Concrete and Visual Poetry

1) Take an already completed poem and, using Word or some other application, alter its font. Try applying one particular font to the whole piece, and try also varying fonts throughout the piece. Save each version, and read each carefully to see what effects are achieved by altering your work visually in this way.

2) Take an already completed poem and apply effects to it in Photoshop (or some other graphics program). Smear letters, words, or lines; apply shadow; add textures; break up portions of the poem and move them around; experiment with color (hue, saturation, balance); apply filter effects (brush strokes, stylizations, blurring, noise etc.), warp the text; import graphics; apply animation; and so on. Play with the poem as material. Consider how these changes affect the poem's meaning, what it asks of its reader, and what it asks of its writer. How does our sense of the piece change when its visual dimension is forgrounded? When we are asked to "read" it both as a verbal event and a visual piece?

3 ) Take a nonliterary written document of any sort and play with its language and graphics until it is a visual poem. I.e., take a magazine ad, a bulletin board flier, a bank check, a restaurant menu, a pizza box, a beer label, a newspaper page, a highway billboard, a postcard, some bathroom graffiti, a movie poster etc.and ALTER or simply DISPLAY the piece in such a way that we see it as a "poem."

4a) Write a concrete or visual poem in which you imitate one of the pieces by Richard Kostelanetz in WordWorks.

4b) Write a concrete or visual poem in which you address, respond, and/or talk back to poet Richard Kostelanetz.

5) Create a concrete or visual poem from scratch. Anything goes.