It is used in many languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Swedish, among others) and in a vast number of articles and books on poetry (for instance, Faust 1977 Taylor 1985 Adler & Ernst 19 McGann 1993 Drucker 1994 Nazarenko 2003 Greve 2004 Prohm 2005 Bohn 2011 Bradford 2011 Fernández Castrillo 2013). This term has been almost universally acknowledged among Western literary scholars for several decades. It is my impression that poetry that is not arranged in fairly symmetrical stanzas or verses of approximately the same length and horizontal direction tends to be called visual poetry. Courtesy of Dante Pignatari and Ateliê Editorial. 2), and Décio Pignatari's “Beba coca cola” (“Drink Coca Cola”) from 1957, a poem made of only a few repeated words, including cola (“glue”), caco (“pieces”), and cloaca (“sewer”), forming a square-like shape (Pignatari 2004, 128) (fig. 1), Stéphane Mallarmé's “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”), a poem from 1897 famous for its scattered verses (Mallarmé 1998, 266–267) (fig. Recurrent examples of “visual poetry” are, for instance, George Herbert's “Easter Wings,” a poem from 1633 in the shape of a pair of wings (Herbert 2007, 147) (fig. It has been said to exist in “the borderland between literature and visual art” and to work with both “word and image” (Honegger 2002, 5) it has been understood to “combine visual and literary impulses” (López Fernández 2004, 20) it has been characterized as “simultaneous poetry,” meaning that all its constituent components can be grasped at once (Schmitz-Emans 1991, 3) and it has been set apart as simply “poetry meant to be seen” (Bohn 1986, 2). “Visual poetry” has been circumscribed in many different ways. In fact, what is generally but misleadingly referred to as “visual poetry” is characterized by extensive iconicity. Eugen Gomringer's “Wind,” on the other hand, is a standard example of “visual poetry.” Also this poem is certainly visual, even though it is not visuality but a high degree of iconicity that sets it apart from poetry such as Plath's. No scholars refer to Sylvia Plath's “I Am Vertical” as “visual,” but in addition to being visual this poem possesses a certain level of iconicity. In order to illustrate the line of reasoning, two rather different poems are analyzed. Whereas visuality is a sensory trait, iconicity is a semiotic trait consisting of meaning created by way of resemblance, and these two qualities must not be conflated. However, visuality is actually an irrelevant feature for the specific character of “visual poetry” it is iconicity that makes the difference. This article argues for the advantage of applying the analytical perspective of “visual iconicity in poetry,” rather than trying to delimit the problematic category of “visual poetry,” which has been understood to be a type of poetry that deviates from normal poetry in and through its visual characteristics (for instance, poems looking like physical objects).
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