Visual poetry

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Visual poetry is poetry that uses pictures, typography, and other visual elements to convey meaning, not just words. It mixes visual art with writing and plays with how a poem looks on the page. Some works tell a story, but many are more about the arrangement of letters, shapes, and images. Others are abstract, focusing on the look of the piece rather than language itself.

This form grew out of concrete poetry and the idea of intermedia, where language and visuals blend. In the 1950s, concrete poetry experiments expanded into broader “intermedia” work, a term Dick Higgins described in 1965. As these pieces moved away from traditional poetry language, many people began to see them as a separate phenomenon: visual poetry.

In 1968, Mary Ellen Solt talked about a shift toward a “new visual poetry” that relies on typography and visuals rather than oral tradition. She noted artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival, and Hansjörg Mayer as part of this movement. Marvin A. Sackner later defined the difference this way: concrete poems use only letters or words to form an image, while visual poems mix images into the text itself. He also pointed to related forms like artist-made picture poems and artist books, mentioning Kenneth Patchen and Tom Phillips’ A Humument.

Earlier and in different ways, artists laid the groundwork for visual poetry. Joan Miró’s poem-painting Le corps de ma brune (1925), Piet Mondrian’s Textuel (1928), and H. N. Werkman’s drukels used typography and layout to create visual effects. Werkman even used the typewriter to make abstract patterns called tiksels. These efforts anticipated what would be called visual poetry in the 1960s and 1970s as intermedial work.

Klaus Peter Dencker has stressed that visual poetry is intermedial and interdisciplinary and that current forms wouldn’t exist without concrete poetry. Some scholars, like Willard Bohn, use a broader label and see visual poetry as poetry meant to be seen, requiring both a viewer and a reader.

Today, visual poetry includes works where layout, typography, images, and language all work together to create meaning or a striking effect, sometimes focusing more on form and look than on telling a traditional story.