visual poetry, today

January 20, 2009 5:53 PM

Visual Poetry Today collects various forms of visual poetry, today. It includes Peter Ciccariello, who wraps text around computer-modeled landscapes.

Here's more from Derek Beaulieu, including his "flattening" of Edward Abbot's Flatland, and links from his site to a pointed, if not savage, back-and-forth about an anthology he co-edited.

More from Joel Lipman.

See also the classics thread at the vispoets discussion board, these two related posts from Katallus, and The New Post-literate, a blog about asemic writing.

posted by mediareport (4 comments total)

You know, I'm usually the sort that's trying to stretch the poetry big-tent wider, and the linked material is beautiful, but in the end I don't see how calling it poetry is any different than calling this a hamburger.
posted by regicide is good for you at 6:06 PM on January 20, 2009

I kind of agree with you, regicide, and if you read the descriptions at the first collection a lot of the artists themselves use other terminology for what they do.

Also, I meant to link to this awesome list of female visual poets from the comments at the Poetry mag site. Lots of great stuff there; just clicking randomly got me to Suzan Sari's wonderful stuff, e.g.
posted by mediareport at 6:37 PM on January 20, 2009

A tent is a good analogy actually, because it doesn't have walls. I don't understand your objection to stretching the poetry-tent. The wider the tent is, the more room we have to move around. Personally, I prefer a tent large enough that multiple conversations can take place. I hear some talk in the corner over there about stretching the poetry-tent out towards that nearby tent, the art-tent. I wonder what they talk about over there? Imagine if the two tents stretched so close together that we could hear what they were talking about. Or if the tents overlapped even, so we could move freely from one to the other. We wouldn't even have to walk out in the rain!

Hey, they're having a barbeque over there! I think there are hamburgers!
posted by oulipian at 7:33 PM on January 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

oulipian, great analogy.

I'm down with that, as long as we don't mess with the structural security of the poles (meaning, rhyme, meter, form) that keep the whole thing from collapsing into a jumble of burlap, cheap booze and mud (literally this happened to me at an AWP conference once so don't say I didn't warn you).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:11 PM on January 21, 2009