See also Poems.
For an animation of the autobiographical poem Sailing from Belfast please click here.
The movement of the red rectangle after the poem has been fragmented shows the order of reading in the picture space. After fragmentation, lines or parts of lines which are about Northern Ireland are placed to the West, ones which concern Liverpool to the East and ones which concern the sea passage through the Irish Sea in the centre. The poem could be superimposed on a map of this part of the British Isles. This is a static view of the poem in fragmented form:
Almost all poetry so far has been in what I refer to as matrix form - the usual way in which a poem is printed, as a continuous block of lines. In this version of picture poetry, lines or parts of lines are freed from their position in the matrix - this is fragmentation of the matrix - and arranged in picture space.
If a representational picture poem describes events in the sky, where there is a plane, events near a wood on the left and events near a river on the right, then the line or lines or parts of lines which are about these events are not placed in sequence, in the matrix of a traditional poem, but are placed where these events take place in the representation, high up in the picture space and lower down, to the left and right.
In a non-representational picture poem there is more freedom of action in placing the words in the picture space. The designer may take account of considerations which are familiar to artists, such as balance, proportion, deliberate use of imbalance and disproportion, arrangement of masses along horizontals, verticals and diagonals. This is the practice of text design, which offers exhilarating opportunities.
This has important implications for the directionality of a poem and the reading of a poem. The reading of a traditional poem in matrix form is obviously simple: from the left hand side of the first line to the right hand side of the last line. When a picture poem is read, directionality is more complex, as shown by the eye movements of the reader when looking at the picture space. In the animation, the complex eye motions are shown by the movement of the red rectangle. For example, the first lines of the poem may be placed in the lower right hand corner of the picture space. The next lines may direct the viewer to the lower left hand side, to be followed by a shift to top right. There may be frequent pauses, allowing time for concentrated attention on a single part of the picture space and the words in that part of the picture space. Poetry becomes in this way less subject to time. (The non-temporal aspects of poetry and the temporal aspects of visual art interest me very much.)
Faulted poetry gives a way of opening up the texture of a poem. Faulting in poetry is analogous to geological faulting: layers of rock are fractured and a block of rock may move vertically downwards. In the same way, in faulted poetry some or all of the lines are fractured and a block moves downwards, so opening up the interior of the poem, with significant effects upon poetic texture.
I've introduced the new category of allomorphic poetry. Allomorphs have the same words and the same punctuation but differ in the arrangement of the poem on the page or in the size or tone of the lettering. Examples include a poem with unfragmented lines and the poem with fragmented lines, the poem in matrix form and the picture poem. Another example is a centred poem (the poem is centred on the page rather than having a justified left margin, a way of arranging the lines used by James Dickey) and the same poem with a justified left margin.
Allomorphism may give two different textures, close and open. In close texture, there is an effective contrast between the massed black print of the text and the surrounding white space of the paper, the ground, unless other colours are chosen for the print and the paper. In open texture, there's greater interpenetration of print and white space. A faulted poem will have open texture, encouraging the reader to give a more concentrated attention to the words in the interior of the poem, whilst the poem with unfragmented lines in close texture is likely to have a more striking visual impact. The faulted poem in open texture is derived from the allomorphic unfaulted poem in close texture by two operations: opening the lines, to give double spacing, and then fracturing the lines. All these innovations are due to my interest in the morphology of the poem.
The picture poem may be made up of words only, or may include an image in the form of a drawing, painting or photograph, for example, an outline drawing of hills or a fully-realized painting or a photograph of one feature in the picture space. Of course, there's no reason why a design poem should be limited to the size of a page in a book. Large works can easily be produced.
The words in the poem plane - the sheet of paper on which the picture poem appears - may vary in size, in a system of poetic linear perspective and in tone, poetic aerial (or atmospheric) perspective. ('Tone' has the sense familiar to artists, referring to gradations from dark to light.) A picture poem need not have the flatness of a medieval painting, then, but there may be the illusion of depth which came into painting during the Renaissance with the invention of perspective. Linear perspective gives the illusion of depth in a picture by variations of size, Aerial or atmospheric perspective gives the illusion of depth by changes of tone, lighter and darker. In a picture poem which uses aerial perspective, the tone of the print has a gradation from darker, in the foreground, to lighter, in the far distance. Perspective in poetry can be used for contrasts other than spatial, such as temporal contrast, the contrast between the present and the distant past. and the contrast between matters of close concern and matters which are remote.
A picture poem can paint a scene, it can express very vividly the spirit of place, but can also show that a place has a history, has a place in memory, has rich associations. There may be a contrast between two time strata , the present and the past, shown by using lines in the present and past tense. If a poem is about a present-day visit to a place in Northern France or Belgium, with remembrance of the conflict there during the Second World War, and, earlier still, the First World War, then there may be lines of poetry in the picture space belonging to three time strata.
All the material on this page could be included in
the page on Concrete Poetry but here I focus attention on transformations
of the matrix. Some of these transformations lead to a concrete poem, but
not necessarily, and that isn't their only effect.
