Nonlinear Lineages

Can a visual poem reproduce a traditional verse form? Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to answer this question in my writing. More recently, I’ve begun to talk with workshop groups about what happens when a writer tries to visually represent the hallmarks of, say, a sonnet.

In order to get to this question, we first have to talk about what visual poems and sonnets are, so the workshop begins with definitions. Visual poems are a broad category; they often include both text and visual design. To oversimplify: the practice falls along a continuum where sometimes the work is text-heavy—think concrete poems—and sometimes there is no text at all, except in the title. For more on visual poems, Geof Huth curated a folio of work with a strong introduction here, and Andrew Venell has a nuanced description and set of prompts here. Sonnets, on the other hand, are a more narrow category of poem that includes iambic pentameter, fourteen lines, end rhymes (whose patterns vary depending on the type of sonnet), an argument-like movement of thought, and a turn. But not every sonnet has each of these hallmarks, and not everyone agrees that every sonnet must.

I would argue that replicating a sonnet’s hallmarks into visual form is something akin to translation. Literary translators will tell you: while any single poem may include idiomatic expressions, rhetorical devices, grammatical play, sound patterning, and line breaks that double the meaning, it can be difficult to bring every one of these choices over in translation. Yves Bonnefoy will tell you: “The answer to the question, ‘Can one translate a poem?’ is of course no. The translator meets too many contradictions that he cannot eliminate; he must make too many sacrifices.” Translating verse forms into visual poems presents similar difficulties. It invites the maker to make a stand for what’s most important—to decide which elements can be stretched and which can be stripped away while still making the form legible.

Translating into visual poetry creates an added challenge because we don’t read art linearly. The more a visual sonnet moves away from English’s left-to-right and top-to-bottom organization, the more the eye jumps around the page.

“Ghost Sonnet” by Anthony Etherin. From Knit Ink (and Other Poems). Used with permission by the author.

Take, for example, Anthony Etherin’s “Ghost Sonnet,” whose lines are grouped into tercets and quatrains. Where does your eye travel as you read this poem? Or take Francisco Aguiar’s “Soneto Ecológico,” a sonnet-styled park he planned as a statement on environmental crisis that rhymes trees in either direction along the paths—conceptually, the left- or right-hand margins. The “reading” is multidirectional and peripatetic. How do you represent iambic pentameter in a nonlinear poem?

«Soneto Ecológico» by Fernando Aguiar. Used with permission by the author.

«Soneto Ecológico» by Fernando Aguiar. Used with permission by the author.

In our workshop discussion, we tried to see how these poems are in conversation with the form. What choices has each author made and why? We looked at examples like the ones above, and like Catherine Vidler’s“Keyboards: 14 Poems for Tom Jenks” and Mary Ellen Solt’s“Moonshot Sonnet” and poems whose authors may not have considered their work a visual sonnet at all, like Wanda Coleman’s “American Sonnet #1,” which is a lineated, text-based poem that uses white space and design elements to visual ends. Coleman’s poem engages an equation and uses fifteen lines to underscore inequality. 

Once it came time to create, participants had 30 minutes to start dreaming. The task was open-ended: Choose a form (sonnet if that’s easiest, or another one you’re familiar with) and begin to sketch out how you might render the form visually. You can follow one idea or brainstorm one hundred. The results were remarkable, including a haiku patterned from found objects, mobiles, sketches of fists and buildings, and a musical score. Now we were in conversation not just with what came before, but with one another.

I want to end with this thought: this workshop was aligned with what I’ve learned from Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. That book taught me about innovation, sure, but for those who didn’t already know about Wanda Coleman’s body of work (that’s me), Hayes’s sonnets brought her sonnets to the fore. This is what feels most important to me now; this is why I write and teach. All poetry is pattern. I want a part of poetry’s pattern to be the repetition of community and solidarity. Not “make it new” but “make it communal.”