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.
Trevor Joyce is an Irish poet whose innovation and creativity constitutes a sustained challenge to the conventions of poetry and reading in Ireland and abroad. Writing and publishing in Ireland since 1967, Joyce has seventeen collections of poetry and is cofounder and coeditor of New Writers’ Press.
Hotel Negresco, 2010, collage, 6 ¼ x 5 ½ inches, by John Ashbery. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
While painting occupies a primary place in John Ashbery’s sense of the arts, his poems also have to do with the possibilities he has gleaned from individual artists in nearly every medium.
