easter wings

George Herbert, Easter Wings/ The Temple (1633)

More about historical visual poetry:  How do we define Visual Poetry (and letter-inspired art) by Phillip John Usher

“Our understanding of visual poetry means that words and letters become plastic; they are (perhaps) also signifiers, but they are first and foremost objects: they “are” before they “mean,” suggesting they take on a life of their own. And yet words and letters never totally escape their linguistic sounds and meanings-hence the games our mind plays when we view visual poetry, caught-as it is-between different ways of viewing. It’s a bifurcated road: should I read, or should I see? How do letters and words get in the way? How do they confuse (in the strongest sense) the image?” 

word and image are one

wordandimageareone - by sigrid jones

I don’t play digital games, but I do like to play with digital tools. In the recent holidays I was playing around with some more poetry generators, which I found online. 

My favorite outcome is this visual poem, which I created with the composer on RoboType. This is a great little online tool for creating visual poems with four classic types of font. “Robotype, a type comoposer, that allows playing with letters as graphic elements, exploring each one of the forms, something so extended as typography, draw, design, compose, create.” It allows you more control over the image  than this concrete poetry generator which I posted about here. I guess, if you know how to use design software you can do things like this elsewhere, but I don’t, so I think it is a nifty little tool, and easy to work with so that it could be also used by children. (I just could not figure out how to upload images on the web gallery.) I hope I will find the time to use this generator more often.

The text is based on a quote by dadaist and later mystic Hugo Ball, from his “Dada Fragments” from 1916 “the image and word are one”. Visual poems have been created before, but the dadaists were this first group of people to really explore and experiment with words and letters liberated from their context. When I was a teenager two boys tried to woo me with poems, one used a medieval minne somg, the other one Kurt Schwitters’ Anna Blume. Dada won.

The poetry generator is based on a project, which turned Schwitters’ book Die Scheuche. Märchen (created with Käte Steinitz & Theo van Doesburg) into an online interactive story book, or game in Flash. You could say it is a very different kind of alphabet book. I would like to know what kids make of it.

concrete pot

At the UKLA conference in Liverpool somebody asked me about my favourite Austrian poet. I have never been asked this question before; I think this is something only a British scholar would ask. My answer was Ernst Jandl, who of course is not really known outside the German speaking world, as poems, and especially his poems are virtually impossible to translate, although this book “Reft and Light” might provide a start. His work includes everything that has been called ‘experimental poetry’ exploring the limits of language though visual poetry, sound poetry, concrete poetry and more. Born in 1925, as a young man, even though he tried to avoid it, he was drafted to fight in the Second World war as soon as he left school, and eventually ended as a prisoner of war in Britain, from where he returned in 1946. He remained radically anti-war and anti-fascist all his life. After the war he completed his studies and worked as a teacher for German and English. He meticulously planned and choreographed his readings, which were very popular, sometimes including music. He loved Jazz, but also was an early fan of Rap and Hip Hop, as he liked to draw on the language of the ordinary, the people. Many of my favourite Jandl poems are deceptively simple, you could say minimalist, and often they are absurdly funny. Some poems, as this one, were written in English :

i love concrete 
i love pottery  
but i’m not 
a concrete pot.

In the seventies he started to write poems in what he called “heruntergekommenen Sprachen” – in a “deranged” or “degenerate language” – grammatically incorrect, or simplified language, as foreign workers and speakers of German might speak. I remembered his ‘deranged language’ when I was thinking about lolcat language, and I am hoping to find the time to write something about Jandl and Lolcats in the future. In a way his deliberate attempt to deconstruct, to dismantle language was a bit like lolspeak. I bet he would have enjoyed lolcats. Somewhere I read, that attempts to write lolspek in German have failed. They should just have a look at Jandl’s poetry – he’s invented it, before lolcats were born.