The Question of the Text Element in Visual Poetry

Visual poetry often has the odd requirement of a textual element to make it poetry, and this requirement is unnecessary.

Indeed, we already have a sense of poetry as something other than writing when we use the phrase "poetry in motion" when we watch something beautiful such as the flight of a bird or a dance.

Yet something else seems to be at stake in the definition of visual poetry that requires it to have a text element. Now, when used as evidence, the written word typically trumps the spoken word as such, but these instances involve legal agreement where one should have "in writing" the agreement itself. Poetry is usually considered something written or spoken, but in this case, the bias tends to be in favor of the spoken as defining poetry in its truest form.

For this bias to wok, written words need ultimately to be meant as spoken words, a line of investigation which Jacques Derrida pursues in his oeuvre. That poetry should ultimately be heard rather than seen is, then, critical to the bias that visual poetry have textual element.

In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound offers the following:

The maximum of phanopoeia [throwing a visual image on the mind] is probably reached by the Chinese, due in part to their particular kind of written language. (42)

This approach allows us think of written poetry (poeia) as primarily graphic rather than as primarily aural and gives us, though our poetic tradition is largely different from that of the Chinese, terms to define visual poetry without reference to the aural by severing its ties to a “textual element”.