Karl Kempton's essay: a brief history of visual poetry that goes a long, long way

Nothing delights the reading eye more than information that comes from enlightened & impassioned sources. When Ed Baker introduced me to Karl Kempton's essay entitled "Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions" ["VP"], & especially when I saw the detail and academic richness, the historical breadth and faithfulness to Vispo aesthetics, I knew it was going to be a significant read. And whether the poet is sympathetic to this particular style, and tradition, or not, there is no reason whatsoever for ignoring it. As in law so in poetry: ignorance is no defense.

Serving as a primer and guidebook, I've found myself dipping into it if only to acquire a vocabulary (or a feel, at least) for the technique & ancestry of a poetics that's becoming increasingly popular (especially in online communities). In my opinion, the best, and most interesting, and also the most controversial work being done today is in visual poetry, and Kempton is right to characterize it in general as a product of a "lineage of recognized influences." ("VP" 2)  One gathers from his survey distinct focal points, attached to recognizable practices and names, but also a fluidity ("borderblur") that marks visual (concrete) poetry in any one epoch as a living witness to what's gone before. Kempton himself is both visual poet and historian: distinguished member of a historical project begun by Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer and Dick Higgins.

Whether Ed Baker's STONE GIRL rock art, Geof Huth's pwoermd and asemic writing & Bob Grumman's mathemaku, contemporary visual poetry would be inconceivable without a common ancestry, a clearly delineated continuum from  rock to stele to illuminated manuscripts from which it draws inspiration & materials. In Kempton's own words, "it is probably safe to say that all approaches to the visual poem after 1900 can be found somewhere in the past from rock art to proto-writing and ideogrammatic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical writing on fixed and portable objects" ("VP" 1). All the types of visual (concrete) poetry in both pre-1900 and contemporary forms (such as Cubism, Collage, Italian Futurism, Fluxus, Minimalism, Orphism etc) are traceable to these "ancestral roots". This is the work's major premise from which everything else falls into remarkably neat classifications according to historical lineage, types & modes of artistic production.

"from rock art to proto-writing"

What seemed to guide the post-1900 visual poetries was a desire to free the word from standard syntax and especially the usual left-to-right horizontal, & up-down vertical, page arrangements, a sort of literary revolution in which avant-gardists strove for a radical reworking of the very materials and space of artistic work, even going so far as to espouse principles of "nihilism, materialization and violence" (16). Nowhere was this radically new textual configuration more intensely developed than in Italy, Brasil, Russia, England, Canada and America: where the best efforts were associated with a "collective by consensus" (20) ideal that brooked no destructive egoism. Visual poetry is by essence community & the freest expression of artistic principles consonant with literary & typographical experimentation done for its own pleasurable sake.

Kempton privileges the names of Apollinaire, Mallarmé, & especially E. E. Cummings ("the father figure of American English Visual Poetry"), considering them rightly as founders of visual poetry's most characteristic forms, certainly the standard-bearers for the artistic developments in the 50s and 60s, such as Fluxus, Concrete Poetry & Visual Poetry, with which we're much more familiar. Avant-garde poetry at this period was nothing if not fluid, adaptive & transnational: as Kempton whimsically says,

American English Concrete believed its cement bag with printed directions came from a moderate measure of Mallarmé mayonnaise & cubic centimeters of calligrammes and cummings crumbs & dishes of dada dashes & Rhine River Valley cement dust bundled and barged Brasil bound after stopping for a handful of England syllable grids and Scotland stone scribed syllables & shipped back north to the East Coast with rain forest Brasilian nut wood frames and Amazon River water & to be fanned dry by Japanese ideogram links and winks.(23)

Among other early American visual & concrete poets, almost as significant as Cummings and who would most likely have gone unnoticed were it not for strong publishers, were Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen. It's regrettable that even in egalitarian America Concrete poetry was somewhat institutionalized and roughly separated from an emerging Visual Poetry movement (26-28), the concrete anthologies of the day (such as Klaus Peter Dencker's Text-Builder: Visuelle Poesie international and Robert Altman's TECKEN: Lettres, Signes, Ecritures ) showcasing the works of only a favoured few.


E. E. Cummings, "father figure"

Kempton's essay is a good beginning as well as a perennially welcome resource for readers & critics (of which I am certainly one). And as the author's indicated in many places, there are many opportunities still for exploring the papers, influences & research materials of scores of untold stories. I'm particularly struck by the presence of so many artists who've been all but ignored or forgotten. The footnotes, works cited, & timelines here are an excellent starting-point for any future studies in the origin & development of visual poetry. Computer technologies, and all the multimedia creations they produce, can only be an even greater spur to more sustained & creative advancement of experimentalist poetries.