Kim Dorman's Kerala Journal and VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978, Taylor Mignon (ed.): A Review

Kerala Journal, Kim Dorman, Xylem Books Lign Series 4, 2021, ISBN 978-1-9163935-5-4, £10.00

VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978, Taylor Mignon (ed.), Isobar Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-4-907359-38-6, £15.00

Bashō advised poets ‘From pines, learn pine; from bamboos, bamboo’. Kim Dorman is one of a handful of living English language poets to carefully heed this advice. The poems in Kerala Journal are, we’re told in an author’s note at the back of the book, inspired by, among other things, ‘the poetic travel diaries of Bashō’ but these are no mere imitations of the master haikuist, but rather an application of an approach to poetry, and to the world, that is derived from close reading resulting in poems that capture moments of silent apprehension in precisely carved fragments of language. In addition, Dorman draws on Hindu, Chinese and classical European traditions and on what might loosely be called the Imagist tradition in English-language poetry.

And his world spans both what we term the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’; like Bashō, Dorman is concerned with how his neighbours might manage to live:

By the paddy bund

an old man

grows melons.

The old man inhabits the same world, the same field of apprehension, as a bird or a pebble, and that field is not a human privilege, but one that is shared by other eyes, in a kind of continuum of observation, a unity:

I toss a small

stone

into the river.

A kingfisher

sees it

too,

in silence

And this silence is the natural destination of Dorman’s language, but it is the silence that comes from having said that which is to be said, not the silence of having nothing to say.

At the heart of this work is a concept of analogy that transcends comparison to open tiny doors into larger worlds. Take for instance this haiku-like piece:

morning sky

the pale calligraphy

of birds

A moment of recognition that brings together more strands than it uses words. The reader may think of certain Japanese ink drawings, Chinese ideograms and Pound’s theories concerning them, a haiku by Bashō that reads ‘higoro nikuki / karasu mo yuki no / ashita kana’ in Romanji and might be rendered as ‘bloody crow /he too this morning / against the snow’ and the Greek myth of Hermes inventing the alphabet after observing cranes in flight.

In this extraordinary book, it is apparent that Dorman has learned the world from the world and has found shapes made of words in which to render what he has learned. It’s a book to read, reread and read again, as I can tell you from experience.

VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978 is the latest instalment in Isobar’s presentation of a world of Japanese poetry beyond haiku, and a handsome piece of publishing it is, with reproductions of over 80 works by nine different contributors to the magazine, an introduction by Eric Selland, an Editor’s Afterword and a one-page introduction for each poet. The magazine grew out of the VOU club, founded in the 1930s by Kitasono Katue whose contacts with Pound and others brough an international modernist dimension to the group.

In the introduction, Selland contrasts the work of the VOU poets with the older Japanese tradition of combining writing and painting. Where these works depart from that tradition, he argues, lies in the fact that in the VOU work, ‘dependence on semantic relationships (or ideogrammatic relationships) has been broken, moving the art more into the area of total abstraction’. This also means that, on the whole, this visual poetry has little enough in common with what we think of as concrete verse in the tradition of Stephen Hawes, George Herbert or Apollinaire, where language is formed into shapes that are readable both semantically and visually.

One or two pieces are clearly concrete in this sense, ‘op. I’ by Kiyohara Etsushi, with its rays of language cascading down the page clearly owes something to Apollinaire, while a number of works by Takahashi Shōhachitō, most notably ‘[shadow]’ incorporate blocks of Kanji with shapes and objects to create texts where the language used has a semantic relationship to the overall image.

Neither are the VOU poems scores for performance as in the work of Jackson McLow and Bob Cobbing.

This is not to say that the VOU poets don’t ever incorporate language into their work, they frequently do, but it is used as a purely visual element, not intended to be read, as in the series of text/letter picture pieces by Shimizu Toshihiko where fragments of decontextualised text are incorporated into abstract collage compositions reminiscent of Cubism or Dada. Ironically, the work in the book that most closely resembles pure concrete is his ‘hommage a augusto de campos: popcrete poem 1968’. This is classically concrete in as much as it represents a shape, a perspectival triangle with its vanishing point just above the apex, but the elements that comprise this shape are not language, but images.

As this indicates, not all the works here use text elements of any sort beyond the title. As already mentioned, much of the visual work relates to early 20^th century European avant garde art, the work of Seki Shiro is unusual in that his poems resemble monochrome Klee or Mondrian. Other contributors use treated photographs as their texts. All of this raises questions around what makes these works poems. As I’ve already said, overwhelmingly they do not incorporate text as semantic elements but depend solely on visual composition of image and text elements (when present) for their impact. In what sense are these pieces poetry rather than visual art? Part of the answer is, I think, the mode of reproduction. Although the VOU poets held exhibitions (there’s a photograph in the book of one such event), the pieces were primarily consumed as printed pages in the journal. The flatness of photographic reproduction means that the works are drained of any painterly qualities and become things to be read rather than looked at. This flatness, it seems to me, is the defining characteristic of the work gathered in this most interesting collection, allowing the works to open up moments of pure, timeless perception, which is, I suppose, one of the primary functions of poetry, albeit that the language of these poems is a purely visual one. By calling them poems but denying them any semantic resonance, the VOU poets are calling attention to the relationship between language, the image and thought in ways that leads us back to poetry with wider horizons.

But it is, inevitably, a quality that resists description in language, so I’ll complete this review by sharing an image of Tsuji Setsuko’s work ‘Photo poem’, which, I think, gives a flavour of what the reader might expect:

In the process of working on this review, I asked Poetry Twitter a very simple question, ‘visual poetry, yes or no?’ A couple of interesting things came out of the large number of responses it got. Overwhelmingly, the answers were in the affirmative, which surprised me a bit. More importantly, the vast majority of respondents were conflating concrete and visual work and a number of people stated that all poetry is visual, or at least all printed poetry. This led me to respond: ‘There’s a continuum I think between ‘normal’ text poetry, concrete poetry and visual poetry, with a space in there for sound poetry, or text as score for performance. The VOU work is pretty close to one end of the spectrum.’ If we think of, say, a sonnet, the form on the page is a kind of vehicle for carrying and organising sound and sense. With so-called free verse, the printed representation of regular, predictable stanza breaks and rhyme patterns takes this a step further, with line and stanza breaks, indents and other visual elements acting as a kind of scoring of sound and semantics. Two strands flow from this development; on the one hand you have pure sound poetry, where the text has no meaning until it is performed and on the other you have concrete poetry, where form is both visual and semantic, shape and language in harmony. Although concrete poetry has roots in Hawes and Herbert, it was the move away from formal verse that took hold in the 1910s that enabled a real flowering of the form. Visual poetry as represented in this anthology moves a step further, separating semantics from language. Here the form is the meaning and words become pure visual elements.

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter if the works of the VOU poets are poetry or visual art, they’re interesting, provoking and generally just good, and this anthology is a vital piece of recovery. Once again, Isobar have introduced an English-reading audience to something vital and almost unknown to us.