182 The Writing Experiment
- Break up words and put the syllables back together in a different way.
- Add prefixes and suffixes to the word.
- Slightly change words by adding or subtracting letters, or systematically
substitute one letter for another. - Mediate between standard English and other languages. Employ a
dialect or pidgin, or intersperse words from another language into
your text.
The visual poem
Linguistically innovative poets often play with the visual layout on the
page. We tend to think of lineation, the arrangement of the poem into
lines, as a very important part of writing poetry. But there is a great deal
else that you can do with a poem in terms of spatial arrangement: you
can place the words anywhere and in any order. You may, in fact, want to
challenge our normal reading strategy (reading from left to right), for this
is culturally entrained—in some languages, you read from right to left. If
writers use the layout on the page creatively, they can encourage readers to
assemble the poem vertically or diagonally as well as horizontally, and/or
in a different order each time. The white space on the page can also be used
to create gaps, that is, as a means of punctuation.
Visual poetry has had a strong presence in the twentieth century, and
was particularly prominent in the concrete poetry movement in the 1960s
and 1970s. In concrete poetry the words visually presented their meanings.
The poems often consisted of visual puns, sometimes only using single
words. A concrete poem tended to look like the word it was referring to:
the signifier and signified became identical. The experiments of the con-
crete poets stemmed from the dadaist, surrealist and futurist movements
at the beginning of the century. Concrete poetry could be more readily
international than other poetry, and thrived on contact between poets of
different cultural traditions because translation was usually not a problem.
Consequently concrete poetry anthologies featured poets from all over
the world. For published examples of concrete poems see, Anthology of
Concretism (Wildman 1970) and Missing Forms: Concrete, Visual and
Experimental Poems (Murphy and PiO 1981), amongst others.
Visual poems range from texts with unusual and visually dynamic
layouts, to ones with strong pictorial elements. Cyberwriting has also given
a whole new dimension to visual poetry, as we will see in Chapter 11. For
two examples of visual poetry see Examples 8.17 and 8.18 (pp. 187–8):
‘In Parallel’ by Yuriya Kumagai (1995a, p. 20) and ‘Tofu Your Life’ by Yunte
Huang (1996, p. 29). (We have already seen Kumagai’s work in a previous
chapter. Yunte Huang is a Chinese poet now living in the United States.)