Visual Poetry Research Articles

Gabriel Pacheco: Illustrator – Mexico

Gabriel PachecoIllustrator – Mexico Temi Odumosu Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration comes together in a space of silence, like an ink blot that finds form. It’s true, the shape that we see appearing in the stone roof, the crinkles of the paper, the stain left by the ink, the trail of a brush on paper, or the shape of the clouds...we have already seen it within ourselves, but we have just forgotten it over time, and picture books give that back to us. G. Pacheco whatever abstract moments we might remember from our dreams or from fairytales, Gabriel Pacheco recalls them back in his surreal scenes and compositions: A woman bound to a horse with a feather on her head, surrounded by a cascade of umbrellas. A solitary stag wounded by an arrow looking back to us from the doorway of a room indoors. A ghostly ship squeezing its way through a quiet city. Using a restrained palate of grey shades, accented by azure blue and poppy red, Pacheco softly transports readers to spaces that are both magical and uncanny, visions that give symbolic form to the words of writers he chooses to collaborate with. In this sense, he is a literary illustrator. Born in Mexico City in 1973, Pacheco began his creative journey as a set designer, studying scenography at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. He also took classes in illustration and life drawing at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, later completing a Diploma in Children’s Literature in Barcelona. However, he attests that the focus towards illustrating books came by chance following a request by his sister to illustrate a book called The Enchanted Frog (1997). This experience created an opening for his thinking and practice, building a desire for storytelling through images that has been with him ever since. Even so, he maintains that, holistically, it is the writings of Octavio Paz, the vision of filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and the dramaturgy of choreographer Pina Bauch that taught him how to look. Pacheco’s work travels between different realities reflecting his philosophical approach to making visual poetry. He conceives of the fragment (of time, space, memory) as a window onto story but also a means of articulating what is forever lost. It is, for example, the fragments of old book pages embedded in the trees and plants of his illustrations for The Jungle Book (2012) which remind the reader that the book they are holding is a long gone story that has already been told. Similarly, the illustrations for 12 Illustrated Poems by Lorca (2013) are composed like the poet’s fragments of verse: How does Pacheco depict a child who insists he wants to be silver and water? By giving him his own special rain cloud that drenches him thoroughly, with a silver lining draped around his wrist. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY La Rana Encantada. By Jazmín Flores Yarce. Mexico: Cornuda, 1997. Print. Google Scholar Taller de Corazones. By Arturo Abad. Pontevedra: Oqo Editora, 2010. Print. Google Scholar El libro de la Selva. By Rudyard Kipling. Trans. Gabriela Bustelo. Barcelona: Sexto Piso, 2012. Print. Google Scholar 12 Poemas de Frederico García Lorca. By Frederico García Lorca. Pontevedra: Kalandraka, 2012. Print. Google Scholar Arenas Movedizas. By Octavio Paz. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014. Print. [End Page 40] Google Scholar Copyright © 2016 Bookbird, Inc.

LA CRAVATE ET LA MONTRE SEBUAH KALIGRAM KARYA APOLLINAIRE : ANALISIS SEMIOTIK

rpieces remain timeless and his influence on the world of literature and artare greatly felt. The way typographical poetry, which is a kind of visual poetry orcalligram, is presented is extremely interesting and this article intends to describethe relation between the meaning of the words in the calligram and its pictorialform in one of Apollinaire's poems in the form of a calligram titled “La Cravate etLa Montre.”The term calligram means “Belle Ecriture”, that is, “beautiful writing”,coming from the Greek words kallos, meaning “beautiful”, and gramma, meaning“writing'. So a calligram work of art, also called visual poetry and typographicalpoetry, is a poem or poetic lines or lines of poetic words arranged in such a way thata picture is formed. To comprehend, enjoy, and appreciate well a poetical work,one needs to examine its various aspects. A poem in the form of a calligram needsto be structurally and semiotically analyzed. By means of such analysis, its fullmeaning could be obtained and it can be comprehended as a work of art with poeticvalues.The poem concerned here is a monologue coming from “I” to “you”. Thisis strengthened by the presence of the subject on, meaning “we”, the phrase monCoeur, meaning “my heart”, and the phrase ton corps, meaning “your body”. “I”intends to deliver an important message to mankind about life as a journey towardsdeath. One's life time in this world is extremely short so that one should spend thetime doing useful things. So a happy person is someone who makes use of time toenjoy life with freedom from strict rules. Life should not be burdened with manyrules that bind freedom. In Latin such a view is expressed in the phrase CarpeDiem, which corresponds to the French Mets à profit le jour présent. This isreflected in the tie and clock shapes of the poem. A tie worn on the neck causes aconstricted feeling making one feels unable to breathe freely so that it must betaken off. The clock shape is used to refer to the passing of time illustrating life as ajourney towards God and death.Keywords: calligram, typographical poetry, iconicity

