Reading Visual Poetry

Willard Bohn is distinguished professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Illinois State University.

• 1 List of Illustrations2 AcknowledgmentsChapter 3 1. The Word Made FleshChapter 4 2. Spanish Ultraist PoetryChapter 5 3. Hispano-American PoetryChapter 6 4. French Poetry after ApollinaireChapter 7 5. Italian Futurist AeropoetryChapter 8 6. Brazilian Concrete PoetryChapter 9 7. Digital PoetryChapter 10 8. Eyesight and Hindsight11 Notes12 Bibliography13 Index

The title here is literal. Bohn provides readings of notable 'concrete' poems—poems formatted into a picture or visual design (kinetic digital as well as static print) rather than standard lineated text—from a range of modern literary moments and orbits (Spanish, French, Italian, and Brazilian). The author traces neither the history nor principles of the literary movement as such, nor the development of the genre itself. He follows a straightforward, three-part procedure for engaging the poems: first, perceiving the visual design as a gestalt; second, deciphering the text in its unorthodox and often multiple physical orientations; third, synthesizing the visual and literary import. Interested primarily in the dynamics of "reading visual poetry" as a process, he works inductively, translating and negotiating his way through each poem largely through trial and error, considering and discarding one interpretative possibility after another and bringing the reader along as an eavesdropper on his reflective critical deliberations. The effect is delightful: the readings are as much performance as analysis. And the analysis is particularly illuminating in revealing the semiotic and ontological intricacies of a poetry that many still consider, even after more than a generation of serious scholarly attention, little more than gimmickry. Summing Up: Recommended.