chapter 2 1

Visual PoeticsElisabeth A Frost

With notable exceptions poetry as practiced and theorized by Anglophonepoets before the twentieth century draws its analogies from music anddevelops from structures of sound and sequence ndash often through themetaphor of voice The metaphors of sound pervading poetic practiceare challenged in the twentieth century with the advent of print technol-ogies that make typography and the space of the page newly available ascompositional tools American poets begin to cross the borders of mediumand genre as never before incorporating the visual into poetry and in manycases conceiving of poetry as itself a visually-based artFor women poets the stakes are high If we consider the gendered

reception of modern poetry as well as theories of female spectatorshipa complex and layered counter-history emerges Often relegated to thesidelines in the avant-garde coteries that championed visual approaches topoetry women writers explore not only formal innovations but alsospecifically feminist possibilities of a visually-oriented poetics In her callfor a poetics to defy ldquothe institution of gendered poetry and the male-gendered poetic voicerdquo by writing ldquootherhowrdquo Rachel Blau DuPlessisinvokes visuality as a metaphor ndash and a practice ndash of transgression urgingwomen to write ldquothrough the page unframed from edge to edgerdquo1

Many women poets since the early twentieth century have created visualcompositions precisely to question the gendered politics of the history ofpoetry material culture and reading or performanceBut what is visual poetics The visual in ndash or as ndash poetry can be

considered in numerous ways Links between poetry and visual art maytake the form of ekphrasis ndash writing about an existing artwork Likewiseillustration of poetic texts is as old as writing itself Imagism initiateda preoccupation that informs virtually all of twentieth-century Americanpoetry insisting on the importance of concrete (most often visual) lan-guage Further collaboration between artists and poets supplies anotherlens through which to ldquoseerdquo the visual in relation to poetry Still these

339

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approaches often retain the traditional split between visual imagery on theone hand and symbolic language on the other we assume that all language(printed digitized or spoken) is not a visual medium but a symbolic orderwhose content references meaning rather than embodying it Accordinglystudies of ekphrastic poetry for example tend to privilege theme andcontent rather than the visual qualities of the text itselfBy contrast I will define visual poetics as writing that explores the

materiality of word page or screen Combining text with image andorhighlighting the materiality of the medium visual poetics privileges acts ofseeing in acts of reading As Johanna Drucker observes ldquoAll writing has thecapacity to be both looked at and read to be present as material and tofunction as the sign of an absent meaningrdquo2 In wide-ranging ways allvisual poetics stems from this understanding of materiality thoughapproaches vary widely and are often divided into ldquoexpressivistrdquo andldquoconstructivistrdquo modes The former makes expression primary exploredthrough open form the second denotes a focus on the object status of thetext and the constructed nature of its language andor visual elementsoften involving pre-determined forms Both orientations have their originsin modernism which serves as a harbinger of myriad later examples thatresist both voice-based lyric utterance and narrative form These modesinclude composition by field concrete poetry the prismatic page theperformance page and the photo-text or other hybrid visual genresFrom Imagism to new media the twentieth century evinces a profoundvisual turn in American poetry

Modernism Visuality and Gender

Both material and aesthetic factors contribute to a revolution in theproduction of texts in the early twentieth century The vers libre allowedfor new forms since lineation was no longer defined by meter poeticscould be based on elements other than sound At the same time thetypewriter allowed anyone to design a page on a portable machine creatingwhatMichael Davidson calls ldquoa new visual aestheticmdashthe word as image orobjectrdquo3 Steacutephane Mallarmeacute describing Un coup de deacutes (1897) explainsthat the graphic design of his text corresponds to both an image on the pageand a score for reading At roughly the same time Cubism offered a newway of seeing via fragmentation and juxtaposition ndash collage Reconceivingwords as material objects Apollinairersquos ldquocalligrammesrdquo ndash poems designedin abstract or mimetic shapes ndash epitomize this turn to the visual inexperiments with page and typography taken up by numerous later

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poets from ee cummings to the New Conceptualists But howeverliberating these visual transformations are accompanied by anxiety aboutldquofeminizationrdquo Ezra Poundrsquos and Wyndham Lewisrsquos insistent masculin-ism signaled their rejection of a ldquofemininerdquo aesthetics in favor of the hard ndashthe chiseled4 This reaction against the ldquosoftrdquo and decadent much like thepervasive recourse to a technological sublime can be read as genderedattacks typifying an effort to master what they perceived as a dangerouslyopen new poeticsIn ambivalent relation to this ideology a number of women poets

