Poetic Visuals: Difficulty, Delay, Design

Orbis Litterarum, 2016

This article argues for the advantage of applying the analytical perspective of “visual iconicity in poetry,” rather than trying to delimit the problematic old category of “visual poetry,” which has been understood to be a type of poetry that deviates from normal poetry in and through its visual characteristics (for instance, poems looking like physical objects). However, all written poetry is obviously perceived by the eyes, and the notion of visuality has proven to be insufficient for accommodating the features of “visual poetry”; it is visual iconicity rather than simply visuality that must be investigated. Whereas visuality is a sensory category, iconicity is a semiotic category consisting of meaning created by way of resemblance. When these two categories are conflated in poetry studies, so that visuality is understood to be the same as or to automatically include iconicity, or when iconicity is not recognized as a decisive notion for understanding how meaning is created in visual (written) poetry, the result is confusing. I therefore argue that all media, including art forms, must be understood as being based on four media modalities (essential categories of media traits): the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality, and the semiotic modality. Media differ in one or more of these four modalities. Some are visual, others are auditory, some are spatial but static, others are spatiotemporal, some are primarily based on conventional signs, others are based on iconic signs, and so forth. Written poetry is generally based on conventional, verbal signs, but most poems are also iconic to some extent; and not only poems that are categorized as “visual.” Visual iconicity in poetry can be based on, for instance, empty spaces between words and between verses, lineation, typeface, letter size, and word order. Since there are many types and degrees of iconicity, I present a semiotic framework based on the idea that meaning can be produced by all kinds of resemblances between visual, auditory, and cognitive structures (abstract relations that form concepts and ideas in mental space). Visual iconicity in poetry is a specific part of this rich field of iconicity. Finally, I analyze two poems that differ in their visual iconicity. No scholars refer to Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical” as “visual,” but in addition to being visual this poem possesses a certain level of iconicity. Eugen Gomringer’s “Wind,” on the other hand, is a standard example of so-called visual poetry. Also this poem is certainly visual, even though it is not visuality but strong iconicity that sets it apart from poetry such as Plath’s. In fact, what is generally but misleadingly referred to as “visual poetry” is actually characterized by extensive iconicity.

2014

I could not have written this dissertation without the help of my committee. Thank you Wlad Godzich for knowing what I was trying to think long before I did. Carla Freccero, you listened before my thoughts were comprehensible and gave me the hope to keep on. Rob Wilson, thank you for being the sort of person-scholar-writer I aspire to become. No less important were the creative writers who helped me find my bearings despite the oddities of the academic terrain. Thanks Micah Perks for keeping the institution human. Thanks Karen Tei Yamashita for making a welcoming home. Thanks Nate Mackey for sharing your stories of hard work. Thanks Ronaldo Wilson for dancing so easily across the creative/critical divide. Thanks also to Dan Selden, for being fearless in the face of huge tasks, to John Jordan, for continuing to love literature, and to Karen Bassi, for staying open-minded. This was not my first degree. Earlier, Brian Walker reminded me to walk in graveyards. Victor Wolfenstein taught me to remember the body. Peter Orner taught me to read slow. Chet Weiner introduced me to Marcel Duchamp. Bob Gluck showed me how to find a place for my cup. Nona Caspers tried to teach me to breathe. Stacy Doris taught me to be always being. That was just school. Thanks Janet Fitch for throwing yourself in, Vanessa Place for valiant acts of bravery, Lyn Hejinian for thinking from the heart, Juliana Spahr for transformations, Edwin Dobb for adventurous essays, Lisa Samuels for being smart, Julie Brower for loving poetry, Carol Stoneburner for calm, Dmitry Golynko for mad rampages, Rebecca Bella for Russsian adventures, Aleksandr Skidan for grace, Polina and Tasiya Zaslavskaya for x haircuts and dresses, Matvei Yankelevich for books, and Five and Zinnia Sue for making space for the people who need to be there. This dissertation took a long time and what I am most grateful for are the friends made along the way. Thanks Prema Prabakhar for being beautiful in person and in writing. Thanks Vibeke Pihl and Elaine Brown-you made dissertations seem worth writing. Thanks Jimi Wallen for wild Nietzsche, Matt Landry for translation help, David Auerbach for dragging me out, Mary McMullen for teaching me to shoot a gun and Sophie Rollins for video games, Elisabeth Lore for taking me in, Tim Willicuts for homey talks, Harold Abromowitz for going far out. Thanks Sherwin Mendoza, Jeb Purucker, Brian Malone, Madeline Lane for boots on the streets. Lisa Levad-I still remember you reading those Hegel comic books. Andrea Quaid your sustained and consistent care allowed me to keep going even when I wanted to quit. Thanks Greg Chansky for stretching. Thanks Biseat Horning for spunk. Thanks Stephen Lynch for listening. Thanks to my family, Ruth, Dan, Sasha, Aurora, Tosh, Shawn, Lisaandy, Katie and all the Boyer-Levads-welcome Makayla! Michael Medrano and Kitty, thank you for making me take breaks. You taught me how to laugh again when I'd almost forgotten how. Lastly but not leastly, thanks Les Plesko. Books are always written to someone, and you've always been the only reader I ever needed to have. adapting to what is pulled in, or expelled. 3 Unlike traditional poetry, Olson's open verse is transitive. That is, it is always opening out onto something else. As such, it does "not seek to describe, but to enact" (Collected "Human Universe" 61). In this, the poet and reader are unseated from their usual roles. As carriers of culture, they (and poems, themselves) are little more than an "intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-ruptor, the resistor" through which cultural forces embedded in them were to be referred to one another through the dynamic rebalancing-of forces within and beyond the poem-that is induced by the poem's juxtapositional field (Collected "Human Universe" 61; Collected "Proprioception" 182). Past Partial Implementations of Olson's Poetics These are large claims. Olson's manifesto calls for nothing less than a simultaneous reconfiguration of epistemological, ontological, subject, object, and identity configurations associated with traditional poetry. No surprise, then, that Olson would have presented his findings as a manifesto, indicating a discovery rather than a fait accompli. The idea of the "open field" verse was hugely influential.

1996

Many American Renaissance transcendentalists imagine men as self-contained but permeable orbs, which are both organs of sight and individual planets in their own orbits. This conception is the result of an American pantheism that imaginatively merges and fragments human and divine bodies into parts, which are themselves, like Emerson's eye, also at times considered wholes. For the purposes of this essay, I define American pantheism as the deification of nature--the All of nature and in effect nature's eye--and the representation of natural law and its Romantic taxonomy of bodies as divine. For the pantheist, the classification of nature, its archetypal models of human and plant development, provides the model of divine order: all substances become part of a great chain of being with the eye at the top. I argue that a language of visual self-representation determines the nature of male identity in the American Renaissance. This specific language is conspicuous in the writings of mid-century American pantheists, and in Emerson's and Melville's ubiquitous use of the tropes of eyes and orbs to locate the self. In this chapter, I present a narrative of what happens to the eye, the orb, in the pantheist rhetoric of Emerson and Melville. Their version of the American self is manifested as a globular entity, and what happens to that self happens to the eye. The American's union with nature turns out to generate the fragmentation of the self as orb of seeing and being. Emerson's transformation to transparent eyeball in the essay "Nature," which was originally titled "Pan," is the central visual, linguistic, scientific, and representational motif of his transcendentalism. Through this merger--a quintessential form of pantheistic reverie, a giddy transcendence of the self--Emerson is able to become nature, its archetypal form, nature seeing itself through the instrument of man. As an eye whose I disappears and becomes nothing, Emerson merges with the universe, and so becomes diffusely All, and sees all. Emerson attempts such a merger of part with whole, variety with unity, throughout his works, a merger which he considers the essence of transcendentalism, the transcendence of the male self and body. In Emerson's wake, Melville undermines this optimism, one philosophically as well as etymologically based on Emerson's view of the eye; Melville and many of his characters initially experience Emerson's sublime orbit, but ultimately spin away from it fragmented and disillusioned. Melville then recapitulates but finally parodies Emerson's configuration of the orbed and orbiting self, reincorporating his thematics with bitter irony. Eyes are foremost the locus of human representation, so it is not surprising that altering the language of visuality changes not just one aspect of the self, but all the contingent parameters of that self. While the Melvillean characters I discuss initially experiment with pantheism, they undergo some version of the visual dismemberment Pierre experiences in its most dramatic form.

Polysèmes

2012

Poetry first existed as a strictly oral practice, and long before writing was invented, let alone printing. It relied on the sound characteristics of each language. Now we are used to print our poems on the whitest possible paper with the blackest possible ink, forgotting that in so doing we are using colours. In the middle of the twentieth century there appeared throughout the world a number of poets willing to make use of the other possibilities of the visual signs: form and colour, in addition to the usual sound characteristics. They were stimulated in doing that by the progresses made in the printing techniques. Of course form was readily usable even in black print, and there were many forerunners, even in the Greek antiquity. Colour began to be used in the Middle Ages, but to very little import. The possibilities of modern printing totally changed the situation, and the Visual Poets,- as they came to be named,- took full mesasure and advantage of these new means. In the present...