The Mechanic Eye: North American Visual Poetry in the Digital Age

Maria Goicoechea De Jorge

doi:10.5007/1807-9288.2012v8n1p78

Abstract

This paper offers a revision of North American visual poetry from the contemporary perspective of the digital revolution. From the Native American chants to the digital poetry found on the Web, it will explore the internal drives of this sort of poetic manifestations that have endured through different time periods, aesthetic currents and cultural functions despite the various mediums employed for their production and dissemination. Digital poetry nourishes itself from previous literary traditions as well as from the multimedia convergence favored by the digital medium. We will analyze these influences, and the new reading strategies required to contextualize and make sense out of the digital work of poetry. As readers and writers reorganize their reading pacts, researchers of literature face a new challenge: the polymorphic and metamorphosing liquid text made possible by the digital language.

Highlights

This paper offers a revision of North American visual poetry from the contemporary perspective of the digital revolution
Visual poetry works of distant periods will be placed in a dialogic position with digital works of the last decades, with the double purpose of shedding a contemporary glance to the past and reigniting visual poems that had become obscure for the general audience- and of understanding our present better, concretely the work of artists who create their poems as pieces to be read on the computer screen
In the digital literature youthful canon, visual poetry is inseparable from other forms of digital poetry, to the point that one wonders if the category “visual poetry” is functional within the field of electronic literature

Summary

Introduction

“The Mechanic Eye” hopes to offer a revision of North American visual poetry from the contemporary perspective of the digital revolution. It is not hard to imagine the powerful effect of such an extraordinary collection in the mind of a young artist, his internal confirmation that the rules concerning language (punctuation, syntax, grammar) were as susceptible to be poetically broken and transformed as were contours, forms and color for the modernist painters As it can be seen in the following example, “the sky was”, the words of the poem are arranged on the page in the shape of a cloud of smoke spouting from the locomotive mentioned at the end of the poem. Kempton argues, have left out important contributors to the field of visual poetry, such as Kenneth Patchen and Paul Reps, who had continued cummings’ tradition of the picture poem, rooting their work in a poetic lineage that did not match the constraints imposed by the Concrete movement. The digital poem, on the other hand, still retains the innovative aura which triggers in the viewer the question: “how did you do this trick?”

Letter aesthetics and glyph mysticism

The performative dimension of visual poetry

Reading moving letters

Conclusions

Works Cited