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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 57 > Poetry >Introduction by Bob Grumman

Introduction by Bob Grumman


One Editor's Preface

          In the field of what I call visio-textual art, I am considered eccentric, for almost everyone in it believes that a visual poem is no more a kind of poetry than a mongoose is a kind of bird. I disagree, so consider many of the works John Bennett and I have chosen for this gallery to be what I call "textual designs," rather than visual poems.

          For me a visual poem is a poem combined with graphic elements that is able to provide an engagent with an aesthetic experience that is at some point significantly and simultaneously verbal and visual. For instance: J. Michael Mollohan's "Yellow Flower," which you see as both common flower and uncommonly glorious sun (and ultimate living result of sunlight) at the same time as you read the word for it. The textual designs I speak of lack sufficient words to do that. Some, indeed, have no words.

          So, considering my attitude about visual poetry, why so many textual designs and so few visual poems in the gallery? Because, first of all, I recognize my view to be a minority view and am democratic enough to feel the majority should rule (even when insanely wrong!). More importantly, I consider the textual designs we chose to be significantly superior aesthetically to the visual poems they beat out. Indeed, for me the works Scott Helmes terms his "visual haiku" here and elsewhere are some of the best visual artworks of our time, so what if most of them are not poems, in any rational sense? Fortunately, given my loyalty to poetry, John and I still managed to find a number of fine visual poems, according to my poetics, among the submissions, besides "Yellow Flower," so, I feel, we have done our duty to it as well as to textual design.

          One last word. Because there were so many submissions as deserving of a place in our gallery as the ones we chose, John and I, with the permission of Pedestal editor John Amen, have decided to put them on display at Spidertangle beginning on August 1. So do visit them there. Visit my blog, Poeticks.com, too, for John and I plan to showcase a few of our favorites among the works that didn't make it into the Pedestal gallery.

          Oops, a second last word, one of gratitude to John Amen for making this gallery possible, and giving visual poetry, however defined, another chance to take over the world!!!!

—Bob Grumman
 



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April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now, a collection of mathematical poems, is Bob Grumman's most important book of poetry to date, but his visual poetry has been widely published in the micro-press, and his Poem, Demerging, a collection of conventional poetry about his alter-ego, Poem, will soon be in print—as a companion to his earlier chapbook about Poem, Of Poem. He has also written two books of poetry criticism, Of Manywhere-at-Once and From Haiku To Lyriku, and is currently working on a book about Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18."
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