Reading Order
“I rejected the ordinary and the extraordinary, because those are rungs one learns how to climb. I do not need a ladder to reach the sky.” – John Yau
A traditional poem, read in English, is read top to bottom, left to right. The tradition of poetry is also a tradition of poetic literacy–of comprehension.
In a visual poem, other ways of reading open up. There are three broad ways to think about how to read a poem that seems to break from the traditional order of reading lines. First, is it accessing a different tradition of “reading”? How do you decide to move your eyes in a comic book? In a painting? In a poster? The 回文詩 is a Chinese poem form that can be read forward and backwards. (See Emily Lee Luan’s book 回 / Return, and her essay Notes on Reversing).
Second, the poet may be inventing a new order of reading. Are there clues for how to read the poem? Arrows or numbers? Try reading a line or stanza and moving to another, then try a different order. Does one way of reading seem to “make sense?” If some ways of reading are perfectly grammatical, and other ways are not, this can be a sign that there is a preferred way of reading.
Third, the poet may be open to many or all reading orders. Or a poem may have no order, or no true order. This might relate the poem to the lyric poetry tradition (poems which often deal with feeling, thoughts, and ideas, and which usually do not involve narrative. Or, it might reimage the narrative tradition of poetry, like DeeSoul Carson’s “Good Riddance,” which is inspired by the video game Hades. Like the video game, every path out of Hades is a path back in, as nobody, not even the prince of the dead, can escape the inevitable.
Reading order can indicate many things–it can represent the mind (stream of conscious thinking), or a resistance to “tradition” or to narrative. If the poem uses a different tradition of reading, it might be in conversation with the associations of that tradition. For instance, visual art is often open to interpretation, and so too might the visual poem that is read like a painting. What is the impact of returning, over and over, to a stanza of a poem not because it repeats, but because you keep choosing to look back to it? As always, look at what the text is saying and see if it aligns with something the reading order says or allows for.
For more on reading order, see: Gestalt Grouping.
Further Examples:
- Douglas Kearney – Afrofuturism
- Monica Ong – Diaspora Nova
- Tyehimba Jess – Olio (look up any of his contrapuntals, or his talks on them)
White Space
“When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” -Jen Bervin
White space is the unmarked page or canvas—it is everything you DON’T write on, draw on, or place image or text. Since white space is the page itself, it can technically be any color.
White space exists in all poems on the page, but traditionally, a poet has very little to no control over much of it, since the publication or press decides the formatting and layout. A short poem on a large page will have a LOT of white space, no matter what you intended. Even so, a text-only poem can increase white space by breaking larger stanzas into smaller ones, or by increasing the distance between each stanza.
A visual poet tends to create white space through intentional decisions about how big an image will be, the shape of a poem—a visual poet often actively creates space and therefore foregrounds it. To see if the poet might be “working with” white space, look for poems that “don’t fill” or “don’t fit” their container. Look for poetry collections that are not traditional sizes or dimensions, and layouts that introduce a lot of the page with nothing on it.
So what does it mean? As with all forms of language, there is no one answer, and any answer depends on context, anything the poem or poet might be referencing, etc.
Here are some associations that could apply to white space:
Space (all the definitions of it), the field, emptiness, breath, time, absence, rhythm (think of how long it takes the eye to find the next word or image), calm, focus (think of a single haiku on a large page), quiet, whiteness (since most pages and screens are white).
A poem that has no white space might feel cramped or oppressive. A poem with a lot of white space might feel airy. Or it might feel exposed. What else is the poem saying or doing that might let you know what the white space might mean?
Further Examples:
- bpNichol
- Erasure poems (see: Nets, by Jen Bervin)
- r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by E. E. Cummings
Letter Style
Though it is commonly done, it is not right to use the same type faces for poems as for the reports of Board meetings. – Bruno Munari
I am using a broad term (letter style) for two interrelated concepts: 1) font choice and 2) style of handwriting. While nearly all traditional poems are typewritten, a visual poem needn’t be, and so we can and should consider handwriting as a tool of the visual poet.