controvert male modernistsrsquo gendered apprehensions Their work sets thestage for the dramatic visual turn of the postwar years Mina Loyrsquos idiosyn-cratic uses of white space diacritical marks and changes of scale in herpoems and manifestos make for a dynamic and embodied page thateffectively regenders Futurist aesthetics in an expressivist fieldBy contrast Marianne Moore used syllabics to develop the stanza ascompositional unit in a constructivist verbalvisual architectureInflecting collage to discursive ends Moore developed as well an aestheticsof citation in which quotation marks signify polyvocality through theseunsounded diacritical marks Moore indicates her intertextuality practi-cing appropriation long before it became commonplace Gertrude SteinrsquosTender Buttons adapts Cubist disruptions to fracture ways of seeing thatanticipate later experiments with the prismatic Steinrsquos scopophilia is inmany ways the inverse of the mixed-media works of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven which perform a boldly erotic verbalvisual embodimentprefiguring the performance page of the 1960sOf great importance to later womenrsquos visual poetics HD theorizes

visuality in direct resistance to a masculinized heroic HDrsquos poetics isoften studied in terms of its musicality But even in her earliest lyricswhich Pound argued epitomized Imagism HD shows both a visual andan aural intent we can see not just hear in her spare lines a resistance tomasculine rhetoric a sharp-hewn lyric mode evident in later works fromLorine Niedecker ndash whose lyrics DuPlessis describes as ldquoa formal answer toBignessrdquo5 ndash to Rae Armantrout This minimal lyric mode with its gen-dered implications is coupled with the visionary The radical Notes onThought and Vision (1919) initiated a life-long exploration of the hiero-glyph of hermetic traditions of an embodied spirituality and of palimp-sest (a layering of texts that results from partial erasure and reuse of anexisting manuscript page) These are all evident in the symbolic approachin Trilogy in which words are palimpsests and short lyric units ndash oftenusing puns and other verbalvisual play ndash reveal that etymology is a layering

Visual Poetics 341

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of history and consciousness These visualaural puns move small momentsof linguistic hieroglyphs into lyric constellations HDrsquos fascination withfilm evidences her belief in the visionary apparent in her resistance to theldquotalkiesrdquo with their naturalistic intrusion of sound Such experimentspresage the flourishing of visual poetics after World War II

Compositions by Field

Illustrating a pervasive visual turn Kathleen Fraser offers a taxonomy ofcontemporary womenrsquos poetics that depart from ldquothe closed airless con-tainers of the well-behaved poemrdquo all deriving in some way from CharlesOlsonrsquos ldquocomposition by fieldrdquo announced in the manifesto ldquoProjectiveVerserdquo (1950) Olson described the new ldquoOPEN verserdquo as a natural pro-gression from the modernistsrsquo ldquorevolution of the ear the trocheersquosheaverdquo (386) The page is not just an expressive but a corporeal space inwhich type can ldquoindicate exactly the breath the pauses which [thepoet] intendsrdquo (393) In many cases transformative Olson is a source ofambivalence for women poets DuPlessis points to the gendered nature notonly of the (male) poetrsquos ldquolistening appendagerdquo and his ldquoprojective actsrdquobut also Olsonrsquos documented ldquomasculinist investment in [womenrsquos] help-meet earsrdquo6 Fraser locates Olsonrsquos influence on women poets in theldquoconcept of page as canvas or screen on which to project fluxrdquo and tovalue ldquoirregularity counterpoint adjacency ambiguityrdquo7 Her taxonomyof ldquonew translations of formerly lsquounspeakablersquomaterialrdquo includes examplesof the grid ndash linked both to Robert Duncanrsquos ldquoword gridsrdquo and to thework of artist Agnes Martin ndash that function almost like ideograms hereFraser mentions Susan Howe Laura Moriarty Beverly Dahlen MeredithStricker and Dale Going8 She also describes ldquowork in which the absence ofreliable matter (as it represents meaning) is given visual bodyrdquo9 a pursuitseen in the work of Norma Cole and others Three poets are notable fortheir decades-long explorations of field composition DuPlessis adaptsthe PoundOlson long poem to feminist critique Fraser regenders thevisuality that Olson championed and Howe extends Olsonrsquos collagemethods into engagements with a gendered American historyDuPlessis has paid homage to Olson and to the Objectivists even as her

theoretical and poetic interventions have changed the field of feministcultural practice The visual effects in the early ldquoWritingrdquo alter both read-ing and seeing parallel texts occupy the same page space subverting theidea of sequence handwritten passages serve as traces of the body thatmade them and the previously taboo subject matter of the daily details of

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childcare and of embodied lived experience alter the genre of lyric (seeFigure 8) The serial form of ldquoWritingrdquo engendered the decades-longDrafts a vast integrated series of 114 linked poems that span multiplevolumes DuPlessis notes that Drafts began in an Italian notebook givenher by Fraser Here DuPlessis ldquolsquodrewrsquo or lsquodraftedrsquo words into the pagemaking a sketch pad of languagerdquo10 This visual impulse ultimately takesform in page-spaces that are at once analytical zones visual fields and sitesof lyric utterance in an open-ended feminist response to epic Like Olson

Figure 8 Page from ldquoWritingrdquo by Rachel Blau DuPlessisTabula Rosa Elmwood CT Potes amp Poets Press 1987 57 Copyright 1987 by

