Visual Poetry
This is a genre that uses poetic licence with the way the materials are put together to poetically and emotively describe the subject.
What is Visual Poetry?
borrowing from the dictionary definition - “visual poetry is a visual work that evokes an imaginative awareness of experience, or a specific emotional response, through a composition of images and words arranged for its meaning, sound, and/or rhythm.”
I’d like to add my own take - visual poetry is not so much about the subject but about the way the materials are put together - like poetry, the words are arranged in a way that involves rhythm, rhyming etc, it might have no punctuation, each line might have only one word…etc, so if you think of painting a picture in this way, assembling the materials so they rhyme or are like incomplete sentences with no punctuation put together for the way they sound and the emotion they evoke, it’s like you’re creating an incomplete, yet fully expressive description with the way you assemble the materials, not how accurately you draw/illustrate the subject.
I made a few ticktock videos to show a process of one of my poems. This is the first time I’ve shared a ticktock clip in this substack blog, so I’m not sure how it will go. Click on the images and it will take you to the clip, turn on the volume and you can here me chatter. let me know in the comments if this works well for you.
1 - setting up the composition.
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2 - time to play (making a mess) - play is messy, so here I’m allowing myself the freedom of not caring too much about the outcome.
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3 - resolving the mess. Now it’s a matter of finishing off the painting so it works visually, is balanced, interesting, neat, pleasing, etc. and evokes whatever feeling I’m trying to portray - weird, thoughtful, moody…
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Here is the finished painting -
the end.