Visual and Digital Poetry, Week 3

VISUAL POETRY - WEEK THREE

How does concrete poetry develop in digital media? What is its intention? What is the meaning behind it? Does it aim to free the work from its representational function towards the “purely visual”? And how should one approach it?

–Roberto Simanowski

READINGS

A visual poem may be defined simply as a poem composed or designed to be consciously seen. The modern visual poem is generally composed with disassembled language material. This stuff of language includes word, text, note, code, petroglyph, letter, phonic character, type, cipher, symbol, pictograph, sentence, number, hieroglyph, rhythm, iconograph, grammar, cluster, stroke, ideogram, density, pattern, diagram, logogram, accent, line, color, measure, etc. Today’s minimalist visual poet, or the post World War Two term, concrete poet, generally composes with fissioned language material to create new and free particles, and/or sonic patterns, clusters, densities, and/or textures. The visual poet composes with these freed particles and generally weds or fuses them to one or more art forms. By doing so, by crossing art form boundaries, the visual poet composes in a field of multimedia or borderblur or intermedia.

-Karl Kempton: VISUAL POETRY: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions