gone asemic

Reading the words of the poem, the mind stumbling over them for lack of coherent language beyond some presumed idiosyncratic intent, one wished the letters themselves could be obscured to the point of asemic writing, where at least one could engage the work on a purely visual level.

text excerpt is enough

I’m suspect of any book that needs a trailer to promote itself. Save your fancy visuals, a short text excerpt will do.

crossing boundaries

Those visual aspects of Ramón’s prose are of paramount importance: temporal qualities are subordinated to the spatial predilections of the author. That is why very little “happens” in his fiction. It bears pointing out in passing, that painting crosses national as well as artistic boundaries much more easily than does literature.

Aphorisms: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, selected and translated from the texts entitled greguerias, with a critical introduction by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1989)

text takes a backseat

Even the broadside seems to have sacrificed the simple virtues of text to visual impact.

sacred spider

Mallarmé described himself as a “sacred spider,” the inventor of a “marvelous lacework,” The appearance of “On Toss of the Dice” thus colluded, in its lacy lack of transitions, with the Lumière brother’s cinématagraphe, which had burst upon the world late December 1895 and was barely up and running before Mallarmé began his optical oeuvre. Bravely conceived and fiercely written against the long tradition of verbal poetry, “One Toss of the Dice” marked a great shift in the direction of the visuality of our own era, with still and moving projections, hand-held personal data devices, monitors, and screens.

—R. Howard Bloch, One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017)

the visual or the musical

…whether we should finally compare Pound’s free verse to ancient musical notations, as if it indicated the placement of varying scales, tones, or, on the other hand, compare it to sculpture, as does Donald Davie, seems a question worth asking, though not worth answering. After all, if Pound did not trouble himself to choose either the visual or the musical as modernist poetry’s sister art, I see no reason why readers should have to make the choice on his behalf. Still, by listening to Pound’s Imagist poems (no only reading, analyzing, interpreting, source-hunting), one may hear the music of the twentieth century having “just forced, or forcing itself into words.”

—Alex Shakespeare, “Poetry Which Moves By Its Music,” Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (UNO Press, 2013), edited by John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H.R. Stonback.

word is

Unlike in prose, the poem will never turn its back on what the word is in terms of sight and sound.

horizonline

A linebreak like the horizon is a visual illusion, yet becomes important aurally.

what is not seen

The image owes neither its principle nor its power to what is visually given. To justify the poet’s conviction and the image’s frequency and naturalness, we must integrate with it those constituents that we do not see, and whose nature is not visual. They are in fact those by which material imagination is made manifest. Only a psychology of the material imagination could explain this image in its real totality, in its real life.

—Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et le rêves

(translated by Jean-Claude Margolin, in Bachelard’s Philosophy and Poetics, 1989, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America)