SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 116-121

Bohn, Willard. Modern Visual Poetry. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 321.

This learned and thorough book offers a panorama of visual poetry, from Apollinaire's first "calligramme," published in Les Soirées de Paris the year World War I began, to the hyperpoetry and holopoems which, as the 20^th century drew to a close, you could access easily on UbuWeb. It takes in the exuberant experiments of the Italian Futurists, the "ascetic exercises" of 1950s Concrete poets, and the Dada-inspired interventions of Lettrists during the 1960s.

It emphasizes the impulse to see—instead of just seeing through language—that marks all visual poetry: the interest in the printed page as a surface bearing a design. It reminds us of the appeal that commercial advertising had for poets like Apollinaire and Marinetti, and of the technological developments that were transforming advertisements and illustrations during their lifetimes (typesetting, typefaces, and photoreproduction, which made printing a more fluid and creative medium). Modern Visual Poetry reminds us too of the interest Apollinaire and the Futurists took in Chinese writing: pictures of concrete objects, they thought, combining to form words and sentences and thereby suggesting the kind of spatial, not discursive logic which they aspired to themselves with their experiments in simultaneity ("Paris Vancouver Hyères Maintenon New-York et les Antilles" Apollinaire wrote, all in one line, in "Les fenêtres").

Modern Visual Poetry treats iconic effects such as those produced in Apollinaire's Calligrammes (or "idéogrammes lyriques," as he thought of calling them), where words are arranged to form the outline of an object (a clock or a necktie, for example), or lines are massed to form a solid shape (a house, say), as well as more abstract, analogical effects, such as those achieved by Gino Severini in "Danzatrice = mare" (Dancer = sea, 1914). Severini described this drawing as an attempt at "literature-painting." It includes [End Page 116] numerous verbal phrases (GIRO RAPIDISSIMO, for example, or VERDE VERDISSIMO, not to mention onomatopoetic outbursts like szszszSZSZSZSZSZSZ), all threaded in among abstract forms (intersecting curves, propeller-like shapes) which are "combined," as Bohn puts it, "to produce the impression of frantic rotary motion" (56). Severini was impatient, we learn, with poetico-visual experiments that were merely mimetic. He didn't want to represent a race car, but speed itself; he was interested in the "absolute dynamism" of reality, which he thought of as a vast circle of analogies and contrasts among colors, shapes and sounds. Whence the swirl, in "Danzatrice = mare," which draws the dancer's spins, her flaring skirt in blues and greens, toward the ocean's colors and curving waves with light dancing on them.

Bohn brings out the tension between the verbal and visual dimensions of visual poetry—the interference of poem with picture and picture with poem. But he also shows the intriguing humor of works such as "Prose," by the Lettrist Alain Satié, wherein the images look like comics, but the bubbles rising from the heads of the sexy brunette and the champion skier contain an indecipherable Martian alphabet.

He stresses the appetite for speed in Apollinaire's "telegraphic style," and shows how ideograms prune away verbosity, but he also dwells on the demand that opaque, materialized language makes on readers to slow down, look, and forget the race to the end of the sentence (or stanza, or poem) where the meaning will come clear.

He emphasizes the Futurists' determination to free words (from the constraints of syntax and from their subordination to concepts); he observes, moreover, that the Futurists' ideographic experiments were meant to bypass civilization—"to recapture the forcefulness of primitive speech and early forms of writing" (51). He devotes plenty of attention to the great sloganeer Isidore Isou, whose determination was to break words down into rubble and start anew from shards (letters). But he also explores productions by Lettrist colleagues of Isou such as Gérard-Philippe Broutin, whose "My Wrappings for Eternity," conveys the impression that we are all imprisoned in language: "enmeshed," Bohn says, "in a network of signs...