Modern Visual Poetry (review)

This learned and thorough book offers a panorama of visual poetry, from Apollinaire’s first “calligramme,” published in Les Soirées de Paris the year World War I began, to the hyperpoetry and holopoems which, as the 20^th century drew to a close, you could access easily on UbuWeb. It takes in the exuberant experiments of the Italian Futurists, the “ascetic exercises” of 1950s Concrete poets, and the Dada-inspired interventions of Lettrists during the 1960s.

It emphasizes the impulse to see—instead of just seeing through language—that marks all visual poetry: the interest in the printed page as a surface bearing a design. It reminds us of the appeal that commercial advertising had for poets like Apollinaire and Marinetti, and of the technological developments that were transforming advertisements and illustrations during their lifetimes (typesetting, typefaces, and photoreproduction, which made printing a more fluid and creative medium). Modern Visual Poetry reminds us too of the interest Apollinaire and the Futurists took in Chinese writing: pictures of concrete objects, they thought, combining to form words and sentences and thereby suggesting the kind of spatial, not discursive logic which they aspired to themselves with their experiments in simultaneity (“Paris Vancouver Hyères Maintenon New-York et les Antilles” Apollinaire wrote, all in one line, in “Les fenêtres”).