The visual poetry in the film criticism of Ángel Fernández-Santos

Very often, it is difficult in the film criticism to distinguish the aesthetic principles of the films which are judged as excellent, non-standard or, even, masterpieces. Within the film criticism of Angel Fernandez-Santos, one of the most prestigious film critics in the history of Spanish cinema, ‘visual poetry’ is a recurrent concept that allows us to identify these principles. It is a term that, within his evaluative arguments, constitutes one out of three great stylistic strategies which, due to their difficulty and complexity when applied in the filmmaking, the critic tends to associate with the highest levels of the aesthetic quality. The other two strategies are the ‘transparency/depth dichotomy’ and the ‘expressive paradoxes’. In this paper, we focus on the film aesthetic patterns of Angel Fernandez-Santos in order to extract from his reviews only the definition, features and typologies of the visual poetry concept where it is clearly used. Those writings come from his journalist career in the newspaper El Pais (1982-2004), and they are devoted to analyse a range of audiovisual productions of different periods and styles; but before that, we will make reference to the origins and the application of the visual poetry concept in the legacy of the film theory and criticism with the aim of highlighting the influences that, (in this field) determine the aesthetic scope in the film reviews of Fernandez-Santos

Part Pattern Whole: What Matters Most in Wopko Jensma’s Visual Poetry

In this paper I discuss unpublished visual poems by Wopko Jensma alongside similar work from his last collection, I Must Show You My Clippings (1977). While Jensma is known as both an innovative writer and skilled artist and designer, it is the combined influences of these disciplines which make his visual poetry interesting. By placing these particular poems within global and local literary historical contexts, and situating their specific modes of signification within a theoretical framework, I explain the ways in which Jensma’s visual poems work as both semantic and semiotic texts.

Russian and East European Materials at the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry

This article provides an overview of the Russian and East European holdings at the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami, Florida. Materials held at the archive include rare and unique modernist books, samizdat and émigré publications, mail art, conceptual art, and recent artists’ books, mainly in Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, and Hungarian.

Fundamental Feedback: Öyvind Fahlström's Kisses Sweeter than Wine

The article analyzes Öyvind Fahlström's (1928–1976) performance Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which took place as part of the festival 9 Evenings: art&engineering in New York (1966). It situates the performance's use of multimedia material as continuations of earlier investigations into manipulating language that played a central part in the artist's practice of both visual art and concrete poetry. It further argues that in Kisses Sweeter Than Wine such manipulations form a series of ruptures into the wider circulation of mass-media images, ruptures that locate Fahlström's use of media images in relation to both Pop Art and the beginning media activism under the Vietnam War.

Estudio de la Suite para Piano Goyescas: Los Majos Enamorados a través de los Personajes de los Cuadros de Goya.

Author(s): Curbelo, Jose Maria; Martin Alfaro, Ariadna | Abstract: The piano suite Goyescas: los majos enamorados by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados is a set of six pieces, all of them inspired by the Madrid society of the eigtheenth century that Goya depicted in his paintings. The success of the piano suite led Granados to compose an eponymous opera in which he reflected every aspect shown in Goya’s paintings in a clearer and more direct way: a literary-thematic story, the characters, the scenery, the atmosphere, and clothing. Therefore, Goyescas is a complex art work by the Catalan composer, one that interrelates the visual arts, poetry, and music, all with a Spanish background. This article addresses one of the important points of this expansive work by providing pianists with the extra-musical context of the work, i.e., the main characters taking part in the Goyescas opera, which will help them understand the meaning of Goyescas: los majos enamorados.

Rhetoric in visual arabic poetry: from the Mamluk period to the digital age

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-9288.2015v11n1p118O presente estudo concentra-se nas manifestações da retórica visual na poesia árabe visual e na forma como a crítica literária tem lidado com isso. A poesia visual, como é conhecida nas ciências literárias, refere-se aos aspectos da poesia, que vão além da linguagem e do conteúdo, como uma forma básica de poemas e de estrutura externa. Estas manifestações retóricas são derivadas a partir da relação entre forma e conteúdo, de modo a gerar significado e afetar o leitor. O presente estudo concentrar-se-á nas manifestações da retórica visual na poesia visual árabe e na sua evolução, do período mameluco até a era digital.