Rachel Blau DuPlessis Used with permission All rights reserved

Visual Poetics 343

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DuPlessis inscribes her pages with embodied language sonically andvisually layered and patterned but in a feminist riposte to Olsonrsquos larger-than-life Maximus DuPlessis structures Drafts around a metaphor ofparental nurturance and unconventional generation each poem in Draftstakes up material borrowed from an earlier poem in the sequence identi-fied as the ldquodonor draftrdquo This formal constraint exemplifies DuPlessisrsquoscomplex engagements with the cognitive and the corporeal the linguisticand the embodied visual in an extensive poetic and theoretical practice11

Like DuPlessis Fraser strives ldquoto invent a visual shape for onersquos interiorliferdquo to capture ldquo[t]rajectory and barrage as if to see it on a radar screentrapping and visualizing the private language still missing from publicrecordrdquo12 ldquoEtruscan Pagesrdquo (1993)13 for example employs a visual methodthat Fraser credits in part to HDrsquos ldquoinvitationrdquo to explore the unwrittenpage ldquothe layerings of old and new inscription were built from accretionsof literal archaeological remnant bound together into current pages oflanguage visual figure and event (present-time dreams and letters)rdquo14

Fraser pays homage to HDrsquos invocation in Trilogy of ldquothe blank pages of the unwritten volume of the newrdquo15 while distinguishing her ownldquolinguistic motion and visual notationrdquo from HDrsquos ldquolsquoair and crystalrsquordquolanguage16 In this way HD offers permission to claim the page withoutprogrammatic insistence Fraserrsquos verbal-visual collage works include seriesfor the wall and the page (some in collaboration) shaped poems (bothabstract and concrete as in WING) and typographic experiments withletters and phonemes Since the 1960s Fraser has tested the limits ofsymbolic language evoking visually speech fragments and ndash or as ndash theinarticulable17

The inarticulate is also a preoccupation for Susan Howe who offersoblique forms of witness combining archival research with collage methodsto explore silencing focusing often on a gendered American history that haserased womenrsquos and native peoplersquos voices At times Howersquos language is asspare on the page as HDrsquos Often though it is so thickly overlaid thatconventional reading becomes impossible typeset lines veer off at all anglesand are set over one another to create sharp-edged abstract shapes in whichindividual words may be unreadable In addition to long poems thatemploy citation and collage in painstaking visual arrangements Howehas written works that incorporate photographs notably The Midnight(2003) Her fascination with the intersections of poetry and the visual isevident as well in her long essay on the filmmaker Chris Marker SortingFacts or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013) which itself importsphotos creating a layered visual-verbal dialogue Since her beginnings as

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a visual artist Howe has developed a profoundly visual and aural page Shehas explored the materiality of both manuscript and print as in the earlyMy Emily Dickinson (1985) in which she framed Dickinson as an innova-tive poet who shaped her fascicles with minute attention to spacing and thepaper on which she wrote In Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987)and other long poems a historical narrative breaks into fragments recon-ceived as word grids Howersquos subsequent collages are more dramatic withwords or lines printed over one another to the point of illegibility ButHowersquos strategies are hardly chaotic or random One taxonomy identifiesher four predominant visual forms ballad-like two-line stanzas indentedtext exploded pages with sharp angles and overlaps and rectangular wordblocks18 Howe extends Olsonrsquos ldquobelief in typersquos exact placement as carrierof meaningrdquo19 consistently ldquoconcerned with gesture the mark of the handand the pen or pencil as an acoustic signal or chargerdquo20

Concretism

Like Olson the concrete poets of the 1950s and 1960s rejected NewCriticism and the personal lyric with its ldquorepetitious emotional contentrdquoto embrace ldquothe conviction that the old grammatical-syntactical structuresare no longer adequaterdquo21 But as Mary Ellen Solt remarks ldquothe concretepoet sees a need for moving farther away from grammar and syntax toa constellation of words with spatial syntax or to the ideogram than doesOlsonrdquo Rather than experiencing an embodied page the reader mustldquoperceive the poem as an objectrdquo22 In this respect the concretists lookback to Apollinaire and Mallarmeacute rather than Olsonrsquos expressivist fieldTwo anthologies of the late 1960s represent concretism as a global

phenomenon Soltrsquos Concrete Poetry A World View (1968) and EmmettWilliamsrsquos An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) Neither mentions theenormous gender disparity in the tables of contents InWilliamsrsquos 342-pagecollection of seventy-six poets from around the world Solt is the solewoman included (in addition two collaborative teams contain a womanpartner) In Soltrsquos anthology the representation is similar Her poetrythen was singular in the circles in which she moved ndash the male concretepoets whose work she championed often in the face of dismissal writing inPoetry David Rosenthal derided the concretists as either pursuinga mystical ldquowhite light of epiphanyrdquo or engaging in ldquoa tidy little jokerdquoand he dismissed Soltrsquos Flowers in Concrete as ldquoa mite preciousrdquo preferringIan Hamilton Finlay as more aware of ldquometaphysical possibilitiesrdquo (127)

