In the range of visual poetry, the work presented here pushes the extreme of lexical characteristics. The sub-genres and cognates of Visual Poetry can extend so far away from text as to appear without any text at all. This range of wordless visual poetry comes from what we can consider the etimological strain in visual poetry. One of the essential changes in literature that makes visual poetry at the present time is the loss of the need for meter in poetry generally. Until the late 19th Century, meter, not language, was the essential element of poetry. Meaningless sounds, essentially forms of scatting, have been around for millenia, perhaps first being written down in the choruses of plays by Aristophanes. In the etimological line of visual poetry, the thing that makes visual poetry qualify as poetry is its heritage in literary sources, and/or its use of syntax and other linguistic properties. If you don't agree with this, please bear in mind for the moment that I see it as legitimate, and am only presenting non-linguistic examples in my own work, for this project, to accentuate the insistance and close concentration on alphabets and language in the "Bringing the Text Back Home" opus.

The following links lead to works done in collaboration with Reid Wood over a period of 18 years. Most contain no words whatsoever, and the majority don't even feature such characteristics of other forms of poetry as the use of structures based on linguistic patterns of syntax or grammar. Reid doesn't consider them poetry at all. While working on them, I don't not think about whether they should be considered poetry or visual art. What is important to me, and to this specific set of notes, is they suggest how far away from language the continuum I work in can go.

Click here to go to a dense and paired collection of collaborations done in 2009.

Click here to go to samples of the collaboration from several years of the work.

In studying poetry, art, and language, an important area of concentration and study for me has been the iconographic writing system used in Central Mexico before the Spanish Conquest, and continued with ever-increasing additions of words after 1521. This is a system of writing not based in phonetics (though it contains rebuses and some forms of phonetic and verbal notation). It was based on icons rather than speech. Commentators for centuries have considered it a crude form of picture writing. However, as studies of Mexican culture and changes in our abilities to see beyond our prejudices move on, it seems possible that iconic writing made a great deal of sense in a geographical area where people spoke not only many languages, but languages within different families. In this bottle-neck of the Americas, it may have made more sense for densely packed speakers of mutually incomprehensible languages to employ a writing system that does not depend on spoken language. You're now reading this on a computer screen, in part of an ecosystem where icons serve useful purposes not imagined a few decades ago. In an environment of rapid change, for instance, icons aid in the process of nearly constant retraining that changing electronic methods demand. Even though English is becoming a world language, we are living in a world held together by electronic media where the majority of people do not speak English as their native language. Perhaps we are entering a phase where we can beter understand the sophistication of the pre-Columbian central Mexican writing system — and where we can better understand its real weaknesses instead of those we project onto it.

On-line you can find my notes and "translation" of Codex Boturini by clicking on the title.

The essay Animal and Human Stages in the Aztec Continuum of Life concludes with brief readings from Codex Borbonicus.

My most important essay and interpretation of this writing system may be found in my essay on the opening pages of Codex Vindobonensis in vol. 11 of New Wilderness Letter edited by Jerome Rothenberg and David Guss, 1982, under the title "Notes on Codex Vienna." The magazine was reprinted in 1996 by Granary Books under the title The Book, Spiritual Instrument.

Writing need not be seen simplistically as either phonetic/alphabetic or iconographic. Even the systems called "ideograms," from those of Egypt to the mayan regions of Meso-America to China show a great deal of variety, as do options for creating poetry at the beginning of the twenty first century. Written Chinese has at times been mistaken for picture writing. Its nature may best be described, as it was by Arthur Cooper, as "etymological." Although based largely on spoken language, and largely phonetic in nature, it does contain some picture writing and some icons. Most interestingly, it depends largely on internalizing the gestures of writing as part of its inherent nature, from the process of learning to the processes of writing and reading. Still, it can only be understood, like post-metric poetry, by its evolution, not a single set of consistent principles. I made some use of characteristics of Chinese writing, and of Chinese poems in Clouds Over Fortjade, parts of which can be accessed by clicking the title. A few pages of the next work of this type, Stellar Dreams Above the Middle Kingdom can be found in Sugar Mule on-line magazine. The poems presented here work very well on-screen. I am trying to work out ways to present some of the others electronically.

In Notation and the Art of Reading, I try to relate several different writing systems to contemporary literary and artistic methods. In addition to the on-line version linked above, this may be found in a number of printed sources: the most widely distributed being A Book of the Book edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay and published by Granary Books, 2000.