How do we define Visual Poetry (and letter-inspired art) for this exhibition?

Phillip John Usher 2004

Visual Poetry ('Vis-Po' for short) can be defined for the purposes of this exhibit (many other definitions certainly exist) as any form of artistic creation that uses language as its raw material, i.e. words, letters, punctuation marks, etc. This can mean anything from a calligrame by Apollinaire (who, for example, used the words of his poem to literally draw a dove and a fountain), through the 1950s concrete poetry by Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, to a series of pictures each representing a different vowel in a playful and experimental way-as realized by the Spanish artist J. M. Calleja, who makes each letter into cuerpo imaginado (*). Our understanding of visual poetry means that words and letters become plastic; they are (perhaps) also signifiers, but they are first and foremost objects: they "are" before they "mean," suggesting they take on a life of their own. And yet words and letters never totally escape their linguistic sounds and meanings-hence the games our mind plays when we view visual poetry, caught-as it is-between different ways of viewing. It's a bifurcated road: should I read, or should I see? How do letters and words get in the way? How do they confuse (in the strongest sense) the image? The exhibit defines the terms widely and is purposefully fragmentary, aiming to open the stage to as many different interpretations of visual poetry and letter-inspired art (an undefined extension of the former).

Visual poetry has a long history, but it always feels astonishingly contemporary. The Early Modern period, for example, is strewn with examples of visual poetry, from the word-play of the French Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Georges Chastellain, Jean Molinet, Pierre Michault) to the concrete poetry of George Herbert (the following illustration shows his famous poem "Easter Wings").

George Herbert, Easter Wings / The Temple (1633) (**)

Visual poetry is all around us: on cereal packets, advertisments, book covers... When the printing press was first introduced, words became objects more than ever before.(***) With the omnipresent graphic design of our modern consumer society, the use of logos, typefaces, fancy websites, Power Point presentations at every level of business and academia (Arthur Miller's travelling salesman would now have a laptop and a laser pointer; the start of Flaubert's Sentimental Education would show a schoolboy sat under a video projector). It is difficulty to step outside the verbal and image noise... Unless we step deeper into it... which is what visual artists hopefully help us to achieve!

Visual poetry, letter-inspried art, concrete poetry are all terms that are re-defined by each artist. This short attempt at glossing the terms, then, concludes with these words: "View the exhibition and let the artists answer the question!"

. . .

(*) "El cuerpo imaginado de las vocales de J. M. Calleja" in: Annetna Nepo Bulletin 4 (Nov 2002).

(**) From "Material Poetry of the Renaissance/ The Renaissance of Material Poetry", The Harvard Libaray Bulletin, Ed. Roland Greene, Summer 1992, Vol. 3, No. 2. (Image taken from on-line version: click here).

(***) See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy.

For an interesting review of concrete poetry, see: Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View