Chris McCabe - The Language of Visual Poetry

My presentation is focussed on the very first visual poems in history, written in Ancient Greek by Simias of Rhodes (ca 300bc). I will focus on his poem ‘Wings’, which responds to a strange statue of Eros, in which the love God – usually depicted as a boy – has a beard.

This poem can be seen as the nucleus for subsequent visual poems, a genre that is currently exploding in the digital world. What made Simias want to create a poem like this in the first place? What was the literary culture that Simias worked in? I will discuss how the genre Simias invented has been transmitted through the centuries via different mediums, from the creation of the codex, through the Xerox revolution, to today’s Instagram. Is visual poetry a universal language that has the potential to transcend the need for translation? And how are today's artists and poets achieving what Simias set out to do, in the digital age?

‘Wings’ is included in my anthology No, Love is Not Dead: An Anthology of Love Poetry from Around the World (Chambers, 2021), and my presentation will also explore the culture of love associated with Ancient Greek civilisation, through the poem’s questioning of the Eros figure. The foreword to my book is by Laura Tohe, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, who explains how Eros is anathema to the Navajo people: ‘how can babies have wings, are they supernatural? ... And why shoot arrows to make people fall in love?’

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Видео Chris McCabe - The Language of Visual Poetry канала Polyglot Conference