Visual into Vision: Visuals as Symbolism in Poetry

Visuals are part of what make the poem an organic whole; but at the same time, symbolise a harder, smarter and macabre world beneath their pictorial presentations. Typographical arrangements, length lines, physicality and art are not a by-product of coincidence or recklessness. It has been carefully mediated and planned to be a visual aphorism.

Just as a poem is designed to incorporate the rhythm and music between lines and lyrics, how a tenor acquires its vehicle and latches on to it tightly, how subtext is stitched into a poem as a blind hem—unseen but needed to prevent unraveling— technopaegnia is by no means the result of anarbitrary accident. This paper looks to occupation, absence, typography and shape of text and poetry in the works of Eugen Gomringer, e e cummings, and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

This paper was supervised by Marilyn Chin, and has won the Outstanding Academic Papers award (Department of English) by Run Run Shaw Library, City University of Hong Kong.