This post is a companion to a free workshop I’ll be giving this Sunday at 12 noon EST on how to play visually with a text using Canva, a free graphic design program. Even if you’re not able to attend, all registrants will receive a link to the video recording, so if you’re interested, do sign up.
Things we take for granted:
Times New Roman, size 12, and its best buddies, Arial and Courier.
The “return” key moves to a new line, equidistant from the previous line.
Black-colored fonts.
These and many other defaults (margins, spacing between letters, words, size of punctuation, angle and direction of text, and so on) make up what are essentially easy-to-use templates that help set a writer up for success. They’re streamlined, useful, and sensible.
But as a poet, these defaults are not always going to be what you need.
Below I’ll describe some innovative methods of typographic presentation on the page, alongside some poets who’ve employed them to great effect, including Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Nelson, Filippo Marinetti, e. e. cummings, Douglas Kearney, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
Eye Music
In my last post I wrote about the geography of the poem, and mentioned shape.
Non-visual artists have often worked their artworks into shapes. In the 14th century, French composers making music in the ars subtilior1 (“subtler art”) style liked to write out their music in graphic style, also known as “eye music.”
Concrete poetry (or structural poetry) is poetry which shapes itself into particular shapes or otherwise creates art from poetry. It was formally named in the 1950s by Brazilian poets Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, and Haroldo de Campos.2
A few powerful examples are snapshotted above and linked below:
Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem “Valentine,” in which she uses the shape of half of a heart, playing with this halving to explore grief.
And poet Marilyn Nelson’s “Hitting Bottom,” in which she uses the shape of an X to build a wrenching persona poem.
Marinetti: Intensely Problematic Fave of Typographic Poetry History
In his 1909 manifesto titled “Declaration of Futurism,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti broke from what he described as literature’s “glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and slumber,” and announced the movement’s intention to instead “glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring.”
His most famous work is probably Zang tumb tumb, a long sound poem and concrete poem that typographically, sonically, and poetically represents a battle which he witnessed as a journalist. It’s ambitious and effective.
But for all its subversiveness and innovation, Marinetti’s futurism was an explicitly anti-feminist, anti-library, pro-war movement (he described war as “the only true hygiene of the world.") A real committed asshole, he went on to co-write another manifesto: the Italian Fascist Manifesto.
Spacing, Capitalization, Punctuation
e. e. cummings was my first typography crush when I was a teen. He moved his poems across the page, broke up words between lines, used punctuation in unconventional ways and generally smooshed anything he liked together:
Overlapping & weaving
Douglas Kearney, a poet, interdisciplinary writer, and performer, describes his work as “performative typography.”
Two (of many) brilliant examples of Kearney’s typographic poems, excerpted in the images above, are “Every Hard Rapper’s Father Ever: Father of the Year,” and “Noah / Ham: Fathers of the Year.” When you visit these links, be sure to click the small play button next to the titles to hear the poet himself read them.
Kearney works with typography in more collage-centric forms as well.
Typographic worldbuilding
Caribbean poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite developed his own font, which he called Sycorax video style, after a series of truly horrible events in his life. He also innovated with font size, layout, and other aspects of presentation.
After awarding Brathwaite the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize for his book Born to Slow Horses in 2006, the judges wrote, in part:
”To read Kamau Brathwaite is to enter into an entire world of human histories and natural histories… […] An epic of one man (containing multitudes) in the African diaspora, Brathwaite’s world even has its own orthography and typography, demanding total attention to the poem, forbidding casual glances.”
Read Brathwaite’s poem “Coral” in the Paris Review (with a video reading by poet Major Jackson).
I enthusiastically recommend this album of Ars subtilior interpretations - also available on Spotify.
The Getty Research Institute has a great slideshow on their website about some of their work as well as works by other poets. There’s also a cool online exhibition of Latin American concrete poetry artifacts here (click on the dropdown menu of “Exhibit Cases”).