Bernhardt and Wysoki
Poetry has recently fascinated me for being something that we predominantly encounter in print, while its origins and structures are dictated by vocal performance. Rhyme, the repetition of sounds, rhythm, iambic pentameter etc. work because of the way words sound when arranged in a certain way. It could be that doing this organizes the content cognitively, as Bernhardt suggests the visual elements of a text do in writing. I know that, while I hear poetry in my head when I read it, that hearing is pretty distant from any experience actually hearing poetry performed. This might be why iambic pentameter didn't make any sense to me when I first encountered Shakespeare in middle school (I still can't quite grasp it). While I think written poetry is meant to replicate or be a source for the auditory experience, the visual presentation of it doesn't provide that unless you know how something is meant to be read. Consider the visual arrangement of a poem in your Norton Anthology or Penguin Classics: for stuff written before 1900 especially, everything is left-justified with white space to indicate space between stanzas and line breaks. Until I started taking lit classes with Ben, who insists on reading everything out loud, poetry was often a confounding experience. What was most interesting, from the point of view of how visual arrangement influences reading, was that I read rhythm in the line breaks. I remember writing as if that was how poetry was punctuated; my 8th grade English teacher corrected me, saying punctuation was totally necessary unless you were e e cummings.
However, following from Bernhardt's overall point that writing makes visual arrangement a key part of how readers categorize and navigate information, it seems as if that's a very natural way to read poetry. And what I think you start to see with poetry in the past few decades is an increasing interest in arranging a poem visually. I speculate that this could be a result of the printed word becoming the primary vehicle through which a person encounters poetry, creating an audience more sensitive to visual cues and less able to read the auditory arrangement of poem into a printed text.
Rupi Kaur's stuff is a good example of how visual arrangement might be doing the work that auditory arrangement used to do:
With Kaur's poetry, the visual arrangement of words and image on a page seem to create the feeling as much as the words themselves. Type size, font, and white space all evoke something. Following Wysocki, I think the way I read font and type size is a consequence of cultural associations that tell me how to read them. This looks like a serif font, like Times New Roman. While originally designed out of an attachement to the works of the classical world (Wysocki 128), for me I'm most used to seeing this in academic contexts, or in contexts where the text isn't meant to be visually informative. The size is also something that I would expect of a paragraph, rather than a heading or title, which further informs how I read this. The effect is an understated voice. The white space looks like something modern publishers have done to make poetry look profound (maybe its a zen-like quality of emptiness). That's pretty blunt, although I think that's why Kaur's poetry has also invited some measure of mockery. Maybe its more that, with less crowding the page, you are invited to dwell there. Finally, the illustration has a movement of its own. It exists in equilibrium (Bernhardt 72) with the text, while its upward drifting motion complements the poem. The visual gestalt (Bernhardt 71) lends feeling that the words don't communicate on their own, and so the poem is constituted by the layout of the entire page.
However, following from Bernhardt's overall point that writing makes visual arrangement a key part of how readers categorize and navigate information, it seems as if that's a very natural way to read poetry. And what I think you start to see with poetry in the past few decades is an increasing interest in arranging a poem visually. I speculate that this could be a result of the printed word becoming the primary vehicle through which a person encounters poetry, creating an audience more sensitive to visual cues and less able to read the auditory arrangement of poem into a printed text.
Rupi Kaur's stuff is a good example of how visual arrangement might be doing the work that auditory arrangement used to do:
With Kaur's poetry, the visual arrangement of words and image on a page seem to create the feeling as much as the words themselves. Type size, font, and white space all evoke something. Following Wysocki, I think the way I read font and type size is a consequence of cultural associations that tell me how to read them. This looks like a serif font, like Times New Roman. While originally designed out of an attachement to the works of the classical world (Wysocki 128), for me I'm most used to seeing this in academic contexts, or in contexts where the text isn't meant to be visually informative. The size is also something that I would expect of a paragraph, rather than a heading or title, which further informs how I read this. The effect is an understated voice. The white space looks like something modern publishers have done to make poetry look profound (maybe its a zen-like quality of emptiness). That's pretty blunt, although I think that's why Kaur's poetry has also invited some measure of mockery. Maybe its more that, with less crowding the page, you are invited to dwell there. Finally, the illustration has a movement of its own. It exists in equilibrium (Bernhardt 72) with the text, while its upward drifting motion complements the poem. The visual gestalt (Bernhardt 71) lends feeling that the words don't communicate on their own, and so the poem is constituted by the layout of the entire page.
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