Category: Visual Poetry

As part of the larger conversation about poetics, design, and accessibility that Tab Journal encourages, Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic interviewed five visual poets whose work we’ve published. As we move well into National Poetry Month, we want to recap these conversations.

Tab Journal welcomes visual poems that challenge traditional conventions of page, line, and poetic form. To use the term visual poetry is, perhaps, to gloss over the fact that typeset text is itself visual. What exactly do we mean by the term visual? And what does this imply about poems that are spoken aloud—or read with the ears instead of the eyes? How can design thinking help us explore how visual and textual elements make meaning together?

See the March 2022 issue (Volume 10, Issue 2) for the interwoven interview. In addition, over the past month, each poet has shared additional thoughts and practices here at Tab Musings.

Visual Poetry: Monica Ong

Visual Poetry: Kylie Gellatly

Visual Poetry: Keith S. Wilson

Visual Poetry: Maria DeGuzmán

Visual Poetry: Donna Spruijt-Metz

Tab Journal has published several visual poems over the last two years. Perhaps because we use design thinking in our approach to poetry, we’re interested in the definitions, practices, and possibilities for poets who are consciously using visual elements to create meaning. Tab Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic talked with five visual poets for the March issue: Maria DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson.

Here, she talks in further detail with Donna Spruit-Metz.

Lydia Pejovic: Your work in Volume 10, Issue 1, of Tab Journal juxtaposes documentary material, in this case a death certificate, with poetry. How did you begin working with these visual materials?

Donna Spruijt-Metz: Such a good question. Allison Albino, a dear poet friend of mine, sent me one of her poems that was bouncing off a family snapshot. We send poems to each other all the time for feedback.  I loved the poem, how it helped her to talk about things that she hadn’t talked about in her poetry before. At the same time, I was going through boxes and boxes of my mother’s archives. I had been putting that off for decades. I was really having a hard time of it. She suggested I try doing the same thing with some of those materials. And so I embarked on that journey and it really was amazingly painful and fruitful—like writing poetry so often is!

Lydia Pejovic: Your previous career was as a professional flutist. In what ways do you see poetry and music interacting? Can a visual piece be musical? 

Donna Spruijt-Metz: Another good question. I think poetry and music ALWAYS interact—or I might say that my favorite poets all have music in their language. I wrote an entire ekphrastic cycle based on J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion—some of them are in the forthcoming book. That was one of my favorite pieces to play. So, in those poems, I was listening to each section again and again, and crafting the work to kind of ‘match’ the section. A direct relationship, thus. But in general, I listen for the music in the lines and in the poems—the meter, the arc—crescendo and decrescendo, tempi, register, even pitch. Yes. I really do think that all plays a part in making a poem stunning, memorable, worthwhile. I have been memorizing Christian Wiman’s poem “Every Riven Thing.” That poem is SO musical—so much music. The lilt in the beginning, the change in meter with the change in subject matter. He’s a genius at it.

Lydia Pejovic: How do you decide, then, which poems should be visual? Your poem “I Find This in My Mother’s Effects,” for example, uses the actual image of the death certificate, possibly functioning as visual evidence of your mother’s effects. Are there specific themes or concepts that work better visually?

Donna Spruijt-Metz: Oh, I don’t think I work in that direction. Or I haven’t yet, but it is a really tempting idea.

Up until now, it has been the shock of seeing a picture or document, and thinking, I have to write about that, but I need the picture to be there for me—or the reader ?—otherwise it won’t work. I can’t say what the picture says. But it is an intriguing idea to be working on a poem and think, I can’t get the ‘aboutness’ right—this needs a picture, or it reminds me of a picture. 

Previously in Visual Poetry: Maria DeGuzmán

Also, see the March 2022 issue (Volume 10, Issue 2) for more from all five visual poets who participated in this conversation.

Tab Journal has published several visual poems over the last two years. Perhaps because we use design thinking in our approach to poetry, we’re interested in the definitions, practices, and possibilities for poets who are consciously using visual elements to create meaning. Tab Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic talked with five visual poets for the March issue: Maria DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson.

Here, in excerpts from a longer exchange, she talks in further detail with Maria DeGuzmán.

Lydia Pejovic: In Volume 10, Issue 2 (our Current Issue as this post goes live), your visual poetry functions somewhat like captions for photographs of what seem to be abstract images. How did you come up with this combination and decide the relationship between text and image?

