A GUIDEBOOK for visual poetry 2005, Zinhar.com translated to english by SUZAN SARI
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Barış Özgür, Deniz Tuncel, Serkan Işın, Şakir Özüdoğru, Volkan Çelebi
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* the guidebook is published firstly in Zinhar no:3 . this update compiled in november 2005 and articles are written without giving the names of writers.
(...)Visual or concrete poetry is a new experience for it has utilized the forgotten technics. Elementary school for its basic function secondarily for its own profit open you the doors through “literature”. While teaching this technology, it compounds some beneficial “painting” tools on our advance in nonliteral (figurative) area with literature, then interferes the sprinkled speech in a complex way in an unexpected moment.
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There has not been such a period that the painting and the handwriting courses are close to each other. This begins with the old methods like special notebooks for handwriting, inkwells, divit*; the children sees the relation between the meaning and form of the letters for the first time and it is corrupted immediately before getting mature. By this way it becomes complicated for us what is the letter “a”s verbal and visual knowledge. Using stencils, stickers in writing, straightening letters and the absoluteness of forms add stationary business to the handwriting courses. So writing is “corrected” by drawing by the interference of school and the stationary market. This traumatic effect reveals later in some layers of conscious by terrible repetitions of letters. This is the proposition is re-experiencing this by writing with stencils, printing and painting games for elemantary school, inkwells, divit*, etc. The combination of the concealed energies in language and this technic would be the genuine demonstration of visual poetry.
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Sometimes insisting on a certain technic can be useful. For example, dividing a word into letters and syllables and later re-arranging this material on a page can make earn practical experience. For that a pen, sheets, scissors, glue, newspapers, magazines, catalogues, websites, word processors, graphical processors, print screen key etc. can be used. This is finally for having experience on using those tools. If we can not decide on the certain technic again, we choose some of the remaining variations to use their versions later. The certain technic can be clear after a comparison between the versions we preferred using insistently and the ones we did first. The technics we will use, how we will use and its vehemence will be selected tardily. If we are in a virgin experience by accident or a sudden; at those moments there reveals the technic on the sense of a second hand self-conditioning on its own and we see the sense dispatched to the technic itself, revealing. This sense is announced itself to the other schemes in the way which it has dispatched itself, struggled with them, this is the instant that the appearances, of what is in spite of those schemes and by those, are left in the conscious. Like every comprehendable moments it, as it is a sort of house completes space to time, keeping its true essense to ground?. But the senses seem like they are promised us can discombolate the certain technic. These moments are sacred. Now it is the time that the “certain” of the certain technic is excessive and we are at a point of impossiblity where visual / concrete poetry begins. Impossiblity is the last chance of displaying of possibilities.
(...) The re-production of the city itself entangles the person and that can not be disclosured or destructed only by seeking in “writing technology” because the compromise of the word with the vision triggers to the meaning immediately. This meaning is entirely a functional, abstract or concrete no matter, consumption oriented, and it establishes relations to dissolve subjectivities in equivalence of asserted companies and shifts in micro-authorities. As soon as the person looks into his own existence it puts the goods in front of him. Visual poetry is a map of gathering destruction of vision, the technic or copy-paste, spotting on a page etc. and of and the ones not having any companian with them converge on and is a field scheming includes a mirror reflecting from outside to the inside. (...) Exchange currency has effects on the amount of goods you can own, the advertisements on your subconscious, the share certificate on your share from national income, billboards on your visual delight, the signboards on your space perception, articles on papers and magazines on your information process… They determine us. (...) Open a blank paper and change it as you wish. Tell what all make you feel in their own languages. Give back what they have done to you. (...) The desire of uncompanionship that is the imagination of the heterotopic one, included by visual/concrete poetry is all fictional and takes