User:Stevenarntson/English Composition/Vispo

"VisPo" is short for "Visual Poetry." While many people think about poetry as something that is read aloud, poems are also often just looked at on the page. For this reason, some poets have become interested in creating poetry as part of visible, instead of audible, culture. The worlds of typography, visual art, and poetry all intersect here. Below are some links that will take you to some interesting examples of VisPo on the internet. We'll look at some others in class as well.

Origins of Written Language

 * Mysteries of the Alphabet by Mark Alain-Ouaknin

Visual Poetry

 * "Swan and Shadow" by John Hollander, and an anagrammatic version by Richard Grantham
 * l(a by ee cummings
 * Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire
 * "Constellations" by Eugen Gomringer
 * "The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goth Phase)" by Donato Mancini.
 * Poems That Go
 * Evidence that Everything Is Exploding
 * Fossil Sky by David Hinton.
 * Primiti Too Ta, an excerpt from Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters. This is a great visualization of Schwitters' experimental sound poetry.