What We Expect Of The Poet: Autonomy From Image (2015-07-12)
Visual art. Text embedded in an image is a multi-media art form. At least that is how I think of it. It is different from a purely visual image. It can enrich the image, just as lyrics can enrich music. And, as in the case of music, it isn’t correct to assume that because the whole work is art the textual component is necessarily poetry.
My own visual art is always an image with text. It is simply a rule I’ve set myself. When I started creating these works back in the eighties, I initially called them ‘computer poems’ because they were created on a computer and contained text. It was mislabelling, like calling a song a poem. Sometimes I did use one of my poems in an artwork, but that didn’t make it a poem. It is an entirely different beast.