the opportinity that gets out of its own beingness by the unique way or not, to the boundary of impossibility. The subliming of the spirit ownself figures out itself there in the eternal long run of the space or fullness of (the page),that attempts to go beyond of the dimension and sheet of visuality, and making represantation something further than a mirror that is making it unincluded directly (but attached to be taught on) things/objects. So this progress attaches the person, his language, his subconscious, pre-language period to the things and the imagination and reality –of letters, fragile lines- get confused at the highest level of tension. We must love and save the poetry placed in our minds for it is to be exceeded all the time as human being (ref: zarahadust). The perspectives are broken through a meta-vision of place and time in this exceeding process, and the being human there is confused with his own sight from now on. Confusing bonds the flesh and the spirit to each other, this is the visual and concrete poetry , is the spiritual dimension of the process, places between the conscious and unconscious (...) Generally in concrete poetry each letter is considered as units, and the pauses and subscribing of the coescalences that reflect the whole image of the poem. The aim is partly placing the letters, words in the spaces on page in concrete poetry, typography and visualization. If you glance at Campos’ and Günersel’s works you will find out what I meant. Visuality works in two layers, first is at the seeing eye, second is at the localization of imagination which is reading and the things intended to make read according to each other. This is an energetic field and the eye goes into there with the aim of reading poetry. Look from a distance to the poem. (...) Visuality in poetry can be supplied by presentation, coherence, description, eloquence, rhetoric, repetition, similarity, etc. The book “Bir Zar Atımı” (One Toss The Dice/Un Coup de Dés) is one of the most concrete works of Mallarme, in a field can be called certanity based on a plastic perception. If the stones are the words in poetry, they are going to be destructed, too. So visuality can be started easily with an “a”. If the meaning comes out of compounding words, the same rationality can be used in destructing them. Destruct your letters. (...) Writing and vocalizing are not the same. Vocalizing “a” alone means nothing but its typographical and graphical appearance always becomes ahead of its phonetical characteristics. When you see the letter “a” it’s fixed reflection, also it is crooked, pushes you to vocalize it from inside to outside. The reason of the letters’ being in the way we have taught comes out in the process of deconstructing the meaningful or meaningless words and structures we have constructed with them. Deconstract your words.
(...) Writing is a technology and the effects such as underlining, italic, bolding, striking, do not work only as spots or relieves. They are pathfinders for eye. The relations of these emphasises with voice can be used to make visual, the grades of the lyrical expressions on page. The relation between voice and writing can be provided by topography at surface. The letters or words that you take as poetic units can be arranged not according to an order based upon meanings but the creation of action for eye on page according to an order or disorder. Extend your letters. (...)
Logos, placed on imagination, disguise their own meanings by a formal trick. Logo works in a field out of speech. visualization begins somewhere in speech, with an economical geometry beyond intelligence. Triangle, circle, square… line, fullstop, comma. Every letter is a statement of an unexpressed capacity. A, B, C .. is one of the basic elements in visualization while percepting the world and the things and is the writing of confined relations between each other. Language, poetic language should be independent of this former burden in the pursuit of impossibility. Ç can be a baloon unable to fly in reality. (...) Every new font is a tool of another technology carrying connections entirely for eye, it is not speech anymore. Visual poetry is an attack to the hierarchy between letters. Fonts seem us constituing a serial, curls bring us new spots from nothingness. In this context visual poetry is about existence and beings. Every new visual poem is the track of nothingness, the being not here, unseen. (...) Since printing has circumscribed the mind and the connections of mind (covering on theirselves), paper(palimpsest) is not only a surface but superposing of surfaces. A blank white paper is a map divided into invisible squares and wells. The spaces subdivided and owned by space can be regarded as a crossword puzzle. For example the letters “a”, “c”, “ç”, “ğ” can be on different parts of the page divided into 100 squares. Possibility of these letters’ being there is never fixed, for our reading does not always observe the same line. According to this, one letter can be somewhere independent of another.
