VISUAL POETRY BY IRVING WEISS

Team Sonnet: 14 Lines by 14 Different Canonical Poets
from Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object 

 Appease this virtuous enemy of man     (MARVELL)
 The way which thou so well hast learn'd below, (DRYDEN)
 And dwell, as in my center, as I can, (JONSON)
 As into air the purer spirits flow-- (POPE)
 Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie (WORDSWORTH)
 A chronicle of actions just & bright, (COWPER)
 Cheerful & fresh as ever as ever: let us try (R. BROWNING)
 The grave of joy, prison of day's daylight. (DRAYTON)
 Whom thousand souls devoutly idolize (G. FLETCHER)
 Full in the smile of the blue firmament, (KEATS)
 Rise in thy heart & gather to the eyes (TENNYSON)
 With glist'ring beams, gold streaming where they bent. (SACKVILLE)
        To sing again, beneath the shadowy trees, (RANDOLPH)
        Of tempests can no more disturb thy ease. (VAUGHAN)

If it looks like  a sonnet and reads like a sonnet, then it's a sonnet. Try
it on an English professor without giving the names away and ask him what
period.

Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object  (Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon
Press, 1994) is a collection of 71 poems, the kind you can find in any
traditional anthology, transformed into print objects. 

Why print objects? Because, although poetry is supposed to be an oral art, 
for the last 500 years we've known it primarily from page print: a cluster of
words in the middle of the page, each line beginning with a capital letter,
recognizable stanza shapes on the page, an irregular right margin with rhymes
sometimes clinching the line  endings,  and so on.

Until print as a fixed record of information was extended by new
technologies, from photograph through audio and video to computer; until
modernist verse, becoming a display on page space, disengaged poetry from its
conventional print obligations--until then, the significance of print as such
in traditional verse lay below the threshold of our awareness. Just as the
significance of paint as such in the art of the past became remarkable only
after modernist art gave up imitating nature.

Visual Voices  is about the poem as a print object in a page environment. Now
that most  word-poems, including those I still sometimes write, are
free-verse sprawls on the page, my visual reworkings of  conventional poems
can remind us that the printed poem of the past has always been a subliminal
pictograph on the page. 

And so, most of my subject poems in Visual Voices consist of the
representative black appearance of verse on the white page. My ``visual
voices'' are a kind of light verse whose content is the traditional poem. I am
transforming the print to compromise the sense by making it difficult to
``read'' the poem intelligibly except as a print object. 

The original manu/typescript of Visual Voices has been acquired by the Ruth
and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.

For graphic examples from the book originally composed as manuscript,
typescript, or freehand, or combinations of these modes, please go to
http://www.io.org/~dalopes/rasp/visual.html

For further information, please email: iweiss@washcoll.edu
or send SASE for other graphic examples from the book to:

        Irving Weiss
        319 Rosin Drive
        Chestertown, MD 21260