Article begins on following page. Please note: Copyright Agency limiled (CAL) licensed coPy. Further copying and communication prohibited e~cepi on payment of 'ee per Copy or ComrnuOicallon aoo otherwise in accordance ~th the licence from CAl 1o ACER For more inloflllalion contact CAL on (02)9394 7600 or [email protected] English in Australia Volume 46 Number 3 • 2011 The Kaleidoscope of Visual Poetry: New Approaches to Visual Literacy Tamryn Bennett, University of New South Wales Abstract: What are the possibilities for poetry? This paper introduces approaches to creating and teaching poetry through a critical survey of contemporary practitioners within the field. Analysis of ekphrastic traditions, comics and concrete poetry, artists books, graffiti poems, film, performance and interdisciplinary collaborations reveal new opportunities for poetic experimentation that help to meet the aims of the Australian Curriculum. This theoretical examination is exampled with visual poetry by Shin Yu Pai, Cecilia Vicuña, Ebon Heath, Tom Phillips and Australian practitioners such as Elena Knox, Chris Edwards and Michael Farrell. Also explored are experiments in poetry comics by Dino Buzzati, Kenneth Koch, Bianca Stone, Warren Craghead, Matt Madden and Sean Michael Wilson as well as examples of multimodal texts within The Red Room Company’s projects. Exposure to this kaleidoscope of visual poetry encourages exploration of poetic possibilities, both creatively and critically, for teachers and students. Kaleidoscopic Poetry The kaleidoscope of visual poetry: New approaches to visual literacy The visual poem is a word design in a designed world […] The visual poem as a functional design can humanise the materials and techniques of the mass media of communication, can make them available to the human spirit. The poem comes alive once again in the world it has been assumed would destroy it. (Solt, 1968) Possibilities for poetry aren’t constrained by pages or set forms. Its malleability is precisely what enables poetry to transcend time, space, imagination and fixed definition. Concrete poetry, spatial works, artist’s books, comics poetry, new media collaborations and interdis- ciplinary experiments challenge outdated notions of poetry. The purpose of this paper isn’t to limit poetry, rather, it is to reveal the myriad of ways artists work within the field of visual poetry to encourage new approaches in the creation and critiquing of poetry. These composi- tions engage with the materiality of poetry, conceiving of the poem as an aesthetic object in which language and form are inextricably bound. Within this context, visual poetry can be understood as an interdisciplinary platform containing aesthetic, ‘phonetic’ and ‘kinetic’ forms (Swiss, 1976, p. 46). These forms are manifest across an array of text types such as ekphrastic poems (composed in response to artworks); concrete poetry (in which the spatial arrangement of visual-textual symbols is a principal feature); artists books; Fluxus works, sound poems; animated poems; poetry comics (that illustrate and borrow the structure of comics panels and devices) as well as installation works and live performance. Although there is still some debate about the distinction between concrete and visual poetry, this paper places concrete poetry within the broader framework of visual poetic forms. Poet and critic Thom Swiss asserts that ‘[b]y teaching concrete poetry, teachers can encourage students to develop a more flexible and creative attitude toward communication and a dynamic sensibility 55 English in Australia Volume 46 Number 3 • 2011 regarding perceptual experience’ (Swiss, 1976, p. 46). dialogue between verbal and visual language, deepen- This paper, similar to Swiss’ ‘Approaches to teaching ing the understanding of multi-modal texts in which concrete poetry: An annotated bibliography’ aims to the aesthetic language of poetry can be created and provide new paradigms for teaching visual poetry. critiqued. The relevance of visual poetry to English teaching and the developing multimodal aims of the Australian Word painting Curriculum will be demonstrated through a survey of Foundations of visual poetry can be linked to Egyptian selected contemporary works. This study presents a hieroglyphs (McCloud, 1993) as well as ekphrasis, cross-section of Australian and international practition- ancient Greek rhetorical exercises that practiced render- ers whose works broaden definitions of poetry through ing visual art, real or imagined, into vivid description. diverse approaches to visual poetics. These multimodal Historically, this was limited to poetry written about examples comprise digital, spoken, printed and visual paintings or sculptures. Commonly cited examples of models of poetry that help to ‘develop interest and ekphrasis include