At 12:24 PM 6/21/01 -0400, you wrote:
Pedro et al:
Sorry to take so long to respond further to this matter - I've been on a retreat (during which I took a field trip to the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in /Miami Beach) - but as to defining What visual poetry is, that's a tough one. I tend to think of it as anything in which there is a visual element to the work (that is, SEEING it is part of the experience). That, however, could well include almost all poetry, so I think it also includes a quality of the work which makes it in one way or another totemic and/or talismanic. That is, its physical presence is part of the thing; it's not just "abstract" like a purely linguistic artifact is.
That's useful, yet doesn't cut much out.
It seems that most "non-visual poetry" could be experienced aurally
and not visually without losing too much.
Would you agree with that?
Pedro
Yes, I would agree, loosely speaking. In reality, however, an aural experience is quite different from the "visual" (or reading to oneself) experience, because the aural presentation is an interpretation, and therefor a limitation, of the whole text. A whole text is (or should be) full of ambiguities, double meanings, etc., some of which is lost if you can't see the words. This varies of course depending on the text under consideration.
John
The Sackner archive is AMAZING - there's nothing else like it anywhere.
Onword,
John