Visual Poetics 345

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Rosenthalrsquos denigration may be explained by the gendered nature ofSoltrsquos experiments As AS Bessa notes Solt foundmaterial in her domesticlife as in Marriage-A Code Poem (1976) In Flowers in Concrete Soltldquoattempted to relate the word as object to the object to which it refers bystudying the law of growth of the flower and making a visual equivalentrdquoSoltrsquos ldquoForsythiardquo is iconic ndash taking the shape of the branches of the plantrising from a rectangular pot ndash but Solt also uses other modes of repre-sentation The letters of the base spell out ldquoFORSYTHIArdquo each letterleading vertically to words that spin off into branches to readldquoFORSYTHIA OUT RACE SPRINGrsquoS YELLOW TELEGRAMHOPE INSISTS ACTIONrdquo Within the potted forsythia lie multipleldquoactionsrdquo ndash the coming of spring the plantrsquos growth and the swiftertelegram with its Morse code whose dots and dashes appear as diacriticalmarks Soltrsquos ldquostillrdquo object then meditates not just on the association ofspring with ldquohoperdquo but on the perception of time speed and organic aswell as technological modes of communication in this way trackingcollisions between the natural and the mechanical (see Figure 9)Such is the case with another practitioner of visual poetics of the period

In a career that spanned over three decades May Swenson addressed thetensions among romantic aesthetic and scientific approaches to the nat-ural world Sometimes likened to ee cummings in its form and to Moorein its preoccupation with science Swensonrsquos work is consistently visual andfeminist Iconographs (1970) was Swensonrsquos most extended experimentwith visual poetics To distinguish her approach from that of the concre-tists Swenson explains that she wrote the text first and only then shaped itSwenson coins the term ldquoiconographrdquo as she notes the prefix ldquoicono-rdquodenotes ldquoimagerdquo or ldquolikenessrdquo terms less restrictive than ldquoiconrdquo Similarlyeven though the suffix ldquo-graphrdquo derives from the Greek for ldquocarverdquo theEnglish ldquographrdquo denotes a ldquolsquosystem of connections or interrelationsrsquordquo (86)fundamental to Swensonrsquos feminist practice In each ldquoiconographrdquospacing drawn and typeset lines and diacritical marks serve specific yetvarying functions Although some poems are shaped mimetically most usespace abstractly for rhythmic as well as visual effect In this sense we mightapply the term ldquoiconoclasticrdquo to Swensonrsquos work as it resists formalreductiveness in an effort ldquoTo make an existence in space as well as intime for the poemrdquo (86) Neither lyrics in organic form nor constructivistvisual ldquoobjectsrdquo Swensonrsquos iconographs embrace multiple aesthetics andundogmatic ways of seeingLike much of Swensonrsquos other work Iconographs undercuts gender

binaries The first two poems frequently anthologized focus on the self

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in relation The interlocutors of ldquoBleedingrdquo ndash the ldquokniferdquo and the ldquocutrdquo ndashpartake of a sado-masochistic dependency The poem moves down thepage with a gash of white space down its center Although the pairing ofbleeding flesh and phallic knife suggests feminine and masculine rolesneither is gendered allowing for a ldquoqueeringrdquo of the familiar binaryConversely with its vertical zig-zag of short lines interrupted by two longerhorizontal lines ldquoWomenrdquo states ironically that women should be ldquopedes-tals to menrdquo or ldquosweet oldfashioned painted rocking horsesrdquoldquojoyfully riddenrdquo (14) In a fascinating parallel to a poem of Soltrsquos calledldquoMoon Shot Sonnetrdquo Swensonrsquos ldquoOrbiter 5 Shows How Earth Looks fromthe Moonrdquo uses long lines to suggest shape ndash the ldquoshadow-image of lsquoa

Figure 9 ldquoForsythiardquo by Mary Ellen SoltFlowers in Concrete (Portfolio Edition) UbuWeb httpubucomhistoricalsoltsolt

_flowershtml Copyright 1969 by Mary Ellen Solt Used with permission of the Estate ofMary Ellen Solt All rights reserved

Visual Poetics 347

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woman in a square Kimonorsquordquo as supposedly seen in an early photo of theearth from the moon23 Swenson shows how intent we are to attribute notjust anthropomorphic qualities but also gender to all phenomenaIn the decades since Soltrsquos and Swensonrsquos experiments the impulse

behind concrete poetry can be seen in numerous forays into typographysome of which continue to cross the lines between Language Arts andpoetry Notably Joanna Drucker ndash writer visual artist and theorist ndash hasdefined the field of visual poetics and contributed in multiple hybrid formsthrough her explorations of book arts The concretist strain appears inother poets who experiment with typography sometimes in recurringforms that highlight the object status of language andor generate alternatemeans of signification Some reinvent symbolic language at the micro levelas in Alice Fultonrsquos ldquobride signrdquo (=) an indeterminate mark that plays withvisuality and gender More extensively Joan Retallack interrogates bothconcrete impulses and abstract shapings of the page in such works asAfterrimages (1995) and poets as various as Tina Darragh Julie PattonRosmarie Waldrop and Jena Osman explore concretism in their bodies ofwork

