Visual Poetry is used as a single concept and refers to visual images enhancing written words or visa versa. When creating visual poetry the full range of visual and verbal communication skills are utilized to suggest or imply more than mere facts or marketing stimuli. The accent is on poetic expression via visual images as well as written words. When the visual and verbal are reconciled, the interpreting experience has a multi-dimension quality which stretches beyond mere illustration - it becomes visual poetry.
I often make use of the Haiku an epigrammatic poem, laden with significance in my Electrographs. The Haiku usually consists of 17 syllables and is presented in three lines of 5,7,5 syllables respectively. Two ideas or concepts are posed either in juxtaposition or in an ambiguous form, and in turn, by subtle implication, mask yet a third idea. The discovery or understanding of this latter idea is known as the Haiku moment. Experiencing such a moment is extremely personal for both the reader and poet, and the reader is therefore made a partner and co-creator of the haiku, in that he applies his own associations and perceptions on the words, ideas and concepts.
A successful haiku is both subtle and complex, full or deeper meanings that extend and invitation to the personal development of ideas and to personal interpretation.
In haiku, reference is often made to the seasons. One is sometimes even expected - on the strength of but one word - to call up the entire atmosphere of a season, including all the associations and nostalgia involved.
Both poet and reader use a sensitive, receptive awareness of, and focus on, the mystic relationship between things. Even the smallest and most everyday things are intuitively experienced transcendentally as part of a greater cosmic whole.
The haiku may ostensibly seem simple and its a form limiting, and yet in Japan, where it had its origin, it is considered to be the most elevated and purest of the verse forms. It demands an inner discipline from both the poet and the interpreter that points to a spirituality of, and deeper insight into daily experiences. In other words, both the poet and the reader are made to realize the essence of things. Once all nonessentials have been stripped away, a quiet moment and cosmic unity is experienced.
The haiku is the unification of perception and reality - an intuitive identification with the greater universe - and it therefore requires a willingness to pinpoint the 'now' and turn it into something both timeless and universal.