First, what fonts and handwriting share is a capacity for expressiveness. This is somewhere between an art and a science. Based on their appearance alone, what do each of these font choices make you feel:
Fonts can evoke elegance, playfulness, romance, seriousness, severity, fancy, tradition, authority, motion—the list goes on. These qualities apply to both your natural handwriting, and intentional decisions you make. Consider the difference in a hand-written letter that is written carefully vs hurriedly, or one written in print vs calligraphy. How might each of these make you feel? Is there something in the personality of the person you can see in their handwriting or font choice?
Think too about choices you may make when emailing or texting. WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF WRITING LIKE THIS? How would you expect a whisper to be written in a comic book? What color would you choose for someone’s words if you wanted to show they were angry?
Another function of type is historical and referent. Many fonts have deep histories, both in their creation and their use. Caslon was designed in 1722 and was historically used in textbooks. Helvetica is famously used in hundreds of company logos (Microsoft, Toyota, Target, Motorola). A poem title can contextualize a poem, and so too can a font.
There is no shortage of graphic design resources on typefaces. Practical Typography is an excellent one.
Further Examples:
- Douglas Kearney – Black Automaton (Book)
- Kameelah Janan Rasheed – No New Theories (Book)
- Avery Young – neckbone (Book)
Gestalt Grouping
“To make images, you think with them, somehow.” – Etel Adnan
Gestalt grouping is a broad term for our tendency to group together similar visual elements. In a traditional poem, you might group your ideas by stanzas, or in sections, but in a visual poem, you can relate different portions of a poem to each other by color, shape, and alignment. Here are a few:
| Similarity |  |
| Proximity |  |
| Symmetry |  |
This is just the beginning of the ways we order visual information. In psychology, the Gestalt principles are a set of observations first developed in Germany in the 1920s. Bauhaus (and therefore contemporary graphic design) was heavily influenced by these ideas.
Hierarchy is a related idea, and is a big part of graphic design. As above, elements in a poem are grouped by sets of similarity, but now, take into account the “intensity” of each group to signal the order of reading (from most intense to least) or order of importance. I am using the word intensity as a catch-all term for what seems to jump out the most to you as a reader/viewer. Very large text is more intense than very small text. Bright colors are more intense than dull ones. Is a small bright text more intense than a large dull one? Go with your intuition.
Further Examples:
- Eugen Gomringer – “do you think” 2005 (Silkscreen)
- Cynthia Dewi Oka – “Ma: A Multidisiplinary State” (Poem)
- Anthony Cody – Borderland Apocrypha (Book)
The Lyric Image I – Association
“I love the freedom that is created when the text and the image are in juxtaposition—that it creates a kind of associative field that I can’t control.” – Claudia Rankine
Many lyric poems operate through associative leaps, with no explicit logic linking lines together–instead, they are linked through the interiority of the speaker of the poem. Ideas in a lyric poem are often not driven by narrative or by cause-and-effect, but by thematic or emotional resonance:
H.D. – Oread
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
It can be difficult to describe what a lyric poem is about, since unlike a novel which has a story, or an essay which has an argument, a lyric poem is often a set of uncertainties (what does the poet mean by this?) which evoke something in the reader.
Therefore, much of the power of a lyric poem happens between the lines, in what is not said. In what is felt, understood, or guessed at by the reader based on possibilities expressed in the poem. Visual poems create these lyric leaps through the gap between lines and images:
Is the circle mimetic–does it represent a hole, and therefore illustrates “falling” in love? Or is it meant to evoke a cycle–that the speaker keeps falling in love for someone over and over again? Maybe the circle is the moon, and like Li Bai, the speaker is in love with it.
Poems–all poems, from visual to non-visual to everything in between and beyond–are best served by careful reading, and by multiple readings, and by considering what might be being said, while testing it against other things that poem is saying and doing.
