BEYOND LINGUISTIC BORDERS: VISUAL POETRY AT THE CONFLUENCE BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE FAR EAST

Abstract

The present study calls into focus the poetic art promoted by the “new poetry†which appeared during the second half of the 20th century, known as concrete poetry or visual poetry. While globalising the possibilities of expression and communication of poetry, the “verbivocovisual†poetic formula offers itself as a theoretical model which redefines already established methods of producing and receiving the lyric text. It propounds an experiential-expressive model which broadens information on the materiality of language. Several examples of visual poems (in Portuguese, French and Japanese), which are subject to analysis in this study, attempt to certify that two apparently extremely different cultural universes, that use arbitrary signs in their script (the West) or pictorially meaningful signs (the Far East), might meet somewhere beyond their linguistic borders in the form of visual poetry. Its poetics may finally give birth to “common universal poetryâ€, semantically governed by innovative rules. The result of this analysis, undergone from an interdisciplinary perspective that joins the linguistic-semantic method with those given by cultural semiotics and art history, may materialise through the recovery, within the perimeter of the modeled world proposed by visual poetry, of the recurring motif which could be called “the moving lineâ€.