Visual Improvisation: Cognition, Materiality, and Postlinguistic Visual Poetry

Abstract

In this article, I present a framework for the analysis of postlinguistic visual poetry through a discussion of several works by Canadian poets derek beaulieu and Donato Mancini. This poetry eschews words to manipulate parts or hints of letters, exploring the minutiae of typewritten form for meaning construction. Drawing on recent work in cognitive science, I show how visual poems disrupt common understandings of language through its materiality, how the creators engage in improvisations around these understandings to develop the unexpected, and how the poetic artifacts prompt dynamic inferences and improvised understandings in readers. Meaningful understandings of the poems emerge especially from the development of relational understandings between fragments of letters through the perception of fictive motion and fictive change. I show how cognitive improvisation facilitates these perceptions and meaning construction in the contrastive styles of beaulieu's and Mancini's poems. I argue that improvisational cognitive processes on the part of both the writers and readers play a crucial role in how postlinguistic forms come to be meaningful within the context of bibliographic and material expectations.