5th International Meeting of Experimental, Sound and Visual Poetry

Centro Cultural Recoleta  -  26 . September . 2002  -  Buenos Aires

My Visual Poetry

By John M. Bennett

September 2002

Even before I identified as "poetry" my fascination with the magical properties of language, I was interested in the visual and other physical properties of words. As a child of about five years old I wrote notes and drawings on little pieces of paper, wrapped them very thoroughly and dropped them overboard from the ship in which I was crossing the Pacific Ocean to reach Japan. In Japan, I was confronted with what was to me a very visual experience: Japanese writing everywhere. I couldn't read this writing, but I lived with it for over two years at a very impressionable age, "reading" it in my own way.

This interest and experience became especially evident in my early adolescence when I identified my fascination with using language as poetry. I wrote a prayer to the sun and devised a ritual to go with it, involving a small altar and the burning of a piece of rope found on a beach. Poems were not just metaphysical abstractions, but had a physical presence and operated in the physical, material world. You could see and touch them.

In the early years of my poetry writing, when all my poems were purely textual, I still felt that their visual presence was important. They were oral documents also, to be sure, but things like the spaces between lines, and, more importantly, the blank spaces at the ends of lines, were essential to what they were: the visual silence was a fundamental part of the poems' visual music. I was encouraged in this by the poetry of e e cummings, who often used blank space very effectively.

In 1970 I began making a lot of what could properly be called visual poetry, in addition to my regular text work. The first efforts were visual compositions using collaged phrases and words cut from popular newspapers. In one poem, for example, called "Poet Eating Big Dinner", the words were arranged to form the shape of a table.

From there I proceeded to develop a very personal calligraphy, a kind of drawn writing, which is fairly well-known today to people interested in visual poetry. I often combine the calligraphy with text, or images, or other materials in a great variety of ways. The fact that the hand-writing effects communication through visual as well as literary means; that is, through the "reading" of the drawn and shaped lines, is important to me.

I think "visual poetry" is merely an acknowledgement of the fact that poetry, and probably language itself, is not simply an abstract medium but an integral part of humankind's physical or material reality. Poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry, whatever kind of poetry is really all the same thing: it is part of our body, and it is our body that "reads", knows, and understands it.

Dr. John M. Bennett

Curator, Avant Writing Collection

Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

The Ohio State University Libraries

1858 Neil Av Mall

Columbus, OH 43210 USA

(614) 292-8114

bennett.23@osu.edu