This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation I just discovered a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading “Via”, a poem composed entirely of English translations of the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

It might sound like a thin idea, but it’s mesmerising to listen to. What’s more, even if you know that translation is a complex process that makes meanings rather than just safely transporting them from one language to another, the repetition and the variations together really bring it home in a way that just reading the words doesn’t. So her reading is a beautiful piece musically, but it does something intellectually, too, that’s hard to precisely put a finger on.

Bergvall is one of a number of practitioners who are blurring the line between poetry and the visual arts. In a sense, of course, that line has been blurred for as long as poetry has been written down; as I’m fond of pointing out (entirely spuriously), the very first word of English poetry is both a sound and a graphic image more than it is a piece of straightforward semantic content. In the twentieth century concrete poetry — making the graphic elements of typography part of the work — was a movement of the avant garde, but anyone who’s read some books printed in the sixteenth century, or looked at a reproduction of a Chaucer manuscript, will know that these concerns have always been important.

Treating them as such, however, cuts against a curious fetish that developed in literary criticism for the “text” — something that could be easily reproduced and consisted only of those aspects of language that the logical positivists would have considered significant. I’m not aware of any conscious connection between The Criterion and the Vienna circle (perhaps there was one, I’m no expert) but there must have been something in the air in the first half of the twentieth century. In effect, it was that the important things about language were the combinations of abstract syntactic units — tokens of lexemes, say. How each token was instantiated wasn’t so important. A Shakespeare sonnet chiseled into a block of stone, say, was the same poem as it was on the printed page of a modern edition.

This marginalised at least two important aspects of poetic practice: sound and image. A poem looks like something, and sounds a certain way; these are aesthetically important, too. Of course the layout of a poem on the page matters, and modernist poets began to experiment with using the space of the page more and more. Later in the twentieth century, poets continued to use words to make images. The results are as richly different as can be imagined, and there are many different aesthetics that emerge from the need to interpret written text as a plastic phenomenon.

Dick Higgins’s book Pattern Poetry is good on this “minor history”, as Deleuze would call it. But my key point is that all poetry is visual poetry, just as all poetry is musical. These are important aesthetic aspects of the work that an unwarrantedly abstract kind of criticism often misses.

The excellent Penn Sound site has more recordings of Bergvall’s work as well as an interview. In a nice piece of circularity Bergvall, whom I discovered through a top-ten-of-Ubuweb list, made her own top ten, which is also worth a look.