Saturday 17 May 2008

vispo in education

Now, we all know visual poetry will never be fully be mainstream. Maybe this is a good thing, because to find really good contemporary poetry you often have to go beyond the so called "mainstream". But what dictates the mainstream and what is it? well, I suppose it's stuff that is seen more widely and is perhaps more conventional. Well perhaps not conventional, because as good as he is Ron silliman could never be regarded as conventional.

Brion Gysin said that writing was 50 years behind painting and he was very right. And still is. your average man(or indeed woman) on the street probably doesn't know much about vispo. Is anything being done?

well, a growing amount of websites and blogs about it are appearing (including mine), I only just started my blog I have no idea if people are actually looking at this blog yet. If anyone is reading this I would appreciate a few comments, just so I know I'm not talking to myself. This subject of the appeal of vispo will be something I may get back to. I am studying Creative and professional writing and English at Wolverhampton university in the UK at the moment and I noticed that there seem to be absolutely no courses dedicated to how to write and publish poetry.

The creative writing course certainly is interesting , but it focuses on novel writing and short story writing. I am essentially a poet. It's kind of how my brain works. though there is a module dedicated to poetry, they only mentioned prose poems once (I gather its not exactly popular historically with British poets) and the lecturer seemed very ignorant of visual poetry when she talked about it. She only knew of pattern poetry, and while I know that is a historically important stage in visual poetry's development, its a bit terrible to maintain this is the only kind there is. I introduced a few students to contemporary vispoets like Gustave Morin and recommended Geoff Huth's blog .
They were seemingly amazed and had never seen poetry like this. I think I did well there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

New reader here -- have subscribed to your RSS feed. Saw your post on the vispo board. Excellent work! Look forward to seeing and reading more. Best, A.

mike di tomasso said...

well thank you,Angela. I am glad you like my work. I will be sure to look at your blogs

Geofhuth said...

Mike,

I'm keeping up with your blog. Today directly, but I'll usually do it via my Bloglines RSS feedreader just as my friend Angela is.

If you want to have some idea of visits to your blog (keeping in mind that this doesn't include anyone reading it via a feedreader), go to sitemeter.com to find out how to put up a meter to track visits.

Have fun!

Geof