{"id":38481,"date":"2012-12-05T14:09:51","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T19:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=38481"},"modified":"2014-03-14T19:49:35","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T23:49:35","slug":"vispo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/05\/vispo\/","title":{"rendered":"Vispo"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sun<\/em>.” src=”https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/vispo-235-981×1024.jpg” alt=”” width=”316″ height=”331″ \/><\/a>

Amanda Earl, Sun.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s interviews have long featured single manuscript pages from among the subjects\u2019 writings. They are meant to show the author at work, his or her method of self-editing, of revision\u2014an illustrative supplement<\/span> to the process described at length in the conversations. To me, though, they always exist first as instances of visual artistry. The particularities of each writer\u2019s markings are immediately perceptible: the way Margaret Atwood<\/a>\u2019s handwritten lines appear impatient and vital in contrast with the prim logos of the SAS Hotel stationery on which she penned a poem; the way Yves Bonnefoy<\/a>\u2019s long, spidery insertion lines give physicality to the pallid rows of words; the way David McCullough<\/a>\u2019s xed-out typewritten phrases become so many tiny, busy intersections. In the same way, I\u2019ve always found the looping inscriptions of Cy Twombly\u2019s \u201cblackboard\u201d paintings, in particular Cold Stream<\/em><\/a>, to be a kind of magic\u2014the secret scribblings, writ large, of a mind at work. (It\u2019s no coincidence that Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the army.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m struck by the frequency, in Paris Review<\/em> interviews, with which authors describe writing as being a visual activity. John Edgar Wideman<\/a> imagines his drafts as \u201cpalimpsests.\u201d Don DeLillo<\/a> finds that \u201cthe words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality \u2026 They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.\u201d Nicholson Baker<\/a> admits, \u201cI can fiddle around with something on a screen for days and think I\u2019m getting somewhere, and it won\u2019t be right. Then I\u2019ll print it out and take it to bed, and instantly it\u2019s obvious what\u2019s bad about it, and I\u2019ll cross out, cross out, cross out.\u201d Words become objects, things to be looked at. I\u2019m reminded of Apollinaire\u2019s calligrams, Jackson Mac Low\u2019s grid poems, and Robert Smithson\u2019s Heap of Language<\/em><\/a> (1966), which views words and phrases as \u201cmatter and not ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

In poetry, such notions have long held sway: micrography, or text that forms an image, dates from ninth-century biblical codices; instances of concrete poetry exist in seventeenth-century religious poetry, and also in the early-twentieth-century works of the anarchist Futurists; asemic writing is a wordless, ideogramic form that Henri Michaux described as \u201cinterior gestures\u201d and Roland Barthes called his \u201ccontre-\u00e9criture\u201d (see, again, Twombly and also Jackson Pollock). Poetry that can\u2019t simply be read or heard must be seen, experienced, enacted; how it is interpreted is the reader\u2019s prerogative. In this way, both writing and reading are performance. In the new Winter issue, Susan Howe<\/a> says, \u201cI often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.\u201d In the 1960s, composer Cornelius Cardew wrote a number of indeterminate scores<\/a>\u2014stunning visual experiments\u2014that cannot be read in any traditional way and that, like these examples of poetry, charge the performer with interpreting abstract forms and shapes that allow for an unlimited set of permutations.<\/p>\n

Lest we think visual poetry reached its apogee as a phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, we have The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998\u20132008<\/em><\/a>, a sampling of the current, international state of the art. For coeditors Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill and the anthology’s wide-ranging practitioners, Vispo (a portmanteau of visual poetry<\/em>) is poetry that begins on the molecular level: \u201cIt\u2019s alphabet in every possible and available position you can imagine \u2026 The alphabet [as] a periodic table of speech elements.\u201d And between these scripted platelets is room to shift and stir. If poetry ought to be performative, as James Fenton<\/a> recommends, then it makes sense that in visual form poetry would elicit a kind of motion, an unfolding over the space of a page, and that even its sound would be voiced as a series of discoveries. Movement disrupts the continuity of a sentence, a phrase, a word. And language, unsettled, is unbound.<\/p>\n