The Prismatic Page

Categorizing visual poetics Solt and others distinguish an expressivist form(as in field composition) from a constructivist pursuit of the ldquoobjectrdquo statusof a poem (as in the concretists) Yet another mode might be described aswhat DuPlessis calls a constellated or prismatic page one that engagesvision as such ndash often as embodied experience ndash and takes the page as a siteof projection of multiplied fractured andor plural ways of seeing Indeedthe term is invoked byMallarmeacute who remarks that his ldquovision of the Pagerdquoin Un coup de deacutes embodies ldquoprismatic subdivisions of the ideardquo24 Amongtwentieth-century women poets this prismatic approach is surreal oftenvisionary Not linked to one movement or time period it reveals ties to anynumber of aesthetic andor hermetic traditions DuPlessis makes a crucialconnection when delineating her notion of the prismatic citing Druckerrsquoscall for ldquoa lsquotheory of female pleasurersquo that can emerge lsquofrom productionrsquordquo25

DuPlessis asks what form such pleasure might take in ldquoa poetry of imagis-tic tonal linguistic and textual pleasure from a female subject entering the space of meaning of the symbolic and exerting her right tovision clairvoyance and agencyrdquo26 Such agency is evident in women poetswho claim the space of the page as a place of vision

348 elisabeth a frost

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As DuPlessis points out Barbara Guestrsquos spare short lyrics privilege notbreath but sight not the gestural but the fractured Guestrsquos interestsinclude not only seeing but also vision as a state of consciousness ndash bothof which can be read as gendered in Guestrsquos work which DuPlessis arguesldquomultiplies lsquothe gazersquo so that she as a female poet can claim some powerover the many dimensions of sight and seeingrdquo This ldquoprismaticrdquo orconstellated page partakes of a quality DuPlessis calls the ldquogenderedmarvelousrdquo27 In the witty minimalism of her short lyrics Guest consis-tently resists ldquomeaningrdquo in favor of a sculpted surface of languageIn similar fashion such later poets as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge practice

collage techniques to foster a surreality that multiplies rather than nar-rows perceptual fields The visionary as such ndash in both experiential andformal terms ndash is explored in the long poems of Alice Notley whose surrealnarratives engage with received mythology on the one hand and popculture on the other In a page space dense with text The Descent ofAlette which Notley calls a ldquofemale epicrdquo quotation marks register asunexplained visual markings which may delineate dialogue citation orshifts of consciousness each set of phrases in essence becomes a lensthrough which to see in relation to the surrounding fragmented phrasesaltogether contributing nonetheless to the forward thrust of a book-lengthnarrative In a very different mode in an exploration of womanist aes-thetics and politics Audre Lordersquos symbolic use of surreal imagery invokesWest African sacred traditions Over the course of her career Lorde createdpage spaces whose frequently unpunctuated lines leave syntax open toreaderly interpretation while using surreality to embody dream states ndashfor Lorde a sine qua non of feminist consciousnessUtterly distinctive in form Hannah Weiner was obsessed with both

vision as such and its fractured multiples on the page For theLANGUAGE group with whomWeiner was associated the visual becamea means of defying the dominance of speech-based lyric In the first issue ofthe journal This Robert Grenier famously wrote ldquoI HATE SPEECHrdquo ndasha declaration Ron Silliman later called ldquoa new moment in Americanwritingrdquo28 But Weiner was concerned not just with the visual but withvisions A conceptual artist who joined ranks with poets Weiner experi-enced visions recorded in what she called a ldquoclairvoyant journalrdquo In the1978 collection of four months of the pages recorded in 1974 Weinerprefaces the work ldquoI SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR onother people on the typewriter on the page These appear in the text inCAPITALS or italicsrdquo This code to readingseeing Clairvoyant Journalallows its polyphony to emerge text in explosive capitals or emphatic italics

Visual Poetics 349

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cohabits the page with a more linear narrative of the dayrsquos eventsThroughout lines and words overlap and read vertically or diagonallyIn this way Weiner renders her embodied experience of words as visualobjects ndash things both signifying and seen In this multi-voiced rendering ofrevelationsWeiner created a sui-generis visual poetics ndash a true hybrid of artand poetry29 (See Figure 10)The thick layered multi-texts of Weinerrsquos Clairvoyant Journal contrast

dramatically with prismatic pages whose minimalism suggests not multiplevoices but silence Engaging in forms of extreme fragmentation as acts ofwitness not to personal but to historical trauma Myung Mi Kimrsquos manybooks of poetry develop an aesthetic of brokenness in which syntacticfragments occupy pages striking for their overwhelming white space ndash aninvocation of silence and loss In Kimrsquos work the violent oppression soprevalent in Korean history (invoked in Under Flag in the figure of slainactivist Young Ok Kim for example) meets the irretrievable loss of lan-guage and identity in diaspora Kim turns to numerous visual devices toembody this trauma over-writing of typeset words idiosyncratic diacriti-cal marks non-signifying letters and phonemes and a mix of Koreancharacters with alphabetic words ndash all of these create a page whose spareshards of language mark a space of mourning and the inarticulate

