There's a gap between the earlier concrete poetry and a later one, beginning in the 70s I think, when opacity rather than transparency and illegibility becomes the order of the day. There were earlier visual poets than Ullán in Spain, but he represents that transition.

Voice and visuality are not in opposition to each other in modernist poetics, though they may appear to be at times. Emphasis on both or either entails an emphasis on the materiality of the sign. The relevant opposition is between voice and visuality, on one side, and Billy Collins-style transparency on the other. In other words, anti-modern emphasis on the communicative function of language. Poetry cannot be transparent by definition.

I've figured out why I've always hated concrete poetry: it moves quickly to a certain transparency of effect. Once you see that the words form an image of the Eiffel tower, and once you see what the words say, and put the two together, you are done. I prefer Ullán's opaque signs, where visuality takes us in the direction of abstraction.

A new dimension of the project is emerging: performativity, visuality, etc... in tension with the emphasis on intellectual history / philosophy.

Perloff usefully distinguishes between 4 approaches to literature / poetry. Poetry as a branch rhetoric; as philosophy; as an art form alongside of other forms of art; as document of cultural history. The tension in my project is between philosophy, intellectual history, and cultural history, on the one hand, and art. Ullán is bringing me closer to performative and interartistic, performative aspects of Lorca.

I re-read Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character" again yesterday. I couldn't believe how naive the underlying theory of language was in this seminal text--naive to the point of stupidity in the privileging of transitive verbs and subject verb object word-order. The orientalizing gaze of Pound and Fenollosa is almost unbearable. What is most unbearable is that opinions of Chinese scholars are never cited frequently enough, that there really isn't a depth of knowledge here adequate to the task at hand.

I also spent some time with some Twombly catalogues and a huge, recent Yale UP book of Chinese calligraphy. My ideas are coming together nicely.

Concrete poetry also seems kind of naive and hokey to me--most of it. Wouldn't it make sense that if I only like 10% of poetry that I would also only like 10% of visual and concrete poetry? What I don't like is the regressive move back toward naive mimesis, when the aim should be to move in the opposite direction, toward abstraction in both language and the visual, iconic sign. Here I'll bring in John Yau's point about Creeley's abstract language in his catalogue of Creeley's collaborations.

This chapter of the book is going to end up being the center in a way I hadn't anticipated, taking me in new directions.

There are four direction in which modern poetry re-emphasizes visuality:

(1) The hypervisuality of imagism and related movements.

(2) The dedication to the printed or type-written page.

(3) The exploration of typography for its own sake, as an extension of (2).

(4) The collaborative impulse, reaching out to forms of visual art.

I spent some time with Ullán's "agrafismos," which also go the title "ondulaciones." These are small works of visual art in various media that insist on a few basic motifs in repetitive, playful variations. There is a serpent superimposed on various backgrounds, some of which look like thicker, undulating serpents or worms. Place enough of these worms in a circle, and the serpent is seen against a human brain. The wavy lines can look like ocean waves or suggest indecipherable writing systems.

A wave in a rope or whip, for example, moves the length of the rope, but the rope itself does not move forward. I realized that I don't know how snakes move forward. Legged animals move by pushing back on the ground and causing an equal and opposite reaction of forward motion, right?. I'm assuming that slithering locomotion occurs by exerting pressure backwards by curling and then straightening, using the friction of the entire length. I'd never really thought of it before. On the other hand I don't know how cross-country skier go uphill.

I think I want to write about what Ullán's visual poetry does to the idea of the "speaking voice" or subject of enunciation. I'll argue that his poetry already lacks a strong "voice" of this type. and the extension into visuality increases this tendency.

At the same time, there is no sacrifice of "expression." There is still a strong authorial presence, there's just not a poetic "speaker" in a dramatic situation telling us stuff, or talking to some other imaginary person. There's obviously nothing wrong with this paradigm of a little imaginary person talking to a little imaginary woman or man, or a vase or the western wind--and indirectly to the real reader, with the little imaginary speaker being the implicit voice of the "poet."

I got this idea while mowing the lawn this morning. I say this because of the idea that a lot of hostility to professors comes from the we can mow our lawns any day of the week. I.e.: we don't do enough work.

As luck would have it, I've been invited to talk about Ullán in Madrid next January.

Where I am skeptical about a lot of visual poetry (and where I think Ullán is the exception) is that it doesn't have a strong visual sensibility behind it. It might have a typographer's sensibility (if you're lucky) but not a painter's sensibility.

***

I remember at a poetry reading in New York several years ago a guy I was talking to pointed out another guy: "See that guy, he came and gave a really bad lecture on visual poetry. He started off with very basic definitions and insulted our intelligence." Then, about 10 minutes later I found myself in a conversation with guy #2, who pointed out guy #2 to me across the room. "See that guy over there? I went to give a lecture on visual poetry and that guy insulted me..."

This is a similar text to the one I'm talking about in the post below.

Ullán, I'm coming to realize now, is a really key figure of Spanish culture of the past 40 years. I'm thinking I do need a chapter on him--or at least a good part of a chapter.

Collaborated with artists: Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, etc...

One of the only major poets who experimented in visual poetry.

Early translator in Spain of Jabès. Valente himself comes to Jabès through Ullán.

Knew María Zambrano; his poetry was admired by Octavio Paz.

Friend of Miguel Casado...

A significant career in journalism, in a country where the cultural supplements of newspapers have an importance they don't have in the US.

Yet Ullán never won the major awards and prizes. In a literary world where such prizes really are a driving force, and come almost automatically to writers with a certain longevity, he was not the one raking in all those awards. Perhaps it's better that way, because it makes us realize that prizes recognize value rather than creating it.

i feel horrible about not writing about him when he was alive. I was always too intimidated by his work, I suppose.

One of my favorite poems by Ullán is a sonnet, consisting of 14 lines of hieorglyphics of his own invention. There is a rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet-- ABBAABBACDCDCD--since the characters that end the lines recur in that order. Some are mimetic images--a fish, a bird, etc... Other glyphs are more abstract, but still highly expressive, hand drawn or maybe stenciled with real craftsmanship. It's visual poetry of the highest order, because it's not just conceptual: the written signs are dense and meaningful, and recur in a classic form, that of the sonnet.

***

If you google "Mayhew" with "García Montero," as I did last night, you will see that several people disagree with my most notorious position. This doesn't bother me. In the first place, if your work has a polemical edge, then people are bound to disagree. Protesting that is like protesting the fact that the player on the other side of the net is hitting the ball back at you. Once a critical position is a virtual consensus, then the issue is a closed one. Secondly, it's me they're disagreeing with. That is, I'm the one defining the terms of the debate. Thirdly, I am still right; I still have the stronger arguments on my side as far as I'm concerned. My position has always been that I could be mistaken, but you'll have to show me how. Fourthly: I don't take it personally if someone doesn't agree with me, even when their responses take on a personal or insulting tone (which is rare in any case). When I read that "Mayhew" says this or that, it almost seems like a different person to me. Seeing my own name in print has always done that to me.