Tab Journal

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