Performance Page

The association between visual poetics and the resistance to narrativeprogression and metaphors of voice ndash both time-based and sound-basednotions ndash is complicated by the parallel modes of performance poeticswhich paradoxically relies as well on visual and textual pages analogous toscores for varied kinds of performance andor improvisation Writing in1997 Aldon Nielsen argued that the emphasis on orality in the reception ofblack poetry has obscured poetsrsquo attention to the materiality and appear-ance of poems on the page ndash what Nathaniel Mackey calls ldquographicityrdquo30

At the same time Nielson notes that the ldquospeech-basedrdquo poetry of theBlack Arts movement necessarily involved typographic and other visualelements Such now-forgotten poets as Julia Fields and Elouise Loftinwrote visual texts (employing drawings graphic elements and elaboratewordplay) that have never been anthologized or reprinted31 At the sametime both the better-known poetry of Sonia Sanchez and the under-recognized work of Jayne Cortez are appreciated mainly (if at all) fortheir aural elements rather than for complex methods of ldquoscoringrdquoa poem for reading while also creating a visually signifying page32

350 elisabeth a frost

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Figure 10 Page spread from Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner(n pag) Copyright 2014 by Bat Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trustUsed with permission Clairvoyant Journal 1974 Dijon France Bat Editions 2014

All rights reserved

Visual Poetics 351

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Figure 10 (Cont)

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In a wide range of aesthetics the visual rendering of speech-based poeticshas a lengthy history ranging from Black Arts poets such as Sanchezthrough the ldquochoreopoemsrdquo of Ntozake Shange to the interlingual writ-ings of Lorraine Sutton and Gloria AnzalduacuteaSanchezrsquos poems merge spoken word with visual statement Home

Coming (1969) and Love Poems (1973) were among the first to explorea black feminist consciousness ndash a stance difficult to take in the face ofthe Black Arts movementrsquos repressive views of women ThroughoutSanchezrsquos long career she has remained aesthetically open writingpoems in both traditional and radically experimental forms The visuallydisruptive pages of We a BaddDDD People (1970) indicate the primacy ofpitch tone and duration even as idiosyncratic uses of capitalization anddiacritical marks make it clear that words are sculpted material there is noexact way to ldquotranslaterdquo this visual creation Among other black womenwriters who began to publish in the 1970s a frequent use of a spareunadorned page ndash evident in the work of June Jordan and LucilleClifton ndash marked resistance to academic formalism but many of thesetechniques primarily emphasized transparency and voiceBy contrast and like Sanchezrsquos work Shangersquos for colored girls whorsquove

considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1977) combines page andperformance A series of twenty monologues staged with music to forma ldquochoreopoemrdquo for colored girls has a dual existence as theater piece andpoetic sequence The text draws attention to ldquothe field of material beingpresentedrdquo as Fraser puts it as ldquoShange uses the slash mark to temporarilyrein in her line catch her breathrdquo and move toward the next moment ofldquoenergetic truth-tellingrdquo33 Shange has continued to create black feministwork (especially novels and plays) in her often visual cross-genre bookspoems share pages with drawings reproductions of visual art andorphotographs34

Inspired by the Black Arts movement the Nuyorican poets of the 1970sand 1980s ndash overwhelmingly male ndash are celebrated for spoken word andperformance poetry but as in much Black Arts poetry the page was oftena field of composition as well Notably Suttonrsquos under-studied SAYcredLAYdy (1975) uses visual and verbal play to explore the problematics ofgender sex and nation in Puerto Ricansrsquo experience on the mainlandUnited States With its ironic allusion to ldquoLady Libertyrdquo colliding with theldquoraperdquo (a ldquolayrdquo) of Puerto Rican nationhood SAYcred LAYdy employsvisual devices ndash from capitalization to spacing to punning homophonicwordplay ndash to stage a ldquocunt-frontationrdquo with American cultural andpolitical imperialism Suttonrsquos code-switching between English and

Visual Poetics 353

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Spanish occupies a distinctly visual field in this way drawing attention tothe performance of race gender linguistic identity and classIn another part of the United States Anzalduacutea engages ChicanaLatina

identity in one of the most influential and innovative feminist works of thepostwar years the multi-genre (and poly-lingual) BorderlandsLa FronteraCombining cultural criticism theory memoir and poetry Anzalduacutea usesthe page ndash whether in prose or in visually-inflected poems ndash to ldquoperformrdquoborder mestiza and queer identities through code-switching that ismarked both linguistically and visually A landmark figure in feministborder and queer studies Anzalduacutea is still under-acknowledged for thepoetry that is the heart of Borderlands Here the book itself ndash more thaneither the line or the page ndash functions as its own complex visualverbal unitDense pages of analytic prose alternate with open breath-based poeticpages stanzas range across the page to suggest voicings and most sig-nificant continual quickly paced code-switching serves as both visualstatement and visualaural experienceIn parallel with theater and its contemporary offshoot performance art

the performative poetic page clearly engages questions of embodimentIn the Beat tradition the mantra-like chant forms of Anne Waldmanrsquospowerful lyrics take visualverbal form on a page designed to be experi-enced as corporeal phenomenaWith differing aesthetics and even politicalorientations feminist disability poetics and deaf performance poetrylikewise seeks a means of performing the corporeal through a visualverbalembodiment

