ON CRAFT: MARY SZYBIST ON VISUAL POETRY

November 25, 2013

The first visual poem I loved is not really a visual poem—or rather, it was not originally created
to be one. Let me explain.

I had loved George Herbert’s “Prayer”—intensely, beyond reason—for many years, and from the
first moment I turned the page in Helen Vendler’s textbook Poems, Poets, Poetry to see her
sunburst rearrangement of the sonnet, I found it deeply satisfying and beautiful.
I stress “from the first moment”; the form made the syntactical structure thrillingly visible,
instantly apprehensible. By placing the word “prayer” in the center with all modifying phrases
radiating out like spokes on a wheel, the sentence’s symmetry becomes clear: every phrase in the
poem is a metaphor for prayer. This visual rendering also enacts the poem’s grammatical
incompleteness. By beginning “Prayer the church’s banquet, angels age . . . ,” Herbert drops the
expected “is.” Without a main verb, the sonnet is an incomplete sentence, a subject followed by a
list of metaphors. The visual rearrangement enacts the suspended, verbless world of the poem.
Everything has equal weight, everything is attached to prayer as if by an equals sign.

It was Simone Weil who first inspired me to memorize this poem, knowing that she had
memorized and recited it often to herself while standing just outside of the church she was drawn
to yet still refused, watching the communion she longed for but of which she would not partake. I
understood that. Vendler describes Herbert’s poem as one of “radical amplification”; it makes the
concept of prayer larger, stranger, and more inclusive. Her rearrangement makes the poem seem
even more inclusive, makes prayer seem like something open to me, something I could enter. In
this version, one need not read in any particular order or even move through the whole poem:
land on any “spoke” and it takes you directly to “prayer.”

If the sonnet gains a more radical sense of openness through Vendler’s rearrangement, it loses
something, too. As Vendler insists, “Because poetry is a temporal art, it has to unfold
sequentially, one piece after another. First I say x, then y, then z.” As she notes, the poem may
have a radial order, but it also has a temporal one. In Herbert’s original sonnet, we do not
“choose our own adventure” of prayer as we might in the sunburst version; we move through a
human mind working out a concept and relationship to prayer as it reaches its understated end:

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Order matters. Even the “Milky Way” does not suffice, and the speaker must go beyond it,
replace it with bird, bell, blood, and “land of spices” before rejecting metaphor altogether to
arrive at the transcendence that most matters: “something understood.” It is a powerful
trajectory, and one we entirely miss if we happen to read the sunburst arrangement in a way that
ends with “the church’s banquet.”

I want it both ways: I still recite the poem to myself with all its temporal drama, but as I do so, I
picture the radial arrangement. Vendler’s point, as I take it, is that the original poem does contain
both: her sunburst arrangement simply helps us understand the syntax that is already there, helps
us understand the radial order along with the temporal one.
Still, this doesn’t fully account for why I
so often find myself leaving Vendler’s
book open to the sunburst page so my
eye can land on it through the day. I want
to see and touch it. It is an object I simply
want to have around. It may primarily be
an image of syntactical order, but I find it
nevertheless an image that invites
contemplation—largely due, I think, to
its openness.

To turn to images shaped with words for

meditative or spiritual practices is not a
new idea. Aramaic cultures inscribed
bowls with circular incantations believing
that a demon would read “round the
spiral until he reached the centre, and
then, unable to read backwards, was caught forever” (Bowler, 7). More inviting is the Burmese
seven-wheel-jewel writing where the center word belongs to every line.

The lotus flower with its seven petals is

often symbolic of the deity. In Shahin
Ghiray’s Turkish ghazal or circle ode,
the center word acts as both the first
and last word of each line.