Further Examples:
- Roda Avelar – Jotxland Epic
- Rebecca Cross – The Transgressive Body in Film
- CAConrad – Golden in the Morning Crane Our Necks
The Lyric Image II – Guided Interpretation
“What I cannot express, I point out with my finger.” – Montaigne
In a traditional poem, a title can serve as an interpretive catalyst. A partial list of things a title can do:
- set the tone – “Don’t Let Me Lonely”
- give a context – “Harlem” (by Langston Hughes–note how the title informs the dream deferred)
- give a referent – The Sound and the Fury (Refers to a line from Macbeth)
- foreshadow – The Tragedy of Macbeth
- enigmatize- The Emperor of Ice-Cream
- polysemize (to introduce multiple possible readings) – RENT
A visual poem (which of course can have a title too) can do all of the above with its images. “Amazing Grace” sets a tone with its title, and a visual poem can set a tone with glitter. “Jabberwocky” is a mysterious title, and finishing the poem, one might not fully know what exactly a jabberwocky is. So too can a visual poem introduce images which remain just beyond the reader’s reach.
Let’s think about images that act as referents. An image can get the reader to think about something the text never directly asks the reader to engage with. A poem might be about family, but the images include graphs. In poems like those in Monica Ong’s Silent Anatomies, the great contrast between the emotional vulnerability of a love poem and the cold objective minimalism of a graph creates a kind of foil (a contrast used to intensify or highlight a message or character).
Further Examples:
- Vanessa Angélica Villarreal – Crossover Album (Poem)
- Tom Phillips – A Humument (Book)
- m. nourbeSe Philip – Zong! – Book
- Diana Khoi Nguyen – Ghost Of
Performance
“Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a “Hup two three four.” They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
The word lyric shares it etymology with lyre, because in ancient Greece, poems were sung to the music of the lyre. Poetry is deeply tied to performance in the West, and some forms of poetry exist primarily to be read aloud (see: slam poetry / spoken word).
A visual poem might work as a manner of sheet music designed for words. In that case, one could interpret space in terms of pacing, typeface in terms of voice, and other visual elements such as color, texture, shapes, illustrations, or photos as expressive cues for the reader’s body language, facial expressions, or vocal tone, or for the co-occurrence of one reader’s voice with dance, music, other readers, or any other sensory accompaniment. This can be an alluring way to handle visual poetry, though it has its set of challenges. How do you resolve poems with no defined order of text?
Try reading the poem aloud (as best you can). Try it a second way. Did either (or both) feel “true” to the poem? After, look up the poet, or poem, and see if they have performed the piece. See if you can find the same poem performed on a different date—is it the same performance? (Douglas Kearney is a great poet for this exercise)
But all of this is only one model–one of many potential ways to understand or reinterpret a visual poem. Another: what if the visual poem itself is record of a performance of a set of feelings or ideas? What if we think of the visual poem on the page as the equivalent of a recording of a live band?
Furthermore, what if we consider the visual poem as “unreadable.” Some or all of the piece might literally be impossible to read aloud, or possible, but not intended to. In theater, the closet drama is an example of a form of “performance” never meant to be performed except in the reader’s head. Asemic writing is illegible text that nevertheless evokes some of the qualities of language (See Renee Gladman’s Prose Architectures).
Examples:
- Yoko Ono – Grapefruit (Book)
- John Cage – Water Walk (Score for performance)
- Shayla Lawz – Speculation, N. (Book, with QR Codes)
Case Study – Uncanny Emmett Till, by Keith S. Wilson
Making a Visual Poem
“All visual writing is a rejection of, by which I mean an expansion of, regular writing.” -Jim Leftwich
Even if don’t consider yourself an artist or writer, the act of creating gives you new avenues for understanding. But unlike poetry, which has a very low barrier for those inspired by what they read, there are technical barriers in play when it comes to visual poetry.
My first tip is to try to start with what you already know: if you love taking photos, use your phone or camera for your images. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, or Google Slides, or some other program, try that. Get started.
Visual poems also don’t necessarily require much technical expertise. Try creating things by hand. If you want to share your poems, you’ll need to take a photo or scan what you create, but you don’t need to work in a program to create a visual poem. For examples and inspiration, look at Naoko Fujimoto’s “Glyph: Graphic Poetry” (mixed media and paintings), Anne Carson’s Nox (photographs of personal ephemera) and Susan Howe’s “That This,” (collage and photocopy).
Here is a list of other resources.
These programs/apps/websites are fairly quick to learn. They are often free or cheap, and there are lots of tutorials on YouTube, LinkedIn, and at your local library since these programs tend to be used in corporate environments.