Photo-Text and ldquoCinepoetryrdquo

Just as 1960s conceptual art imported language into its forms so poetrytoo began in this period to forge its own hybrid genres Even leaving asidecollaborations among women poets and artists over the past century ndashtaking into account only single-author works of poetry ndash the emergence ofthe photo-text is striking especially since the advent of digital photographyand printing in the 1990s As in the revival of documentary poetics (whichhad its origin in WPA-era works by Muriel Rukeyser among others)photos may serve as evidence or they may function impressionisticallyin a more symbolist mode Lyric disjunctive and narrative examples are allplentiful Whatever their formal orientations these works address bothreading and seeing in an image-centric response to visual culture WithRukeyserrsquos The Book of the Dead often cited as an influence such docu-mentary poets as Brenda Coultas Bhanu Kapil and Catherine Taylor

354 elisabeth a frost

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reproduce archival materials as evidence creating a dialogue between poetictext and visual artifact Pointing to the fictionalized nature of evidence itselfClaudia Rankinersquos Donrsquot Let Me Be Lonely (2004) features photo-collagedimages of TV news broadcasts ndash simulacra of simulacra ndash to critique a worldgone virtual By contrast for such poets as Kristin Prevallet and CDWright photos and other visual representations function elegiacally attimesmimicking the failure of language in the face of trauma and silencing35

An important early example of such mixed media work Theresa HakKyung Charsquos DICTEE (1982) has proven hugely influential provokinginquiries into language culture and gender her work included perfor-mance art installation artistrsquos books and film Her only full-length bookDICTEE is a poly-lingual collage that includes prose and poetry archivalartifacts such as charts diagrams letters and maps and uncaptionedphotos and drawings Handwritten passages and calligraphic ideogramslarge enough to fill a page blur the lines between the discursive and theimagistic contrasting Eastern and Western epistemologies ThroughoutCha evokes a traumatic history of cultural geographical and linguisticdislocations embodying post-colonial dispersal in a text composed of whatDrucker calls ldquomaterial wordsrdquo Charsquos resistance to orality in DICTEEshows the ways in which visual poetics can become a means of resistancesince ndash as Mackey and Nielsen show ndash the reception of works by writers ofcolor is too often defined only in terms of performance and oral traditionIn a very different orientation towardmixedmedia writing in general and

photography in particular Leslie Scalapino used serial form to exploreconsciousness itself combining word and image to create an immersion inthe experiential moment of the text From the 1970s onward Scalapinodeveloped a distinctively visual page consisting of discrete phrases in repeti-tion and variation both connected and disrupted by em- or en-dashes inquick succession Influenced by an early exposure to Zen Buddhism as wellas by the spiritual and writing practices of the Beat poets ndash Philip Whalen inparticular ndash Scalapino was concerned above all with what she called HowPhenomena Appear to Unfold (1989) delineating the minute motions ofconsciousness that cumulatively constitute the social fabricOf Scalapinorsquos more than twenty books most relevant to her visual poetics

are the serial worksCrowd andnot evening or light (1992) andTheTango (2001)Here Scalapino engages withmaterial and spiritual experience challenging theCartesian split on whichWestern thought depends InCrowd and not eveningor light black-and-white photos of beach scenes with bathers in smallgroups are juxtaposedwith handwritten phrases alluding to economic inequityor injustice (ldquoman whorsquos suffering pushed outrdquo ldquofloating on those who

Visual Poetics 355

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havendashnothingrdquo) The juxtaposition creates tension between the rhetoric of theimage and that of the elliptical text yet the spontaneous feel of the snapshotsandhandwritten fragments creates an immersivemeditative environment (seeFigure 11) Similarly The Tango explores embodied spiritual practices ren-dered analogous to dance (Piazzolarsquos ldquorelentlessrdquo tango as Scalapino puts it)Part poem and part artistrsquos book the work combines Scalapinorsquos photographswith serial poems and with reproductions of Marina Adamsrsquos works onpaper and collages Scalapinorsquos photos are ldquoof monks at the Sera Monasteryin Tibet engaging in formal debaterdquo36 the text alludes to language and child-hood memories and to violence poverty imperialism and war In suchenigmatic visual works Scalapino sought new forms of awareness to challengethe narrow avenues of thought that lead to oppressive social structuresPhoto-texts and mixed-media books open poetic pages to diverse visua-

lities but the moving image has a lengthy history with poetry as wellWomen poets forging intersections between poetry and film ndash in theory