Homer’s description of the shield of skills in inquiring into the aesthetic aspects of texts, Achilles in book eighteen of the Iliad, Dante’s descrip- and develop an informed appreciation of literature’ tion of the sculptures in Purgatorio; Keats’ imagined (ACARA, 2010, ‘Aims’). Such a broad range of poetic artifact in ‘Ode on a grecian urn’ (1819); Williams’ forms facilitates the reading, viewing and creation collected works in ‘Pictures from Brueghel and other poems’ of ‘increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, (1962); and Ashbery’s ‘Self-portrait in a convex mirror’, written and multimodal texts across a growing range (1974) based on Parmigianino’s 1524 work of the same of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose’ while name. This alchemic practice of turning visual art into also fostering an appreciation of ‘the English language poetry has particular application in writing activities in all its variations […] its richness and power to evoke where artworks can be employed as visual stimulus feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate for creating poetry. The National Gallery of Victoria interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue’ (NGV) offers education resources, written in conjunc- (ACARA, 2010, ‘Aims’). tion with the Victorian Association for the Teaching of The following review of works will reveal some English (VATE). This resource encourages teachers and of the ways in which students can profitably explore students to use the NGV collection to explore ideas visual poetry to achieve the drafted Australian associated with the Victorian Certificate of Education Curriculum outcomes and reveal how visual poetry (VCE). Similar education programs are offered by will be of similar interest in the future. Surveyed the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of works include contemporary ekphrastic poetry by Contemporary Art in Sydney, The Queensland Art Shin Yu Pai, spatial and experimental works by Cecilia Gallery and some regional galleries. Vicuña, Ebon Heath and Tom Phillips as well as those Since its Homeric origins, the definition of ekph- collected in James Stuart’s The material poem. Also rasis has been stretched to encompass responses in examined are comics poetry by Dino Buzzati, Kenneth different art forms including music written in response Koch, Bianca Stone, Warren Craghead, Matt Madden to artworks, paintings of architecture, or sculptures and Sean Michael Wilson along with a range of multi- that re-present a fictional character from a novel, modal texts and education resources from The Red as well as a whole range of modern media. Louise Room Company that feature visual poetry. Analysis of Wakeling in her article ‘Facing down the fear: Teaching these works is underpinned by semiotic and ekphras- poetry in the Australian classroom’ also assesses the tic scholarship as well as Rachel Blau Duplessis’ theory evolution in teaching poetry and suggests how teach- of poetic ‘segmentivity’, which attempts to define the ers can use ekphrasis in classroom exercises that direct components of poetry. According to DuPlessis, the students to write poetry in response to an artwork or underlying characteristic of poetry as a genre is its film, a photograph, piece of music or favourite book ‘ability to articulate and make meaning by select- character (Wakeling, 2009, p. 119). ing, deploying, and combining segments’ (DuPlessis, In terms of ekphrastic scholarship, James A.W. 2006, p. 199). For her, this involves ‘bounded units’ Heffernan’s (1993) The museum of words: The poetics of and ‘the creation of meaningful sequence by the ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, provides a sound intro- negotiation of a gap’ such as line breaks, stanzas and duction. His enquiry employs semiotic and gendered page breaks (p. 199). This study informs an evolving studies of language to argue that there is a reccurring 56 English in Australia Volume 46 Number 3 • 2011 ‘representational friction’ (1993, p. 6) between poetry packaged nutritional and visual art. Offering an alternative to Heffernan’s facts: caloric units more traditional theories of image-text rivalry is Mieke of heat raise Bal’s (1991) study, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the word- image opposition. In it, she transcends the divided and the temperature within gendered hierarchy implied by the ‘word-and-image’ the walls of the heart opposition via a co-dependent reading of the two art ascending descending forms as a conversation between poetry and visual art muscles, game play rather than a competition. This survey of contemporary visual poetry begins the red suit with the ekphrastic practice of Shin Yu Pai, an American is avoided/consumed in amounts poet and visual artist. In her first major collection