- Google Slides
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Canva
- Figma
Programs to Create Visual Poems – High Barrier of Entry
If you already have a lot of experience with visual art, or if have very specific things you are trying to do, you might need a program with a lot of features. These programs often take much longer to learn, though keep in mind you only need to learn the parts that apply to your specific practice.
- Adobe Illustrator (Good for a mix of words and images or drawings)
- Inkscape – Free alternative to Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop (Good for very image/photo heavy poems. Text is difficult to edit in Photoshop)
- Gimp – Free alternative to Photoshop
- Adobe InDesign (Good for very text heavy poems. Images are harder to work with.)
Resources for Images to work with
You should make sure to investigate the rights to any images you use.
- Public Work by Cosmos – Search engine for public domain images
- Wikimedia Commons – Includes public domain images
- Library of Congress Digital Collections – Historical documents and images
- Biodiversity Heritage Library – Scientific Drawings
- Nasa Images – Photos of space
FAQ
Q: Are visual poems inaccessible?
A: They are and they aren’t.
Accessibility as a field of study is concerned with making more things usable by people with disabilities. There are resources for learning about methods for accessibility in poems that require seeing (or seeing colors)–from using larger font sizes, to creating alt-text (text that accompanies digital images which describe the images for the screen readers that blind readers use). An excellent resource on alt-text is the Alt Text as Poetry Project. Creating a version of your work that allows disabled people to experience it is an act of translation , with all the opportunities and challenges that come with translation.
“Accessibility” can also refer to general comprehensibility by a large audience. Since visual poetry has a very diverse, and very “young” tradition (the Epic of Gilgamesh is over 4000 years old!), many more people will have trouble knowing where to start. That’s why this document exists! But what is accessible to one person is inaccessible to another–for some, poetry itself is difficult to understand, and visual poetry is a way in.
If you are interested in more people “getting” your work, the best strategy is to read widely, and to share your work with others and listen to what they understand and what they have trouble with. All forms of speaking are negotiations between what you mean to say and what you do say. You can’t close that gap without starting a conversation.
Q. What is the difference between visual poems, hybrid poems, and experimental poems.
A. The nature of definition always drifts into the prescriptive–telling you what you should call things. I resist this when I can. I mean to define a thing only to make talking about it easier. When a definition fails at that, I am happy to leave it behind. Here are some ways I think about each thing:
Visual poems – I think of visual poems as containing especially important (whatever that means!) or relevant information to the poem. Line breaks are visual elements. If a poem is terribly shorthanded by removing all the line breaks, I might call that a visual poem, even if it contains no pictures, diagrams, etc.
Experimental poems – To paraphrase Douglas Kearney, I think of experimental poetry as a practice, not a poem. Nothing can be experimental without pushing off of something that is NOT experimental, and what is not experimental differs wildly from community to community, from culture to culture, and from community to community. It feels worthwhile to think of what is experimental to my own practice–to my own sensibilities.
Hybrid poems – I think of hybrid work as encompassing more than one form or tradition. It’s all very subjective!
If you are interested in these terms because you are hoping to send poetry to a journal looking for “hybrid work,” or want to buy a book on “experimental poetry,” you’ll have to investigate the community using those words to see what they mean.
Q. When I try to make my own visual poems, how do you choose a visual that isn’t literal?
A. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the literal (or direct) use of images—concrete poems and poems which include direct illustrations are examples where the direct image might be appropriate. But there are strategies for the “lyric image” as I describe throughout this work. The first is to to choose or create an image that only represents one quality of an idea you want to write about. For instance, describing a race with a race track is very direct, but describing the love life of a runner using a race track gives you opportunities to surprise the reader and yourself. Another strategy is to write the poem first and try adapting it to images or drawings afterwards. Again, you may surprise yourself with connections you make.
Image Sources:
All images created by Keith S. Wilson except where follows:
Image: “Gradient of a line in coordinates from -12x+2 to +12x+2.gif”
by Alborzagros via Wikimedia Commons,
CC BY-SA 3.0
(Altered by Keith S. Wilson) Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, sourced from the original mural at Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
Cover of Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions, 2010).