Figure 11 Page from Crowd and not evening or light by Leslie ScalapinoOakland CA O Books 1992 49 Copyright 1992 by Leslie Scalapino Used with

permission of the Estate of Leslie Scalapino All rights reserved

356 elisabeth a frost

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and practice ndash date from HDrsquos film collaborations with Bryher andKenneth MacPherson as well as her theoretical writings in Close Up Morerecently women poets have created experimental film and video in colla-boration or as single-authored works including Guest Notley and Cole37

Christophe Wall-Romana defines ldquocinepoetryrdquo as a practice of ldquoenvisioninga specific component or aspect of poetry as if it were a specific component ofcinemardquo38 In the United States one exponent of such hybrids is AbigailChild whose published film soundtracks are lineated in the manner of freeverse and whose films develop the associative text-based logic of poeticfragmentation hers is a feminist practice of disjunctive visuality39

Such works respond to the theoretical question first raised by LauraMulvey of how ndash or whether ndash a ldquofemale gazerdquo can exist Many also seek toalter that question to address the queering of such a gaze especially in workthat interrogates not only formal or generic conventions but also gender andracial identities For poets there remain myriad explorations of the ways inwhich language might embody such a gaze From the creation of digitalpoetics at the end of the twentieth century to the New Conceptualisms in itsfirst decades40 visual poetics is being continually reinvented by women artistswho explore both form and the limits of identity

Notes

1 DuPlessis from the 1990 edition of The Pink Guitar 1542 Drucker Figuring the Word 593 Davidson Ghostlier Demarcations 144 See Poundrsquos ldquoThe Hard and Soft in French Poetryrdquo5 DuPlessis Blue Studios 1526 Ibid 937 Fraser Translating the Unspeakable 176 emphasis in the original8 Ibid 187ndash889 Ibid 18810 DuPlessis Blue Studios 21211 DuPlessisrsquos practice has increasingly moved toward visuality and collage See

her The Collage Poems of Drafts and Graphic Novella12 Fraser Translating the Unspeakable 203ndash20513 ldquoEtruscan Pagesrdquo is found in Fraser when new time folds up (1993)14 Ibid 5515 Trilogy 103 qtd in Fraser Translating the Unspeakable 5516 Ibid 5717 See the separate works collected in Movable Tyype especially hi dde violeth

I dde violet (2003) andWitness (2007) Second Language (2009) and ii ss (2011)WING can be found in Il Cuore The Heart

Visual Poetics 357

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18 The taxonomy is Moumlckel-Riekersquos (291) described by Reed ldquolsquoEden or Ebb ofthe Searsquordquo para 9

19 Fraser Translating the Unspeakable 19620 Frost and Hogue Innovative Women Poets 15921 Solt Concrete Poetry 7ndash822 Ibid 48 823 This quotation comes from Swensonrsquos note to the poem The complete note

is ldquoA telephoto of the earth taken from above the moon by Lunar Orbiter 5(printed in the New York Times August 14 1967) appeared to show theshadow-image of lsquoa woman in a square Kimonorsquo between the shapes of thecontinents The title is the headline over the photordquo (43)

24 Rothenberg and Joris Poems for the New Millennium 5325 Drucker ldquoVisual Pleasurerdquo 9 quoted in DuPlessis Blue Studios 18526 Ibid27 DuPlessis Blue Studios 17728 Silliman In the American Tree xv29 The release of Clairvoyant Journal 1974 (2014) with an afterword by

Patrick Durgin offers a version of the text that is far more accurate toWeinerrsquos typescript than the original book publication by Angel HairBooks in 1978

30 Quoted in Nielsen Black Chant 2231 Ibid 9 26ndash27 163ndash6432 See Nielsen on Cortez and on Carolyn Rodgers Black Chant 160ff33 Fraser Translating the Unspeakable 15734 Specifically Ridinrsquo the Moon in Texas mixes poetry prose and photographs

(including photos of paintings)35 Canadian-born poets Anne Carson Lisa Robertson andM NourbeSe Philip

are noteworthy (and influential) for their works featuring photo-text typo-graphic experiment andor book arts

36 Scalapino Zither amp Autobiography 4337 New York School poets Guest Notley and Waldman collaborated on films

(the latter two notably with Rudolph Burckhardt) See also Norma Colersquos CDRom Scout (Krupskaya 2005) for one example of recent multi-media poetics

38 Wall-Romana Cinepoetry 339 See Childrsquos This Is Called Moving and Mob Maya Derenrsquos ldquoMeshes of the

Afternoonrdquo (1943) remains a reference point for feminist film and poeticsincluding Childrsquos

40 While twenty-first-century examples are beyond the scope of this essay it isimportant to note that the advent of digital poetics in the early 2000sprovided new aesthetic and technological directions opening the field aswell toward the New Conceptualisms See Bergvall et al Irsquoll DrownMy Book for a crucial introduction to womenrsquos conceptual writing in thetwenty-first century including many examples of visual poetics

358 elisabeth a frost

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