Typographical Devices
Typographical art is the employment of typography or text in ways that form patterns, ambigrams, shapes and images. It is sometimes referred to as shaped verse (when poems are employed) or pattern poems.
It is something that has been around for a long time. Examples have come down from the Hellenistic period of Greek culture in which the form of the text of a poem is shaped into what the poem itself is speaking of. Probably the first such example I saw was John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” which had the text of the poem in the shape of a Grecian urn. Another similar development is the Arabian Kufic design. Kufic consists of interlocking designs that are formed from verses of the Koran. From what I have gathered, pattern poetry is most popular in South America. The French/Polish poet Apollinaire did a book of pattern poems which he titled Calligrams. Lee Hollander is probably the most famous contemporary pattern poet in North America.
In the early 1970s I lived in a small college town in Southwestern New Mexico. I was renting a room in a house in which mostly students rented rooms and shared the rent and overhead. Robert Dougherty, a somewhat older individual, was also renting space there. He was essentially a poet. He showed me a book of his shaped verse done on a typewriter and I found it rather amazing. In many ways I found Robert to be a rather amazing person. He also wrote plays. One play which he let me read had the beauty of a Shakespearean play, save for the fact that the dialog and descriptions of the actions of the players, however lyrical, were described in the language of quantum physics. I enquired on that point, noting that the use of such language would seem incomprehensible to most people. He said that he wrote in that mode because the language of quantum physics was to be the common language of the future! Robert believed himself to be writing for future generations who would understand his work. He held a degree in quantum physics from Kent State University and had been a Blake scholar.
I had been practicing calligraphy and lettering at the time so I was not very interested in using a typewriter to create pattern poems. My first piece was one titled “Design” in which the pattern of the poem was in fact a design. The D in “Design” was itself a Celtic interlaced design. The words mimicked the actual movement of the poem’s description. It was superimposed upon a spiral design scribed on stone. I was thinking of the spiraled stone at Newgrange in Ireland. I also did others in time. Some were poems and others simply word patterns. It became so that often I would think of both the poem and the pattern almost simultaneously. I did dozens of them some which will appear here on this gallery. It seems a perfect combination: writing and art brought together in cohesion and complimenting each other.
- R. N. Taylor,
February 2011
It is something that has been around for a long time. Examples have come down from the Hellenistic period of Greek culture in which the form of the text of a poem is shaped into what the poem itself is speaking of. Probably the first such example I saw was John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” which had the text of the poem in the shape of a Grecian urn. Another similar development is the Arabian Kufic design. Kufic consists of interlocking designs that are formed from verses of the Koran. From what I have gathered, pattern poetry is most popular in South America. The French/Polish poet Apollinaire did a book of pattern poems which he titled Calligrams. Lee Hollander is probably the most famous contemporary pattern poet in North America.
In the early 1970s I lived in a small college town in Southwestern New Mexico. I was renting a room in a house in which mostly students rented rooms and shared the rent and overhead. Robert Dougherty, a somewhat older individual, was also renting space there. He was essentially a poet. He showed me a book of his shaped verse done on a typewriter and I found it rather amazing. In many ways I found Robert to be a rather amazing person. He also wrote plays. One play which he let me read had the beauty of a Shakespearean play, save for the fact that the dialog and descriptions of the actions of the players, however lyrical, were described in the language of quantum physics. I enquired on that point, noting that the use of such language would seem incomprehensible to most people. He said that he wrote in that mode because the language of quantum physics was to be the common language of the future! Robert believed himself to be writing for future generations who would understand his work. He held a degree in quantum physics from Kent State University and had been a Blake scholar.
I had been practicing calligraphy and lettering at the time so I was not very interested in using a typewriter to create pattern poems. My first piece was one titled “Design” in which the pattern of the poem was in fact a design. The D in “Design” was itself a Celtic interlaced design. The words mimicked the actual movement of the poem’s description. It was superimposed upon a spiral design scribed on stone. I was thinking of the spiraled stone at Newgrange in Ireland. I also did others in time. Some were poems and others simply word patterns. It became so that often I would think of both the poem and the pattern almost simultaneously. I did dozens of them some which will appear here on this gallery. It seems a perfect combination: writing and art brought together in cohesion and complimenting each other.
- R. N. Taylor,
February 2011