ciborgs

Kaldron: An On-Going Investigation of Visual Poetry
So, What's Visual Poetry?

Visual Poetry runs under many names and definitions. Some of the names are descriptive of different modes of the same thing. Some are silly or unfortunate. Some forms of this type of art are radically different and come from opposed conceptions of what poetry is. Concrete, a rigid, minimalist form, relying heavily on, and partly inspired by, the printers' type used in newspaper headlines, is the best known. We see the possibilities of art forms under the visual poetry name as extensive. Some practitioners want to keep it a highly verbal art, Others dispense with words altogether. The late, great sage David Cole put forward several definitions. Perhaps the one most often accepted is that visual poetry is a form of visual art that comes from a literary background. His antecedents were his university instructor, William Empson, and his poetic model was Walt Whitman - hardly men who were at a loss for words. Some argue for a visual poetry highly dependent on words written in standard alphabets. My definition is poetry that is inaccessible to people who can not see it. No matter how you read it to them or explain it to them, something is always missing if they can't see it. Although I have spent time studying the iconographic writing systems of pre-Columbian central Mexico, which didn't depend on a spoken language, and see no reason for poetry to include words, my own visual poetry is usually highly verbal. Karl Kempton's is usually not. Despite the difference, we have had little argument about it during the past 30 years. The definition for Kaldron has always been to spread as big a tent as possible and to avoid all dogmas. We both have agreed, however, that what gets the most attention elsewhere gets less in Kaldron because it is already more widely known and we want to bring forward the less well known types of visual poetry. In the printed magazine, Kempton put less attention on some modes that became more widely accepted.