Context - Content - Form - Medium

(1) I think this : Context - Content - Form - Medium sums up the range of thinking I'd like to encourage in poets. What are radical contexts for your work? What are novel locations? Methods of delivery? (Context). What are you saying with the words? (Content). How are you arranging the words? (Form). Are you investigating the medium - the paper, the ink, or are using something else, the computer?; I encourage you to be like the calligrapher who makes his own ink and reeds. (Medium).



(2) Ian Hamilton Finlay ; a poet who created work specifically for a garden, intersecting sculpture, architecture and poetry. Check out the link.

Visual Poetry

Check out this poem featured in Poetry by Jesse Patrick Ferguson. The title is "Mama". I think this is a great poem because it's (a) simple, (b) visually pleasing and (c) iconographic : the first curve, I imagine, is mama's knee, the second curve, either a baby reaching up or the two e's - mama's breasts (or both). What's incredible about this poem is that a sound ("e" or "eee..."), a yearning sound (?), becomes an image (or an icon); the word "ee" is simultaneously a phonetic and visual representation of desire.