Poetry: Visual Poetry

When you think of poetry, you usually think of things like sonnets and rhyming and meter and all that other stuff I've been talking to you about all month. But there's a whole different form of poetry called visual poetry.

There is concrete poetry, also known as shape poetry. Here are some examples:

These are also called altar poems when the shape the poem makes is related to the textual content of the poem.

In those examples, the text is still in straight lines. But in a calligram, the lines aren't restricted to lines:

This is a calligram in French that describes the items made up by the words (example: the mouth says "la bouche" which is French for "mouth").

This is where things start getting really weird. Asemic writing is more art and less writing (in my personal opinion). Fluxus poetry is a work of poetry created during the course of a performance. I openly admit that I don't know how lettrism and micrography differ from calligrams and other forms of visual poetry, but perhaps one of you could help me out there.

With that, my friends, we wrap up our March of poetry (which I regret is not alliterative or even rhyming) and prepare for the daily challenge of NaPoWriMo! See you then...