Is This a Poem?
For some time, in my work as both an artist and poet, I’ve carried this quiet, subconscious understanding of poetry (specifically, written forms of poetry) as a visual composition, and not just a literary one.
When I was putting together my first poetry collection, I began to sit more consciously and deliberately with that idea of poetry existing within a visual language.
Aside from the writing of the poems themselves, there was this whole process of putting together the puzzle pieces of how the poems would sit on the page — a process that was often grounded in elements and principles found in visual design. In thinking about line breaks, I was not only considering rhythm but also the visual balance and shape of the poem as well. I was thinking about what would surround the words, about negative space. I was thinking about the visual impact of an em dash versus a semicolon.
Even after I finished putting together my collection, I was still thinking about those elements, and noticing them (or rather paying more attention) to the ways those aspects showed up in poetry that wasn’t my own.
And that’s how the channel “is this a poem” came to be, as a space to think about poetry as a visual arrangement, as a thing to be looked at.
This essay by Nicole Rudick explores the work of Renee Gladman. Her work sits in this very wonderful shared space of the written and the visual, as she uses drawings as a form of writing and writing as a form of drawing.
Her drawings can be found listed as poems on poetry websites or in poetry journals. There is a wealth of delicious considerations within the essay about writing and drawing. For example, when Rudick talks about Gladman’s use of architectural representations in her drawings “as a metaphor for essay-building, poem-building, idea-building, language as a built environment and as a space of community.”
This poem by Sanna Wani is one that I come back to often. I’ve come to think of these no-punctuation poems as “run-on” poems. I am really interested in all the ways that the lack of punctuation kind of forces you to give fuller attention to the poem. You have to hold this constant awareness of the words before, the words now, and the words to come, in order to find your pause or break or end of the sentence. Especially when read aloud, this need to find pause, to breathe, is vital, but the breath isn’t given to you by the poet. I’m also curious about the possible differences in how people may punctuate a poem like this (perhaps one person may put a period where someone else would place a comma, or an exclamation mark).
I’ve found myself particularly interested in work where the visual form furthers the literary meaning of writing, unlike forms, such as some concrete poetry, where achieving a particular visual result seems to serve as the primary purpose, with the literary quality of the writing itself being almost secondary or unimportant. This distinction is explored in this essay by the poet Mary Szybist. Through Helen Vendler’s visual rearrangement of George Herbert’s “Prayer,” Szybist looks at how carefully considered visual renderings of a poem can direct a reader to new contemplations or insights about the poem.
In exploring poetry as a visual arrangement, another aspect I begun to look into was directionality, or the written orientation of a poem. This particular aspect was one I hadn’t considered at all until I came across poems written in other directional forms. This poem by Marwa Helal is written in a poetic form called the Arabic, which rejects a left-to-right reading of it, despite this being the established directionality of English, the language it is written in. In this visual arrangement (and it is visual, as when read aloud, the direction of the words on the page can be concealed), the poem refuses to assimilate into the structures of the English language. In that, there is a really interesting rejection or resistance to the dominant global languages and a preservation and prioritization of the structures and forms of “othered” languages.
I’m also interested in poems that co-opt structures that are otherwise almost decidedly non-poetic in their conventional usage. So, Venn diagrams as poems, flowcharts as poems, indexes as poems, glossaries as poems, graphs as poems. Or maybe it should be “poems as ______.” I’m curious about the ways that encountering poetry in these forms could possibly infuse the forms or structures themselves with a lingering sense of poeticism, even when met in their more standard, non-poem usage.
Sharon Neema (she/they) is a visual artist & poet based in Nairobi, Kenya. They are endlessly curious about process, embodiment, inner landscapes and community.