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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Reading Visual Poetry
ISBN# 9781611470628
Reviewed by: R.J. Cirasa, Kean University
Choice, September w2011 |
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Willard Bohn provides readings of notable "concrete" poems -- poems formatted into a picture or visual design (kinetic digital as well as static print) rather than standard lineated text -- from a range of modern literary moments and orbits (Spanish, French, Italian and Brazilian). The author traces neither the history nor principles of the literary movement as such, nor the development of the genre itself. He follows a straightforward, three-part procedure for engaging the poems: first, perceiving the visual sign as gestalt; second, deciphering the text in its unorthodox and often multiple physical orientations; third, synthesizing the visual and literary import. Interested primarily in the dynamics of "reading visual poetry" as a process, he works, inductively, translating and negotiating his way through each poem largely through trial and error, considering and discarding one interpretive possibility after another and bringing the reader along as an eavesdropper on his reflective critical deliberations. The effect is delightful: the readings are as much performance as analysis. And the analysis is particularly illuminating in revealing the semiotic and ontological intricacies of a poetry that many still consider, even after more than a generation of serious scholarly attention, little more than gimmickry.
Recommended. All readers.
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