Milton’s Spenser: Eden and the Work of Poetry

This essay reads Milton’s Eden as a critical appropriation of Spenser’s image of the mutable world. It argues that Edenic work epitomizes Milton’s engagement with Spenser’s poetry as a site of creative origins and reveals these poets’ common vision of poetry’s virtues as inseparable from individual experiences of freely interpreting images of creation. Linking Spenserian quest’s redemptive labor with the first parents’ work in Eden, it argues that Spenser bequeaths to Milton’s poetry a broadly georgic ethos in which virtue is discovered not in our encounters with transcendent forms but rather in our movements through the postlapsarian world.

诗歌“画”禅——论菲利普?沃伦的视觉诗

20世纪美国禅宗诗人菲利普•沃伦(Philip Whalen, 1923~2002)十分注重诗歌的视觉美感，他的诗歌从一个全新的角度，将绘画之美与禅宗意韵相结合，激发读者的想象，为世人营造出奇幻美妙的诗意空间，独具东方禅宗审美情怀。通过阅读沃伦的诗集，本文作者尝试勾勒出视觉行为浮显在沃伦的作品中的两种主要方式：“绘画视觉诗”和“语义形式视觉诗”，分别列举分析它们的特点和表现手法，借此挖掘出这位禅宗诗人的独到之处以及他对现代诗歌的创新和发展产生的重要影响。 Philip Whalen (1923-2002), a major voice of American Zen Buddhist poets, claims his poetry to be “a graph of mind moving”. In the producing of his works, Whalen paid great attention to the visual aestheticism, which possesses individual and social dimensions with both literary and spiritual brilliance. Whalen’s poems, which are full of oriental aroma, compromised the beauty of Zen and painting. Through reading and analyzing of the whole collection of his poems, this thesis mainly explores Philip Whalen’s Buddhist poetry as well as his poetics from the following two aspects: the painting visual poetry and the semantic iconic poetry, in the hope of revealing Philip Whalen’s unique Zen poetic thoughts and the great influences he has made on the development of American modernistic poetry.

Amanda Berenguer: géneros entretejidos

This paper analyses the visual poetry of Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer, published in her poetry book Composicion del lugar (1976). The aim of the research is to investigate how the poetic text changes applying different artistic techniques and how it influences in the perception of the poem.

Pleasure and apocalypse: The relation of pleasure and horror in images of a catastrophic history

Abstract This article discusses the piece Salves, a performance choreographed by Maguy Marin in collaboration with Denis Mariotte that premiered at the Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2010. With regard to the choreographer's statement that Salves - an attempt to stage a catastrophic past and apocalyptic visions - would be an invitation for resistance, the text questions whether the performance raises any urge for resistance. With reference to Jacques Rancière's thoughts in The Future of the Image, the review scrutinizes efforts of representing catastrophic events with theatrical means and reflects on the pleasurable experience of watching Marin's visual poetry, which stands in vast contradiction to the proclaimed horror of the performance.

Visual Rhetorics of Carmina Figurata in the Poetry of the Early Middle Ages

Examines the way the verbal image represents itself graphically in the shape of pattern poems and traces the forming of visual rhetorics back to the early medieval poetry. Pattern poems ( carmina figurata ) are considered to be the earliest genre of the visual poetry, where from new synthetic form springs. Visual images of pattern poems by Simmias of Rhode, Dosiades of Crete, Theocritus reveal the obvious interconnection between poetry and painting. The description visualises common or mythological object, while its reception is based on the reflection of the sign­symbolic level of the poetic structure in figurative iconicity. In addition, Latin poets contributed greatly to shaping verbal text as a new visual language. Particularly well­known is the visual experiment by Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius, namely The Panegyric to the Emperor Constantine the Great (326), in which the universality of verbal and visual levels represents the semantic whole and the way the rhetoric message is structured. A new approach to visual signification gave a new expressive form not just with the means of language as such but as a specific mode of musical expression of a poetic text. One may recall exceptional drawings based on the depiction of musical signs by the poet and musician Baude Cordier (c. 1380 - c. 1440), namely Belle, Bonne, Sage rondo for three voices presented in a heart­shaped score. The semantics of the Latin cross was reconsidered by the Latin poet Rabanus Maurus Magnentius (c. 780-856) in his treatise De laudibus sanctae crucis , where the semantic structure of the text distinctly reveals its visual potentials and the lexical level correlates with the sign system, so that verbal and visual elements constitute each other.