Maria DeGuzmán: I see what you call photographs of abstract images as both abstract and subtly figurative, as formlessness taking form, and form reshaping into other forms. For me, captions to photographic images (whether figural, abstract, or both) were and are inspired by many sources: Egyptian hieroglyphs, medieval illuminated manuscripts, emblem books, children’s picture books, film (especially silent films), newspapers, comics, advertising, Surrealist experiments with word and image, album covers, book covers, video, etc. In most cases the caption attempts to anchor the polysemy of the mute image. But, the mute image continues to radiate, or vibrate, (r)evolving possibilities, slipping around and away from that attempted anchoring, as does the caption itself, despite its putative function.

Either way, one is faced with a melting, deliquescence, or dissolution of the seemingly fixed and “solid,” even when one is working with figural, concrete images. These dynamics of signification are born out of the tensions between language and consciousness. Much of poetry would seem to spring from the attempt to go beyond the constraints of language. These tensions between language and consciousness drew me and continue to draw me to water. Why not work with liquidity, with water, one of the most seemingly familiar, yet strangest, of liquids, a compound substance with anomalous properties, evoking not only contemplation, but forms in motion, among them, animate things, life itself as we know it (and don’t know it) on this planet?

Captions are, in “Trauerspiel of Water,” captions for photographs of water being swirled around a bowl. The combination of captions and photographs of swirling water creates a juxtaposition between what, at first glance, might seem like the fixed (the caption) and the unfixed (the water), between intentional order and random chaos. However, the contrasting juxtaposition morphs into a surprising conjunction as the watery image assumes form (rather than formlessness) and challenges the assumed prerogative of written or spoken language to have dominion over form-making.

Lydia Pejovic: Do you spend a long time interpreting what you see in your photographs/images, or do you write based off of first impressions? 

Maria DeGuzmán: I write from a combination of first impressions and time spent interpreting and researching what I see in the photographs. The first impressions come to me from the emotional impact of the image or images in question. These first impressions surge, a fragment of melody, not in words, but in tones and vibrations. I have a synesthetic response to them. The time spent interpreting and researching comes about through my interaction with the details of the images, details that correlate with striking forms and, furthermore, resemblance (in the midst of formlessness) to bodies (human and more than human), objects, land, oceans, maps, scenes, faces, squiggles of light that appear, to me, like numbers, letters (from a variety of alphabets), symbols, characters from shorthand, and so forth. 

Lydia Pejovic: How do you go about creating your images? How do you choose the color, how much to swirl the water, etc.? Do the images often turn out differently than you expected them to?

Maria DeGuzmán: I fill a metal bowl with water. I then place this vessel on a counter or table near a window or a light source (sun, full moon, candle, sometimes an incandescent or fluorescent light). With my left hand, I stir the water in the bowl with a metal spoon. With my right hand, I hold a small, digital camera. I take photos while I stir, varying the angle of the shots.

Later, I examine the photos one by one to see what shapes the water has assumed, what shapes “appear” in the water. I do not choose the color or, a prioiri or consciously, how much to swirl the water. The colors come from the fact that the water acts as a molten, shape-shifting prism that bends or refracts light into its constituent wavelengths. The luminosity and the variegated hues derive from the interaction between light waves and the swirling waves of water in a metal bowl.

This experiment and/or ritual is designed to override conscious control and expectations. The images are not manipulated. They are the product of “straight photography” that yields queer results. The images result from the camera’s freezing of refractive and reflective patterns in the water swirling too quickly for the naked eye to grasp. However, what is “there” involves continual acts of interpretive perception, vision, on the part of viewers, myself included. 

Previously in Visual Poetry: Keith S. Wilson

Next Up in Visual Poetry: Donna Spruijt-Metz

Tab Journal has published several visual poems over the last two years. Perhaps because we use design thinking in our approach to poetry, we’re interested in the definitions, practices, and possibilities for poets who are consciously using visual elements to create meaning. Tab Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic talked with five visual poets for the March issue: Maria DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson.

Here, she talks in further detail with Keith S. Wilson.

Lydia Pejovic: You write a mix of both visual and text-only poetry. Your poem in Volume 9, Issue 1, uses a strip of photographs as part of the meaning and design, and the poem seems shaped in relation to that. How do you decide which pieces should be visual and which should be wholly textual?

