Visual poetry can be defined as poetry that is meant to be seen. Combining painting and poetry, it attempts to synthesize the principles underlying each discipline. Visual poems are immediately recognizable by their refusal to adhere to a rectilinear grid and by their tendency to flout their plasticity. In contrast to traditional poetry, they are conceived not only as literary works but also as works of art. Although they continue to provide visual cues that aid in deciphering the text, they function simultaneously as visual compositions. Whether the visual elements form a rudimentary pattern or whether they constitute a highly sophisticated design, they transform the poem into a picture. Reading Visual Poetry examines works created in Spain, Latin America, France, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. While it attempts to recreate the historical and cultural context surrounding each of the works in question, it is conceived primarily as a series of readings-or rather as a series of readings about reading. This book seeks to interpret a number of poems, which, despite their apparent simplicity, can be difficult to decipher. It explores the process of interpretation itself, which, like the compositions, can be surprisingly complex.

Reading Visual Poetry examines works created in Spain, Latin America, France, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. Besides explicating individual works, it investigates the dynamics involved in reading (and viewing) visual poetry.

A great photograph has the potential to transcend verbal and written language. But how do you create these photographs? It’s not the how that’s important, but the who and the what. Who you are as a person has a direct impact on what you capture as a photographer. Whether you are an amateur or professional, architect or acupuncturist, physician or photographer, this guide provides inspiration, simple techniques, and assignments to boost your creative process and improve your digital images using natural light without additional gear. Chris Orwig’s insights—to reduce and simplify, participate rather than critique, and capture a story—have made him an immensely popular workshop speaker and faculty member at the prestigious Brooks Institute. His engaging stories presented as lessons follow his classroom approach and highlight what students say is his contagious passion for life. In this accessible and beautifully illustrated four-color guide you will: Discover visual poetry in the creative process Use less to say more with your subject matter Learn to see light, color, shape, and expression Understand what gear is essential Create compelling portraits Make lasting memories of your family and kids Capture the outdoors and adventure Begin the transition from amateur to professional Chris also includes exclusive interviews with such photographers as: Steve McCurry, Chris Rainier, John Sexton, Rodney Smith, Joyce Tenneson, John Paul Caponigro, Marc Riboud, and Pete Turner. Share your work with the author and other readers at www.flickr.com/groups/visual-poet and visit the Web site: www.visual-poet.com.

Early in the century, poets expanded the possibilities of their genre by creating sound poems, by dispensing with syntax and punctuation, and by arranging words and letters across the page in new visual patterns. This book explores ways of reading the aesthetically challenging and semiotically subversive texts created by four poets: F.T. Marinetti (1876-1944), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and e.e. cummings (1894-1962). The book shows us how to read these experimental texts in a variety of interrelated ways: as products of each poet's individual aesthetic, as part of the avant-garde's reaction to aestheticism, as efforts to bring art closer to life, and as attempts to c reate a new kind of semiotically and aesthetically 'open' work. The book concludes by emphasizing the individual invention of its four central figures rather than placing them in their usual roles as precursors to the concrete poetry movement of the fifties.

The anticipated second book by the poet Mary Szybist, author of Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them.-from "The Troubadours etc." In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist.

This book collects experimental “visual poetry.” With The Last Vispo Anthology, Fantagraphics spotlights the intersection of art and language in this innovative new collection ― without peer in English ― that gathers the work of visual poets from around the world into one stunning volume. The alphabet is turned on its head and inside-out and the results culminate in a compilation of daring and surprising verbo-visual gems. The Last Vispo is composed of visual poetry (a portmanteau of the words “visual” and “poetry) from the years 1998 to 2008, during a burst of creative activity fueled by file sharing and e-mail, which made it possible for the vispo community to establish a more heightened and sophisticated dialogue with one another. The collection extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with ancient “shaped text,” medieval pattern poetry, and dada typography, pushing past the concrete poetics of the 1950s and the subsequent mail art movement of the 1980s to its current incarnation. Rather than settle into predictable, unchallenged patterns, this vibrant poetry seizes new tools to expand the body of work that inhabits the borderlands of visual art and poetic language. The Last Vispo features 148 contributors from 23 countries on five continents. It includes 12 essays that illuminate the abundant history and the state of vispo today. The anthology offers a broad amalgam of long-time practitioners and poets new to visual poetry over the last decade, underscoring the longevity and the continued vitality of the art form.

Who says words need to be concrete? This collection shapes poems in surprising and delightful ways. Concrete poetry is a perennially popular poetic form because they are fun to look at. But by using the arrangement of the words on the page to convey the meaning of the poem, concrete or shape poems are also easy to write! From the author of the incredibly inventive Lemonade: And Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word comes another clever collection that shows kids how to look at words and poetry in a whole new way.