An Archeology of Fragments

This is a short (fragmentary) history of fragmentary writing from the German Romantics (F. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin) to modern and contemporary concrete or visual poetry. Such writing is (often deliberately) a critique of the logic of subsumption that tries to assimilate whatever is singular and irreducible into totalities of various categorical or systematic sorts. Arguably, the fragment (parataxis) is the distinctive feature of literary Modernism, which is a rejection, not of what precedes it, but of what Max Weber called “the rationalization of the world” (or Modernity) whose aim is to keep everything, including all that is written, under surveillance and control.

“Why would it not think of its typographic form already from its birth!”: a genetic approach to the typography of Aaro Hellaakoski’s “Kesien kesä”

‘Why would it not think of its typographic form already from its birth!’: a genetic approach to the typography of Aaro Hellaakoski’s ‘Kesien Kesä’The study of visual poetry often focuses solely on the iconicity of the poem, i.e. the interplay between expressive typography and the linguistic text, leaving the possibly existing genetic documents and the processes they witness with little or no attention. The article shows how genetic criticism (critique génétique) can enrich our understanding and interpretation of visual poetry by examining the manuscript, proofs and published versions of the poem ‘Kesien kesä’ (The Summer of Summers) from the typographically experimental collection Jääpeili (1928) (Ice Mirror) by the Finnish poet Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952). The genetic approach to the typography of ‘Kesien kesä’ reveals a multiphase process of trial and error, where Hellaakoski strives to achieve a satisfactory visual rendering for his poem. Besides trying out different typefaces and sizes, Hellaakoski is especially concerned with the use of white space on the page, especially with indentation and stanza breaks. Based on the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, the article proposes a genetic conception of typography as a more abstract entity, albeit that the interpretation of the genesis of typography is characteristically material.

Neuroenhancement in Reflective Equilibrium: A Qualified Kantian Defense of Enhancing in Scholarship and Science

Cognitive neuroenhancement (CNE) involves the use of medical interventions to improve normal cognitive functioning such as memory, focus, concentration, or willpower. In this paper I give a Kantian argument defending the use of CNE in science, scholarly research, and creative fields. Kant’s universal law formulation of the categorical imperative shows why enhancement is morally wrong in the familiar contexts of sports or competitive games. This argument, however, does not apply to the use of CNE in higher education, scholarly or scientific research, or creative endeavors such as visual art, fiction or poetry, or musical composition. This is because performance in these areas is embedded within practices that differ in morally significant ways from competitive practices. This important difference provides good reason to think that there is nothing morally wrong with the use of CNE in these areas. My approach is not simply to assume a full-fledged Kantian ethical theory and apply it straight away to the enhancement issue but to establish a reflective equilibrium between our moral intuitions, (Kantian) moral principles that support those intuitions, and the nature of the practices involved.

