Extending the Image

In part two, I explored how lyric poetry transforms the reader by allowing the writer to be in conversation with the world, and how the soundtrack in my book speculation, n. extends that conversation. In this section, I turn my attention to visual poetics and the power of images.

While performance allows the poet to transform the reader through the body, visual poetry makes a body of the poem. Whether via collage, concrete poetry, or any other kind of play between image and words on the page, what the poet creates through visual poetry moves beyond the world that exists within the text alone. A line, metaphor, or symbol that holds one meaning inside the poem emits new light when charged by what surrounds it, what bisects it, or what overlays it. What obscures the poem to the eye often reveals something deeper in the mind.

When I first discovered Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman, I was struck by the beauty of the “architectures” made of ink-drawn lines that could be lines of text or not (asemic writing). Lines sprawled across the page that—in their refusal to be “read” in a traditional sense—become poetic. When I look at the drawings in Prose Architectures, they bring me a sort of comfort. They speak, not through words we might desire or expect as “readers,” but through their insistence on being viewed(like a work of art in a museum); they call out to be looked upon as an amalgamation of things, rather than a single image. These architectures are visual representations of the conversation that poets have with themselves—and which Renee Gladman may have had with herself—conversations between an idea in one’s head and a line on the page, between a line on the page and an image, between an image and the world. What this architecture houses is a protection, a safeguarding from being too closely dissected and thus, destroyed. This resistance, this freedom in refusal, is the poem.

In their refusal to be one thing, to exist as a single image, Gladman’s drawings assert the artist’s right to illegibility. I am thankful for this reminder that our work is perfectly legible in our refusal for it—and for us—to be simply read. Instead, the viewer/reader must imagine. Instead, they must feel. We must pause in order to conjure what exists beyond the page that we see in front of us—in order to imagine what thoughts are behind a particular turn or curve of the line, what emotions are housed in these structures. When I return to the images in Prose Architectures, as I often do, sometimes I see what could be words. In those moments that is what I want to see—that these lines are capable of becoming something else. At other times, I see light. Drawn to the image for what it is, for the body it possesses, I am struck by the experience of simply coming into contact with the work. This contact is the poem, is the power. And it is here that I am, each time, transformed.

In One Long Black Sentence, a collaboration between Gladman and Fred Moten, the line is a place of rigor but also rest. The titular sentence is the sentence of being Black in this country and also the line that has carried us through. Here, the line is so much more than a part of an image or a poem: it takes on a collective life and responsibility. That the line got from one point to the next and to the next and did not stop—only continued to go on (as we do) is the poem. Ultimately, that poem says, it is up to you reader/viewer, to continue.

In writing speculation, n., I sought ways to make the world more legible to myself, while obscuring from view the images that we are inundated with on a daily basis. I draw on news headlines and typography in my book, playing with the idea that what we try to escape is somehow always there.  By using overlayed text, repetition, and manipulating font size, I remix and remake those images. This was an effort to create a new image out of already existing material.

As I was creating my typographical world (and a new language within it), I came across Hardly War by Don Mee Choi, a work that deeply influenced what I saw as possible for the interplay between existing material and new image. Choi’s book features photos taken by her father during the Korean and Vietnam wars. These photos, in the present, are artifacts through which the poet attempts to reclaim lost time between father and daughter. The poems, born of this combination of text and image, interrogate U.S imperialism, by speaking to familial distance. By weaving together her father’s photographs and her own words, Choi puts propaganda on display (Smokey the Bear, Agent Orange) in a way that is in striking contrast with the underlying complexity of the book: a daughter needing to somehow make a visual language for loss. As we view the photos with Choi’s words on them, time slows and shifts, allowing the poet and her father to exist on the same page, in the same space. This shift creates a new architecture and a reclamation that moves me each time I move through the book.

The visual poem doesn’t have to reclaim, but it often allows space for the poet to do so and for the reader to be a witness. In Courtney Faye Taylor’s forthcoming debut collection, Concentrate, reclamation is a tool that allows us to see beyond a specific event. The book explores the story of Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner after being falsely accused of stealing a bottle of orange juice; the trial and lack of conviction were inciting incidents for the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Taylor utilizes a breadth of poetic forms to take us to that moment and transport us through time to our own. The poet knows that words do not suffice for such an event. And neither would one single image. Instead, what we receive is a gathering—a conjuring of images, collages, and other poetic forms that bring us beyond seeing, into feeling.

This is not about offering evidence, or attempting an explanation. Instead, the book seeks to show us some of who Latasha was and who she might have been today. Taylor uses materiality to convey the fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities, at times through the near-tangibility of what’s left unsaid between women, at others, by drawing on images, like one of an empty playground where Harlins spent her time. Together, these images and poems conjure up a collective space in which to grieve, to honor what is missing. The poet is herself that child—like any one of us could be or could have been—and at once, simply the archivist doing the hard work of visitation. This is where the transformation happens once again, in the images where we are all gathered.

Visual poetics does the work of making the world clearer through a refusal of legibility, through a movement toward feeling. It can extend the way we see, think, or feel about an event that happened in the past while putting it into conversation—or even, physical contact—with the present. The images that I wove into speculation, n. are both a source of protection and of power. As the poet, I can make the original image disappear, creating a new poem out of what remains, out of what is kept.

It is in our power to pull the reader/viewer both into the text, into the image, and beyond that image to the new world that comes rising out of the work. This ability that visual poetry holds to extend us far beyond what we see with our eyes, or what we think we know, and into what we might need to imagine, is the power, is the heat and also the light of all poetry. In the new image—in the space where the illegible and legible meet—exists a new universe.