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.

Ed Baker's "DE:SIRE IS"

                                                          Chin Fay Ling

1 of 26 LIMITED EDITIONS signed and stamped by the author, DE:SIRE IS is a welcome addition to my personal library of the writings of American visual poet Ed Baker. This 12 page chapbook published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press (Newton-Le-Willows in the UK) is unlike other Baker publications in that visuals (except for the Chin Fay Ling dancing image on cover & personal stamp) don't appear in the text, and the poems, untitled, printed in a light small serif font (almost too wispy for the page), are set in a long vertical (top-to-bottom) format that give the act of reading a scroll-like feel. The text is mostly left-justified with the exception of one smaller centered piece that concludes the work's first section.

Ed's written in my copy, "What's a phantasy?" beside a self-portrait, as if it were my own personal epigraph for the poetry ahead. Baker's stamp is another curious way to introduce himself: perhaps a distinctively Eastern take on the idea of authorial intention.The stamp (as Baker's told me in email correspondence) is a chop carved/made by artist Wink K. Leong in Portland, Oregon. Baker's Chinese name was given to him in 1973 by Angela Jung Palandri, a leading teacher/scholar at that time in Oriental Studies." The name reads", as Baker says, " P'ei Ai Te [that] translates to "Truth", "Love". Te is a "proper name" it is Chinese characters not Korean.... though Kanji is Kanji all around."

The work could be the first time (with its absence of Baker STONE GIRL visuals) the poet deals with a textuality of the page. Some simple typographical manipulations are alone sufficient to homage his Chin Fay Ling muse who is everywhere both inspiration and addressee. Textuality, yes, but without the usual lyrical void of much experimental writing today. DE:SIRE IS is a lyrical, narrative and minimalist work, seeming to unify a diversity of artistic modes in one dominant muse-figure; and spacing, ellipses and capitalization are among many possible ways to create verses that, far from problematizing, respectfully advance traditional contexts. The effect is not one of hybridity but homogeneity :

                                                                     desire is......

space   everything                                                                              to write into this
                                                                                                         is possibility  as

                                                                      BRUSH MIND

None of the cold, abstract verbal play for its own sake in which the image is substituted for conceptual experimentation. Poetry in Baker's hand (and poetry for him is a manual skill: artisanal, above all) is never ever overlaid with standard language tricks (flarfs & "mash ups") of contemporary Language poetics. Like all significant cultural expression his work comprises of real materials, stone, paint, wood and language and takes its place in a literary continuum from Blake to Oppen to Corman to Hidetaka Ohno: the result of a disciplined and finely tuned Eastern minimalist style (that I've discussed in previous Baker posts here). The materials here are so attuned to the work's general design and impetus that each line (whatever its syntactical status) can be read individually as haiku or as haiku-lines within a larger narrative:

nurture

woman in the moist  towards

who first speaks /embraces/ an erotic first

or speaks careful of what determines   -care

politics become her
nature

Baker's poetry never interrogates its practice and language (as it is fashionable to do these days): it is BRUSH MIND at work, apt metaphor for the artistic impetus of most of his productions as well as a description of the freeing & nomadic style of work. What makes it contemporary (particularly if Baker seen as growing out of a 70s literary period) is its refusal to limit itself strictly to genre: arguably even Baker's  minimalist poetry ("shorties" as he calls them), art, calligraphy, sculpture all derive from the same experimentalist period as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the watershed New American Poets anthology, and Smithson's sculptures. Baker can play with sentences & mine new semantical fields with the best of them, refusing to let his meanings mesh too easily with spacing, punctuation & lineation, creating playful tensions instead: as in "around and dbls  doubles back up on becoming poe m   you set your/down/margins!"

But poetics won't intentionally try to undo poetry itself: there's too much respect for muse, materials and literary ground Baker walks on. There's too much literary sense. When Baker dropped out of writing years ago it was to work as a builder, the years in between serving to solidify an already developing sense of working with real tools, & building real things. A sense of the materiality of work that isn't the vacuous intellectual game that people like Silliman have turned it into.The result is that Baker's is always an art-affirming " yes  yes  yes" to the prevailing no to voice and authorial design. Lovely poetic artifacts (like "glass bowl", "fish's home") can never be subordinated to triteness: the center does hold (even in the age of Language disanalogy & disfigurement):

edge
towards
sun
night
becomes
moon

's black

circumference

dresses up
center

Here the pains to "reach out" can result in contact with a poetry and language. If the page reads down the whole text (like a scroll), a definite sort of textual artifice, it's still the flowing or parted hair of Baker's muse we're actually envisaging. This is the personalized "phantasy" Baker's invited me to read.And (as I've said) if visuals don't appear in this work, his Chin Fay Ling muse still foregrounds the work, completing an otherwise colourless canvas:

                                        what color
                                         demands
                                         demands
                                             she

                                         punctuate