Keith S. Wilson: I try to remain open to the possibility of my own writing, especially outside of what I first intended. I used to write with the intention or hope, in the back of my head, of turning what I wrote into a finished piece. This is maybe like chiseling away at a statue, where there is a point at which I’ve concluded so many possibilities that what I have is final. This tends to happen with text-only poems. But now I view my writing as material, like any stanza I write is a piece of a collage, or a color of paint. So it MIGHT turn out to be strong when I’ve pushed it as far as it can textually go, but it might become something else entirely when I cut it apart, move it around, add it to something else.

Lydia Pejovic: How does the placement of lines in a visual piece change and/or enhance meaning?

Keith S. Wilson: I’m interested in a sense of play. In many of the understandings of that. Play means wiggle room and I’m interested in that–in one’s placement space allowing for more than one understanding of something. And play implies a sense of freedom and even joy sometimes, which comes sometimes through movement through space. But play can also invoke discipline and intentionality as well, as when one plays an instrument.

Lydia Pejovic: I saw that you have an interactive poem entitled “love” that I found to be innovative and interesting. How does technology influence the way you create visual poetry? Does it offer new opportunities?

Keith S. Wilson: It changes everything. Digital poetry shares a lot with certain kinds of theater and with video games—you can involve the direct actions of a reader/viewer. Which means you can implicate them, you can involve them or collaborate with them. There’s a barrier of entry into writing and coding this kind of work, and with engaging with it since technological literacy is often lower than reading literacy (and requires that kind of literacy as well), so it also closes off certain kinds of immediate understandings as well, but there are things I can do in an interactive poem that are not possible in a traditional poem.

Previously in Visual Poetry: Kylie Gellatly

Next Up in Visual Poetry: Maria DeGuzmán

Tab Journal has published several visual poems over the last two years. Perhaps because we use design thinking in our approach to poetry, we’re interested in the definitions, practices, and possibilities for poets who are consciously using visual elements to create meaning. Tab Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic talked with five visual poets for the March issue: Maria DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson.

Here, she talks in further detail with Kylie Gellatly.

Lydia Pejovic: Your visual poetry is also erasure poetry. How do you find your source material for these poems?

Kylie Gellatly: Erasure is subversive by nature, which gives the source text a very specific role in the work. In this project, I wanted the process to enact the themes and vice versa, and thus made sure that the source texts matched the process in content in order to explore the fuller concept. Because this work is not erasure in its traditional sense, but an extraction of content from its context, I was interested in exploring what exactly those differences mean. The removal of substance from its content provided the mode for me to work with the concepts of gastronomy, consumption, human and animal relations, and gender.

I selected two cookbooks and a hunting guide. Using multiple texts helps me think of them as ingredients, each with its own flavor and chemical makeup, thus interaction. One cookbook was chosen as a cornerstone of hierarchical and masculine cuisine in the restaurant industry (Escoffier), while another was chosen as an eclectic “kitchen garden” book on herbs and spices that includes both histories and recipes (Matter of Taste, Humphrey). The hunting guide is a book on the ethics of hunting and provides a language that, when mixed with the Escoffier’s recipes and the historical text in Humphrey, rounds out the palette. By working with, I am questioning and undermining the language we use around food—how disoriented the ingredient is from its source, how cooking is all action and transmogrification, it is about power of subject over object, and command-based communication: mince garlic, peel carrots, or remove the meat from the bone. 

Lydia Pejovic: How do you create these pieces? How does poetry work differently based on whether you create it by hand or by using digital software?

Kylie Gellatly: What I love about working with found poetry is that what I notice when I come to the page is always different and depends on the headspace I am in. It makes the headspace something I can work with while creating these poems by curating a space to be coming from. I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading about the concepts I am working with, which has provided a curated space from which to write from, as these poems (so far) are not explicitly depictive of the subject, but are coming out of the questions that arise. As I currently am an omnivore and worked for a time as a butcher, the question is most often some form of how do I feel about this? but is always working with this tension. 

The content and the process of this project is inseparable from the content, while the product—the visual poem—is almost incidental. It’s something I question a lot. With my first book, The Fever Poems, it was truly incidental and I was often saying, “I need to glue it down so the words don’t blow away.” Which is still true, but with this new project, the poems themselves are so dependent on the performance of creating them. With regard to the final visual poem, I am still figuring out how the image works with the text and how I want to direct the image with it. Sometimes it feels too obvious to have an illustration of an animal or butchery on the page—even if the poem is not depicting it, the process is. It will take time for me to discover how that signature, so to speak, is working on the finished piece or what else the image can do. Like any art form, the next piece is informed by the one that preceded it. 

