See also Example 8.19 (p. 188) ‘Jouissance’ by student Ben Garcia, which
combines visual experiments with syntactical experimentation: it also
alludes to the Australian poet Michael Dransfield. In addition it includes
some phrase permutation (from Chapter 1), and a simultaneous structure
(from Chapter 3), to make a comment on the uncertainties of post-
modernism (Garcia 2000).
In order to make your writing more visual (Exercise 2f ), try some of the
following strategies:
- Avoid keeping exclusively to the left-hand margin. A line can start at
many different positions on the page. - Don’t always think of the page in terms of the horizontal and vertical.
Words can fill the space in any way and can be diagonal. Use a com-
puter program which allows you to manipulate words visually on the
page. - Think of how the poem looks, and the impression its visual structure
creates. - Write a poem in which the visual structure (at least in part) mimics or
counterpoints the meaning of the poem. - Consider the visual appearance of words on the page in other
languages. For instance, Japanese is a much more pictorial language
than English, and the words tend to visually represent the meanings.
Are there ways we can apply this kind of approach to writing in
English?
Prose poetry, the new sentence
Prose poetry (see Exercise 2g) is an exciting and inherently innovative
medium to work in because, by its very nature, it questions the division
between poetry and prose. A prose poem usually combines some of the
syntactic and metaphorical/metonymical characteristics of poetry, but
also exploits the intellectual, narrative and logical possibilities of the
sentence. In some cases the dividing line between poem and prose may
be rather slight, and it may seem as if the poem could be organised either
in sentences or lines. Prose poetry is a diverse and loose category, some-
times including short meditations or poetic narratives.
A particular type of prose poetry was central to the work of the Amer-
ican Language Poets. Ron Silliman, in a groundbreaking essay, formulated
this as ‘the new sentence’ (1987). In prose poetry of this type, sentences do
not usually follow on continuously or logically. Rather each one is a world
in itself, containing its own narrative, aphorism or image. Every sentence
is equal in weight to the preceding and following one, but the sentences do
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 183