Visual Improvisation: Cognition, Materiality, and Postlinguistic Visual Poetry

ABSTRACTIn this article, I present a framework for the analysis of postlinguistic visual poetry through a discussion of several works by Canadian poets derek beaulieu and Donato Mancini. This poetry eschews words to manipulate parts or hints of letters, exploring the minutiae of typewritten form for meaning construction. Drawing on recent work In cognitive science, I show how visual poems disrupt common understandings of language through its materiality, how the creators engage In Improvisations around these understandings to develop the unexpected, and how the poetic artifacts prompt dynamic Inferences and Improvised understandings in readers. Meaningful understandings of the poems emerge especially from the development of relational understandings between fragments of letters through the perception of fictive motion and fictive change. I show how cognitive Improvisation facilitates these perceptions and meaning construction In the contrastive styles of beau lieu's and Mancini's poems. I argue that improvisational cognitive processes on the part of both the writers and readers play a crucial role in how postlinguistic forms come to be meaningful within the context of bibliographic and material expectations.KEYWORDScognitive poetics, visual poetry, improvisation, materiality, Activity, asemic, postlinguisticPOSTLINGUISTIC VISUAL POETRYVisual poetry, such as the following untitled poem by derek beaulieu (Figure 1; 2008, 48), foregrounds the materiality of written language through Its forms and spaces of presentation, emphasizing contributions from both visual and verbal modes. As such, it engages with facets of bibliographic, pictorial, typographic, and inferred phonetic forms and conventions as ele- ments of expression. While aspects of visual meaning generally contribute to formal choices in contemporary poetry, such as through line and stanza breaks, visual poetry utilizes the potential of these components extensively, making them essential to analysis rather than optional. It pushes beyond language's references or representations to draw on the materiality of writ- ing itself, Including its medially and technologically derived qualities. Visual poems must be seen to be understood.In this poem, for example, beaulieu manipulates the similar shapes of the letters'a'and'g'to devel- op a form like a looped or knotted rope. Overlay- ing and connecting the similar letters constructs an extended, visual rendition of the word 'gag.' The poem's cyclicality and inverted mirroring-a visual style commonly seen within beaulieu's book- seems to stop compositional expressivity by creating a Mobius strip out of language, effectively gagging written language through Its own forms. The poem also makes a mockery of approaches to language that overlook the letters for the words, thereby also punning on the alternate meaning of'gag' as a farcical joke. The otherwise blank page further emphasizes the singular word and its insular form, adding to the sense of binding and Isolation. Here, the letters and their context enact the verbal content, while also poking at critical approaches that ignore their creative, material potential. This poem exemplifies the semantic and visual synergy employed in visual poetry to construct multiple levels of understanding.Visual poetry's ancient history, which likely began with writing itself (Balan, 1999, 7), primarily Involves the mimetic, imagistic orientations of words seen In shaped, pattern poems (see Higgins, 1987). The recent Influence of the theory and practice of the European avant garde, in particular the visual and non-linear textual productions of Mallarme's Apollinaire's Imagism as well as Futurism, Dada-Surrealism, and Vorticism, widened the creative possibilities for visual-verbal expression (see Bohn, 1986; Drucker, I 996).This typographic and bibliographic expansion prompt- ed and informed theclassical periodofvisual poetry between 1955-1970, known as the International Concrete Poetry Movement, which continued to broaden the possibilities for relating and Integrating form and mean- ing (Perloff, I 99I, Scobie, I 984, 30-32; see Solt, I 969). …

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