Visual poetry requires a lot of trust in one’s own creative process and I put a lot of trust into what words and fragments jump out at me from the page.

Kylie Gellatly: In erasure poetry, that trust is usually heightened, as the words that don’t jump off the page are blacked out, but I am using the ones that grab my attention as the seed or prompt of the poem. When first coming to the page, I am careful not to read any of the text from left to right, but rather top to bottom, looking for non-sequential chains of language to work with. A big part of the creativity in this work is being able to hold the word, seeing its potential, while also suspending its context and connotations. This can be more challenging if the book you’re working with is one that is more familiar to you. The confines of the work—of having to work with what is there, or of choosing to search the whole book for one word—are what make this process so rewarding and full of discovery. 

Lydia Pejovic: I’ll add that you also put a lot of trust in editors—you trusted Tab Journal and worked with Creative Director Claudine Jaenichen because the January 2022 design didn’t allow for four colors, for that vibrancy of your original. I’m suggesting, perhaps, what a page can be.

Kylie Gellatly: The image is usually the product of an emptied page—one that has been whittled to a frame after most of the words have been cut out. The emptied pages, when blacked out beneath, signify an erasure, while the ones that have an image laid underneath and are blacked out around the frame, work more as a window or an under the skin depiction. The latter is used more in this project, as what we tend to engage most with is what is under the skin of the animal. 

Previously in Visual Poetry: Monica Ong

Next Up in Visual Poetry: Keith S. Wilson

Tab Journal has published several visual poems over the last two years. Perhaps because we use design thinking in our approach to poetry, we’re interested in the definitions, practices, and possibilities for poets who are consciously using visual elements to create meaning. Tab Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic talked with five visual poets for the March issue: Maria DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson.

Here, she talks in further detail with Monica Ong.

Lydia Pejovic: Your piece “Her Gaze” in Volume 9, Issue 6, mixes images and ideas of women and astronomy. What made you decide to create visual poetry about women and our skies? How do these two topics intersect? 

Monica Ong: “Her Gaze” is a tribute to the astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), who made important contributions to the field including the discovery of comets, and whose labor made possible the scientific achievements of her brother William Herschel. As a poet, I’ve always been interested in hidden histories, and while exploring stories of the sky and astronomy history, I’ve come across many stories not only of what we see in the sky but about who is looking, and wanted to celebrate Caroline, who deserves to be just as revered as her brother. 

Lydia Pejovic: Can visual poetry be used to tell important histories? You’ve provided an image of “Her Gaze” that is in a three-dimensional form, different than the version in Tab Journal. Why is this the appropriate medium to do so? 

Monica Ong: Visual poetry allows me to engage with archives and also interrogate the “gaze.” “Her Gaze” is built upon a set of sketches that Caroline Herschel made of Comet C/1786 P1 (Herschel), which she observed on August 1, 1786, between the constellations Ursa Major and Coma Berenices that became part the first paper by a woman to be read to the Royal Society.

Although the poem is published [in Tab Journal] as a set of images, the physical poem itself exists in the gallery as a reel that the reader views with a ViewMaster, taking an upward gaze. While this mimics the stance of stargazing, what is central the poem’s visual frame is the hand of a woman’s labor. My goal was to make visible the kind of labor that so often goes unseen and under-recognized, especially due to the social hierarchies of her time, not to mention the profession itself.

Lydia Pejovic: I was looking at “Her Gaze” in Tab Journal and noticed that you include words or phrases that exist outside of the circles on the page. How does playing with the ways in which we format language work to convey new meaning? 

Monica Ong: In a way, I’m noticing how parts of a story get left outside the confines of the gaze. There are always people missing from the frame, especially in history, not to mention science history. At the same time, I also enjoy being playful with what a poetic line can be, especially when interacting with other elements like scientific diagrams. From a design standpoint, to confine all the text within the circle would feel flat and claustrophobic. I like the text to feel like it’s floating and sprawling, allowing the eye to wander into new patterns.

Next Up in Visual Poetry: Kelly Gellatly