the top.

I + I = H

Visually, two I’s joined together with a plus sign become an H. The ‘I,’ the subjective self, becomes H, the Heraclitean changeable self. I is another: I is a river and the self is the ever-flowing water. Or vice versa: The self is a river and “I” i-dentifies with the flow. “I me a river.” Eau-de-vie.

But language shifts. Signs shift. The flow of the name: Heraclitus and the French form of this Greek, Heraclite, skid through time, down the page, become liquid: rivers which are both I’s (I-lands) and the vertical arms of H. The H which begins Heraclitus. The movement of names Mesmer I’s our two eyes. Motion on the page is time. Time is a blur of objects, names, or signs.

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