VisPo: Where to Start, Where to End?

gustave morin, "toon tune." Poetry Magazine (November 2008)

If I were to teach an entire seminar on Visual Poetry (VisPo), I would choose to call it "An Introduction to Visual Poetry in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Age". And even then, it would be a partial survey. This is such a wide and varied field. I would include early visual artist/poets like William Blake, and I would also include contemporary visual artist/poets like David Shrigley and Halsey Berryman. Mel Bochner? Check. Cy Twombly? Check. Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Ruscha? Check, check, check, check. And so on. The above names come from the silo we call "Fine Art." How about the poet/artists? Apollonaire, Bob Brown, Dieter Roth, the Brazilian Concrete poets, bpNichol, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Cobbing. This list is just off the top of my head. I'm forgetting more than I'm remembering. The Russian Constructivists? Check? Dada? Obviously. How about comics? Perhaps this is one of the purest forms of expanded-field visual poetry. "Garfield?" Check. "Family Circus?" Check. Stan Lee, Marvel Comics? Check. You guys get the picture.

Once you start to realize what it is you're looking at, it's literally everywhere. In urban areas, we live immersed in visual poems: signage, advertisements, clothing ("message" t-shirts, par excellence), mobile devices, screens of all kinds, etc. 

Tomorrow afternoon we're going to talk about some of this material. It will be the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg lettuce.

We will likely discuss some (but not all) of the above-mentioned artists and movements. Drag your net through the ubuweb archive: UbuVisPo. See what you find.