The Visual Message

Traditional poetry (and many other forms of literature) has focus in providing a detailed imagery that the reader can use to insert herself into the world the writer intends to create. The usage of certain verbs or adjectives with specific connotations was very important to achieving this goal. Like Vicente Huidobro said, “El adjetivo, cuando no da vida, mata.” The work of literature, thus, comes to life in the mind of the reader. It wasn’t until the creation of electronic poetry that a clear and significant shift in the writer’s intention was made noticeable. Now, the enterprise of the e-poet is, among other things, to provide a visual image that the reader can take in and analyze. And it is through the materiality of the visual image that the writer can achieve this goal. That is, the shape, size, color (etc.) of the visuals contribute to the writer’s purpose of giving the reader an image to take away from the work.

Eduardo Ledesma, in “Latin American Digital Poetry: Animated Embodiment,” exemplifies this shift in his analysis of Ana Maria Uribe's Kinetic Poems. One of the poems he references in his article is Uribe’s "Una manada de centauros" ("A Herd of Centaurs"). In this kinetic poem, we observe a group of h’s galloping, in a group, across the screen. The selection of this visual, the letter h, is based on its similarity to the mythical centaurs, in an upright position, galloping across a field. The connection between the visual image (h) and the intended association to a mythical creature (centaur) is done by a visual metaphor. As Ledesma indicates, “the power of metaphor resides in its status as a trope that attempts to bridge a "gap" between similar yet different terms,” (p. 177). The form of the letter resembles, vaguely, the outline of the half-man-half-horse being. But it is not until we observe the galloping h’s that the metaphor really jumps out of the screen.

Another example of this is the poem “Gimnasia” by Uribe. Here, we observe a group of letters I, in formation, throughout the entire screen. Then, simultaneously, they all morph themselves into a T, then Y, V, and X. These aren’t just still images of letters flipping from one picture to the other. These are dancing letters, performing, like cheerleaders. It’s not just the visual movement of the letters that gives us this association, but the similarity with the physiological movements a human is capable of performing. This goes back to Ledesma’s proposed role of the metaphor in kinetic poetry—the interaction between similarity and difference between the visual provided and the concept they are meant to represent, in a way the fills the “gap” between the two. And it is until the reader can identify the similarities and differences between these two concepts that she can identify the gap to fill and, thus, capture the intended visual.