kaldron / a commentary by karl kempton and Mahmoud Moawad Sokar
Part 1: MAHMOUD MOAWAD SOKAR
The work selected in kaldron highlights how visual poets use elaborate skill to — in turn — elaborate upon many philosophies and avant-garde movements. Even the titling of kaldron is a fascinated/fascinating combination of cubism and the tradition of calligraphy, incorporating a spelling derive.
The stew of works contained within kaldron also elaborates two contradicting philosophies: the first is minimalism which depends on reducing language, sometimes even substituting dashes and dots for the text. The second philosophy is maximalism in which the poets use redundancy of images, texts, and symbols in the same work. Here, what distinguishes these works is that they frequently adapt different tools and techniques for conveying innovation and modernity. For example, the following poster poem highlights and exemplifies visual revolution/s over the course of the 20th century:
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| kaldron issue #10 |
Visual revolution, via modern technological devices and advertisements, has changed visual poetry from a mere rearrangement of the text into an intermediary space between poetry and other human activities. In other words, the “modern” visual poet popularizes poetry as s/he merges poetry with everyday elements like advertising or signage, augmented by painting, music, sculpture, etc. In this regard, the poem above is designed to both convey an authorial POV and interweave exemplars — politics, media, war, commercial visual effect’s evolution. Moreover, it also enfolds scientific and philosophical theories.
The unique interference between plastic arts and visual poetry, used in the poems following perhaps requires wider terminology: “anti-poetry” is a poetic category which aims at destroying the conventions of traditional verse. Anti-poets reject the belief that poetry has any mystical power. Anti-poetry is strongly associated with visual poetry. Visual poetry and anti-poetry’s dependence on avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Minimalism led to de-familiarizing (John Cage would say “de-militarizing”) poetry, consequently de-stroying poetic rules and traditions:
Besides the different themes and techniques utilized by the selected poem, the above-mentioned “anti-poem” elaborates visual metaphor for textual density — the specific gravity of the mix changes, as it clarifies the semantic dimensions of language with less emphasis on slave-ish visual representation.
Calligraphy is a tradition that has a significant influence on the selected poems, however it is a morphed calligraphy that we see here. The visual poems in caldron seem to have ingested the whole development of calligraphy starting from Hieroglyphic Writing and Islamic writing-to modern technological signs, including traffic signs, dashes, and mathematical symbols:
Calligraphy is one of the most important forms of art interwoven with visual poetry, associated with visualizing significant texts, especially religious texts. It renders totems and signs in an expressive, harmony, or discord. It is noticeable that calligraphy is a dynamic source of inspiration for much visual poetry, especially in its concrete form.
On the surface level, the above-mentioned calligraphic/visual poem represents Islamic writings. However, on a deeper level, it adopts the Islamic calligraphy but does not give any Islamic-religious interpretations. The work reconfigures one word only — “Alienation” — which is visualized as a water well. A water well in Islamic and Arabic culture has many implications, especially the idea of being lost as in the story of Jubb Yussef (Joseph's Well). Moreover, water wells in Arab-Islamic culture have many different implications concerning prosperity, guidance, and depression.
It might be said that the kaldron poems assert the visual poem as the art of humanity, the only human artistic and intellectual activity that includes all others. The selected poems not only have the ability to move between different artistic∕philosophical disciplines, but also between ages to combine different cultures and indeed civilizations. They melt together different artistic works, movements, philosophies, and cultures within one artistic-literary caldron, “the crucible of art.”
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| kaldron issue #19 |
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