Light is the energy falling upon the substance and it can be reflected from the surface or be absorbed or pass by to the other side of the substance. Visualization is the evaluating the poem by visual energies. (...) Corporate logos, brands, headlines, all kinds of symbol we come across, goes in and out of our eyes, in actual life are delibaretly suppressed and accounted images. The order of these images is a part of inherited structure and that is commercial oriented. A logo can never mean out of its context. Deconstructing the penetrated meaning of the logo can be possible only out of context. This is the making poem visual. (...) Visual poem is unmediated. It makes read itself no matter usage of a letter, a word, punctuation marks, a line, a curve, a substance constitues typographical picture in a sight of an iconic signifier( that there is ressemlances in the form and itself) or symbolic signifier (there is unsubstantiated correlation between the form and itself) including or excluding the ways reading and observing of the eye. It widens its expression field by providing our conradiction of generally approval of clustering the letters, the language and transforming them into components that can carry new meanings of a new whole in the direction of our subjectivity. It creates movement in every condition and requires the reader’s attendance to this movement. It burdens vectors on the words at the degree of disintegration of forms and visual poetry transforms into a resultant. This resultant completes it. Visual poetry provides the performer and likewise reader’s swallowing in front of the greatness of the speech. (...) Imagine a perspective created by only playing with the size and the placements of letters and words on the page. The obscure sight of the intended expression can be noted down on page. So the automatic function that we are accustomed to see the writing is discharged for the seeing eye. Seeing fastens to the action of making meaningful tightly. By this way poem cannot be narrated verbally. (...) Visualization of poetry begins and ends at the point when poem is silent, that poem is already mute. While we hardly look on the things can be told or became by accident and told and arranged in the page; 1.7 megapixel screens, 17 inches screens, 51 screens have mercy for eye. The duty of eye is to capture the observable and the ones we have been observed from where they are observable, at the scope performer of the speech of the thing as much as speech, at the borderline of vision. Our all memories that can be squeezed in and out letters and words, numbers and $, pos machines, ATMs, X-ray films, cigarrette packages, score table of the 34th week, Warner Bros heroes and especially labels of the T-shirts, also the shirt of cashier. Do not underestimate a graphical processor programme governing the letter and letters; a design, that is always more than a design, its being the residual of the memory and the concupiscence. Do not prevent of loosening the codes, messages, symbols seducted your memory. Please. (...) Give up reading a line so much cold-blooded, immediately. Do not accustom your eyes from left to right. Desire to see the whole at once. Whole but not everything, look many times and make the things visible many times. If it is useless all space are useless, if there is nothing to see on page do not leave useless blank on page. Space is not the break-point for eye. It is because you can see, reading is the half of seeing, see further while reading. Sacrifice the white of the sheet. Please, it is elegant. (...)
Superpose on every moment superposed on your eyes everyday. Talk on it and pick up the ones can be talked on. The silence remaining behind is the everything you have talked. It is everything that made you talk. Put your letters here and there. In this font or that but write with the awareness of the differance between standing HERE and THERE on the page at every moment, here and there, THIS WAY or THAT WAY and the possibilty of standing as both way. Detach the letters from the moments, take them into your imagination, process it. Process it as you can not talk on. This is the talent. (...) Text is the field that we can express what we understand or not and exposed to eye. Bring together the ones we can express in the text and the things our eyes exposed to such as logos, signboards, shapes of the city and the city of shapes. For this generally a photograph processor, a graphic designing programme, a word processor and one piece of “you” are suggested. Do not pay attention but do whatever necessary because every surface is a text. Even if it is blank. You fill. (...) Make visible the power even the reflexes travelled the unvisible space between the cash stand and the department, the sofa and the fridge, the remote control and the television, the window and your eye, the apple on tree and the earth. Transplant the gap carrying the visual tension of the distances on to the surfaces. Meeting on surfaces which are feasible. (...) Do not belive in the ones saying “Ask, how.” De/construct the letters and the words according to or in the each other, abrogating the unvisible in every blank. Interprent the blank field by the ones already being that is the strenghts of the same nothingness. A letter can pull another, exceeds the other. Respect the nothingness. Your regard on jeans pants will change. (...) Ask "how?”. “Search for examples”. Do not believe in them. Curve, crook the letters. Superpose them on to the logos. Degrade the logos. Consider the reductions. Search for examples. For instance, decode a display board of dollar currency. You can comprehend the fluctuation of currency as the amount of per capital income. You can comprehend the extract account of the credit cards with the display board of dollar currency. In every foreign exchange office anything befalls to the persons. You find out what it is. Take serious the takings dividing “/” by persons. You use. (...) Visual poetry is not picture but that does not mean it can not be used some of the pictural technics at a small extent in the visual poetry. The letters are not convicted to be as they are newly printed or on the screen. For example, the rough case of a newly printed visual poem can be finalized by using a watercolor paintbrush and black ink. If you want to create moving letters you can make weak winds splayding from inside of the letters by your paintbrush. For this you are not expected to be a painter. In fact the important thing is the letters, the way we use them; the technics we use are only supporters and that is dependent on whether it institues an attribution to the meaning of poem in us (the performer). (...)
*Divit:-ti hist. a pen-case with inkwell, worn in the girdle by scribes