4 Poets Who Innovated Typographical Poetry

Interested in the poetry of typographical innovation? Lydia Kennaway, who is teaching her London course Fontasia: Poetry & Rebellious Typography this October tells us about four poets who innovated the appearance of poetic text.

George Herbert

Herbert is often presented as a forerunner of Concrete or Visual Poetry, with ‘Easter Wings’ his most well-known example, published posthumously in 1633.  Herbert’s intentions were devotional, the Word becoming image, if not Flesh.

Read the full poem here: Easter Wings

Guillaume Apollinaire

Nearly three hundred years after Herbert, Guillaume Apollinaire published Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913 – 1916, where typographical wit is employed in visual poetry by the person who coined the term ‘Surrealism’.

Read the full poem here: Salut monde

E E Cummings

Cummings is known for his use of lower-case letters, vernacular speech patterns, off-kilter syntax, and portmanteau words.  But, typographically, his experimental use of spacing was also groundbreaking, turning the page into a musical score where the white space could be read as rests or measured silence. In the poem ‘[Buffalo Bill’s]’, he uses this technique together with words like ‘onetwothreefourfive’ to replicate the varied rhythms of speech.

Read the full poem here: [Buffalo Bill’s]

Mary Ruefle

Blackout, erasure, redaction, erosion: these are all related techniques that reveal new meanings in found texts, with the poet acting as archaeologist/ventriloquist.  Mary Ruefle is an American poet who has taken Victorian novels and used white-out to conceal all but a few words on each page.  The result is, as one reviewer put it, ‘haiku-like minifables, sideways aphorisms…’. Ruefle refers to these books as ‘old, friable, one-of-a-kind things’ and so she makes the texts available for public view on her website.

Read more here: Pages from Marie

Poets have always broken the rules of typography: the hint would be in the term ‘line break’. But some have been drawn more than others to acts of poetic rebellion involving typography, grammar, spacing or imagery. In ‘Fontasia: Poetry & Rebellious Typography’, we’ll examine the work of poets who use subversive techniques, ranging from redaction to found text, and learn what happens to our own work when we unleash the power of disruption.

If you would like to experiment with your own typography poems, Lydia is running her London course Fontasia: Poetry & Rebellious Typography this Autumn, starting on Saturday 24 October. Find out more and secure your place here.

Lydia Kennaway is Poet-in-Residence at Thin Ice Press where she is collaborating on a letterpress edition of The Marker Committee, an artist’s book of poems about the written word and deep time. Together with her own linocut illustrations, the book plays with folded paper and forms of type – mudlarked, vandalised, or dot matrix-printed – to comment on our abiding urge to leave our mark.