| |
|
› Volume
18, 2012
|
|
 
›
Volume 5, December 2004
Archive:
›Volume
17, 2011
›Volume 16, 2011
›Volume 15, 2010
›Volume 14, 2010
›Volume 13, 2009
›Volume 12, 2009
›Volume 11, 2008
›Volume 10, 2008
›Volume 9, 2007
›Volume 8, 2007
›Volume 7, 2006
›Volume 6, 2005
›Volume 5, 2004
›Volume 4,
2001
›Volume 3, 2000
›Volume 2, 1999
›Volume 1, 1999
|
|
| |
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
Concrete
Canticles: A New Taxonomy of Iconicity in Poetry |
|
|
|
PETER BARRY |
|
|
|
Abstract |
|
|
| This article is about poems
in which some aspect of the overall shape is
representational, pictorial, or expressive. One of the
earliest practitioners of this kind of poetry in English was
the religious poet George Herbert (1593-1633), whose book
The Temple
contains well-known examples such as
‘The Altar’ and ‘Easter Wings’. In the latter, as
illustrated, the two stanzas are formed into the shape of an
angel’s wings, as conventionally represented in religious
paintings - this poem is further discussed below. Until
around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
poems like this were occasional oddities, but since then a
considerable tradition has grown up of poems which have to
be
looked at
for meaning as well as
read for meaning. I will try
to map out this tradition in what follows, identifying
different ways in which the ‘looked-at’ and the ‘read’
elements are balanced or blended. I will suggest three basic
categories of poems of this type:
firstly, the
Verbal/Visual type, in which the verbal element is dominant,
and the visual element secondary (as in the case of ‘Easter
Wings’);
secondly,
the Visual/Verbal kind, in which the visual is dominant and
the verbal secondary; and
finally, the
Visual/Verbalist kind, in which the visual element again
dominates, and the verbal is merely a residual trace, in the
sense that the poem actually has no words at all, but traces
of some aspect of the reading process are present, as will
be illustrated. The article will consider three examples of
each of these three types.
Keywords:
poetry and iconicity; Edwin Morgan; Bob Cobbing; concrete
poetry; Ana Maria Uribe; Mary Ellen Solt; David Miller;
lvaro de S; poemic poetry; asemic poetry |
| |
|
BACK
|
|
|