Preface

Preface Brian J. McAllister (bio) The essays in this special issue of Narrative offer a small sample of a growing field of study within narrative theory: narrative in poetic form. More precisely, the essays here investigate the potential intersections between the concerns of narrative theory and the concerns of poetry studies, using one to inform the other in a mutually productive discourse. Brian McHale’s essay “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry” offers perhaps the most explicit call for new work in this field. Though he acknowledges from the outset that this work stands on the shoulders of a “huge body of precedent” (11)—from Plato to Bakhtin to Genette—this earlier work avoids addressing poetic narratives’ differences from other kinds of narrative. As McHale makes plain, “We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry … because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component” (11; emphasis original). When considering narrative poetry through the lens of narrative theory, one cannot simply brush aside the poetic aspects of the text. That seemingly obvious consideration of [End Page 151] the poetic in concert and in communication with the narrative directs the critical work in the essays that follow. With this larger objective in mind, this collection includes critical approaches that attempt to answer these questions about poetry’s position in and as narrative, considering narrative theory and poetic studies through a variety of methodologies—from rhetorical narrative theory to reader response to deconstruction—and with a range of poetic texts—from modernist poetic sequence to Romantic verse narrative to visual poetry. Peter Hühn’s essay begins the collection by exploring lyric poetry in either fictional or factual modes. Hühn situates the genre within larger fields of literary form in order to recognize lyric poetry’s ambivalent position between the two categories, as exemplified in his argument by the sonnet. Jason M. Coats then turns to Chistopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden’s problematically structured travel book, Journey to a War, in order to refine rhetorical considerations of the lyric by expanding theories of progression in lyric poetry. This refinement allows Coats to reconcile lyric poetry’s inherently weak narrativity with rhetorical narrative theory’s attention to judgment and the ethical implications of narrative form. Further investigating the narrative potential of lyric poetry, Stefan Kjerkegaard explores the ways that poetic form influences and interacts with narrativity and lyricality, as well as fictionality and non-fictionality, within the autobiographical lyric poem. Kjerkegaard employs narratological approaches to voice and narrativity in an effort to illuminate this understudied poetic genre. Lasse Gammelgaard pays similar attention to the reader by situating poetic studies within the larger concerns of recent reader-oriented studies of narrative production. Building from early work in reader response theory, Gammelgaard investigates the characteristics of poetic and narrative tracks within narrative poetry and locates the reader at the point of interaction between these two tracks. Lewis S. Gleich considers the influence of sonic and visual elements on reader engagement with a textual narrative, refining discussions of the relationship between poeticity and narrativity by incorporating studies of phonetic and oculomotor functioning. While both Gammelgaard and Gleich employ works by John Keats in their essays and build from reader-response foundations, their poetic intersection at Keats reveals how these two approaches offer distinct methodologies that ultimately take narrative theory, reader response, and poetic studies in different directions. My contribution takes an intermedial approach, surveying narrative’s capacity within visual poetry. First teasing out the form’s visual and poetic affordances, I then explore the material on which poetry appears, considering the ways that textual layout and textual surface enrich an understanding of narrative intermediality. Steven Nardi’s deconstructivist approach sheds light on the disruptive tendencies of poetry. Nardi examines the ways that poetic disruptions enrich current narrative theory by troubling distinctions between fabula and sjuzhet. The collection concludes with a conversation between Bruce Heiden and Brian McHale that returns us to a foundational question of this collection: can narrative theory enrich and be enriched...

Narrative in Concrete / Concrete in Narrative: Visual Poetry and Narrative Theory

Narrative in Concrete / Concrete in Narrative: Visual Poetry and Narrative Theory

Pointing to Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Re-imagining Visual Poetics in Research

In this article, the authors discuss how Shaun Tan's graphic novel The Arrival (2006) opened a polyphonic dialogue with culturally diverse early childhood educators. Using visual, graphic and symbolic languages provided alternative ways for the research participants to express their experiences and understandings of being recent immigrants. Analyzing and interpreting the stories that the participants narrated, the authors noted their linguistic, aesthetic and embodied responses to Tan's visual poetry – specifically the physical act of pointing to the images. The research raises multiple questions for consideration: How might The Arrival (and other graphic narratives) be used as an elucidative prompt for understanding caregiver/teacher practice in early childhood education and in educational research more broadly? How can visual research methodologies enhance the complex interrelations among curriculum, diversity and visuality in early childhood education? And, lastly, how can such imaginal and playful approaches point to deeper considerations around intercultural dialogue, social relations, pedagogy and the curriculum in early childhood education settings? Graphic novels provoke intercultural dialogue in research interviews and point to new research methodologies. They enhance cultural understandings among students, scholars and educators at post-secondary and pre-K-12 levels, providing insights into how culturally diverse educators and students can live and learn together in an always complex world.

Interpreting the Construction of the Multimodality of E. E Cummings’ "Eccentric Typographical" Poem "l(a"

Kress and Van Leeuwen, who introduced the meta-function into visual circumstances and established the Grammar of Visual Design which is developed from the theoretical framework of Halliday's systemic functional grammar and provides a theoretical foundation for researches on multimodality, holds that not only verbal semiotics but also visual semiotics can express meaning. Therefore, based upon the theory of systemic functional grammar and the theory of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper takes E. E cummings' poem l(a as an example and attempts to propose a model of multimodal approach to visual poems. The particular focuses of the study are laid on interpreting the construction of its verbal modality which includes the ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction, and the construction of its visual modality (typographical aspects) which includes the establishment of visual grammar systems and the ways the grammatical structures of visual modality realize representational metafunction, interactive metafunction and compositional metafunction so as to explore different possibilities of interpreting the poem. It is proved by the study that multimodality approach proves a systemic and more through way in interpreting such poems. Meanwhile, it further verifies the fact that multimodal analytic approach to discourse integrates language and language-related resources, with the result of making the discourse interpretation more comprehensive and approximative. Hopefully, the provoking result of this study will inspire further studies on multimodal approach to visual poetry.