J. W. Redhouse translates the

beginning of this long love poem as,
“Let but my beloved come and take up
her abode in the mansion of her love. . .
. If thou art wise, erect an inn on the
road to self-negation, so that the
pilgrims of holy love can make there
their halting place” (Bowler, 127). I like
the idea of a poem as a “halting” place
on a larger spiritual journey. It was in
this spirit—wanting my own meditative
object—that I wrote my poem “How (Not) to Talk of God.”
 I wanted to avoid a
prescription for temporal
order and invite the reader
to drop in and stop at
different places. I wanted
it to shimmer with
multiple possible readings.
God is in the title, but I
did not place the word
“God” in the center. I
wanted to leave that open,
blank, a subject that might
be experienced as
presence or absence. The
modifying phrases ring to
my ear as both as
descriptions and
questions. For example,
“who had tried to reach
us, who will do anything
to reach us” both describes
a god who cares for us and questions who is left to make such attempts in the absence of such a
figure. Here, the experience of faith and doubt are entwined and even, perhaps, simultaneous. I
want each line to read as a declaration and as an open question.

Just as I did not want the poem to read in a pre-determined temporal order, I did not want its
shape to resemble a singular pictorial image such as a wheel or sunburst.

In other words, I do not think of the shape of the poem as a pictorial shape. I do not experience
the shape as representing a wheel or a sunburst or anything like this. I see it as the shape of the
sentence’s syntax. If sentence diagrams were so clear, intuitive, and shapely, perhaps more of us
would find syntax beautiful. (As a point of contrast in my book, I include a poem in the form of a
sentence diagram—a very different way of imagining the shape of thinking.) It also strikes me
that giving up temporal arrangement for a purely radial one opens the poems to multiple readings
but also renders it strangely static, moves it closer to the realm of object rather than speech.

For this reason, I sometimes wonder if the poem works better as an object in the world than on
the page. The poem was made into such an object. In the summer of 2012 Poetry Paths selected
the poem to be painted as a mural on the ceiling of the portico of the Pennsylvania College of Art
and Design as part of a public arts project in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Artist Team Room 222
designed and painted the mural.
I will unabashedly tell you how thrilling it was to look up at the poem—to read its lines not by
looking down at the page and turning it but by moving my feet, my body beneath it, weaving in
and out of its lines. Does this make it less literary—less of poem?

I don’t know. For a long time visual or concrete poems held little interest for me. They seemed
overwhelmed by their visual gimmicks, as if they were only playing. I have thought a lot about
Vendler’s claim that “poetry is a temporal art” because I have always loved poetry as a temporal
art, loved its sound in my ear and in my mouth. I am beginning to more fully appreciate,
however, the diverse ways in which visual effects can collaborate with rather than simply
overthrow the temporal, even when these collaborations take the form of disruptions. Once
more, I believe that it is often in these disruptions to the temporal—which visual elements can
achieve with direct and dramatic force—that contemplation is most fully allowed and invited.

There are so many examples of poetry that uses visual effects—visual pattern, typography,
imported images, and more—in innovative and moving ways: the ancient Greek pattern poems,
Latin emblems, the shaped poems of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, Hungarian shaped
poems from the eighteenth-century, William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, Anne Carson’s Nox,
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me be Lonely, Jennifer Scappettone’s From Dame Quickly; the visual
effects in these poems are often as profound as they are diverse. I will end, however, with a nod
to the shaped poetry that I admittedly scorned for so long. Who hasn’t been softened upon seeing
one of Guillaume Appollinaire’s lovely, hand-colored books of calligrams? I think of the letter
that Wallace Stevens wrote to his friend William Rose Benét in 1933 in which he cites “The
Emperor of Ice Cream” as his favorite among his poems. In his words, it “wears a deliberately
commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of
poetry; that is the reason why I like it.” I love that phrase: “the essential gaudiness of poetry.”
There has to be room for poetry
marked by extravagance. And if this is
true, why should poetry always wear a
commonplace costume?

Works Cited
Berjouhi Bowler, The Word as Image (London:
Studio Vista, 1970).
Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An
Introduction and Anthology, Third Edition
(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010).
Holly Stevens, ed., Wallace Stevens (New
York: Knopf, 1966), 263.
Mary Szybist, Incarnadine, (Minneapolis:
Graywolf Press, 2013).
All images, with the exceptions of my own
poem and Helen Vendler’s arrangement of
George Herbert’s “Prayer,” are taken from Berjouhi Bowler’s book The Word as Image.