‘Guggenheim Museum’ (Typoem, 1968)
From a distanced glance, this poem looks like the shape of the staircase inside the museum in New York. When one reads it, however, one has to move their head as they read each word, as though one is moving through the spiralling museum floors. While this process is mimetic of one’s experience at the museum, it also makes the reading process a kinetic one.
‘Tren en marcha’ (Typoem, 1968)
If one takes in this poem at a glance, its shape is reminiscent of a train car, and, if one further blurs their focus on them, the excessive repetition of the letters has the effect of portraying a train zipping passed. The semantic meaning of the words emphasizes the image we can see on the page, but also what we can hear and feel. When one reads the poem aloud, one imitates the sounds of a train in motion: the rolling of the repeated ‘r’s makes the sound of a train revving up, and, as Ledesma also points out, the repetition of the ‘ch’s makes the sound of a train’s wheels churning forward. The reader not only makes the train run visually across the page and gives sound to it, but in a way becomes like a train, or perhaps a conductor of a train: the reader’s eyes move fast across the page as s/he makes the sounds a train makes, and as one reads from left to right on the page, the train moves from right to left, as though the train was moving forward as the scenery zips passed in the other direction (imagine looking out a train window).
‘Bowling’ (Typoem, 1968)
This Typoem illustrates a round of bowling, with the ‘i’s as the pins about to be hit by the close ‘o’ as the bowling ball. The ‘o’ at the bottom of the screen could be seen as the person playing the game, or could be the bowling ball at the beginning of the game. If it is seen as the latter, the ball ‘moves’ down the bowling alley as the reader moves their eyes from the bottom to the top of the screen.
*Some of these descriptions are developed from my article, written with Felipe Cussen, The Spirituality of Language in Cecilia Vicuña’s and Ana María Uribe’s Visual Poetry.
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