Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Our new century and its surge in poetic activity resembles the turn of the 20th century, a time when the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), influenced by cinema and telegraphic technologies, carefully sketched by hand, and then had typeset, poetry that used letters and words in a new way, one that suggested moving images. His courageous poetry formed pictures by means of the placement of letters and words on the page. Those images, though immobile, brimmed with movement, action waiting to happen, and Apollinaire predicted it was only a matter of time before poets would incorporate genuine motion and sound in their poems. Apollinaire anticipated digital poetry, a current style of poetry that animates letters and words.

In his famous lecture “L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poétes,” given at a meeting in Paris in November, 1917, Apollinaire, whose friends at Montparnasse in Paris included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Marie Laurencin and Marcel Duchamp, called for innovation in poetry and predicted that the poetry of the future would be inventive and amazing. He foresaw the role technology would play in poetry, anticipating a day when poets would have the ability to merge words with pictures and sound. Apollinaire concluded his famous Paris lecture by saying, “Poets will mechanize [computerize] poetry one day, just like other things in the world have been mechanized. They will provide a completely new lyricism driven by the motion now taking place with the phonograph and cinema. This poetry is now in its infancy. But watch out, it will soon speak for itself, and a new spirit will fill the universe and manifest itself in the field of letters and art, and in everything that is known.” ¹ Because Apollinaire thought poets were seers who could predict the future, it is fitting that he be the poet to prophesy the current digital era, an age which not only allows individual poets the chance to propel concepts from one side of the world to the other, passing them through towers and cables at the speed of light, but also grants poets who choose to experiment with this new form the liberty to set their words, their letters, their stanzas into a motion all their own.

Apollinaire’s daring poems foreshadowed our present age. He called his experimental poetry “Calligrames,” a combination of the words, “Calligraphy” and “Telegram,” because his poems both played with the design and placement of letters on the page and demonstrated the movement of words through time and space. Apollinaire initially sketched his Calligrames in notebooks or on scattered pieces of paper, and then carried his sketches to a typesetter who would set the letters and words on the page following Apollinaire’s design. Fascinated by wireless telegraphy and its ability to transmit messages from boat to shore, by converting them into encoded radio waves, Apollinaire’s breakthrough Calligram poem was 'Lettre-océan,' which uses words to form the shapes of two whirling wheels, one of which represents the Eiffel Tower from an aerial perspective. 'Lettre-océan' is filled with activity because the Eiffel Tower was used during Apollinaire’s lifetime to send wireless telegraphic messages to stations and ships at sea. Scattered words and seemingly unrelated conversations of persons visiting the Eiffel Tower spin out from the wheel in all directions. There is no specific way in which this poem, meant to mimic a postcard, should be read. It is not interpreted in a linear way, not from top to bottom or left to right. It does not have a primary focal point. Rather the reader’s eye catches the whirling rhythm of the words, sporadically, nonlinearly. The poem renders the impression of simultaneity.

Although the French literary critic Gabriel Arbouin praised Apollinaire’s 'Lettre-océan' as innovative, he also feared this new poetic method threatened traditional poetry. He suggested Apollinaire’s Calligrames evolve in a more controlled fashion whereby shapes formed by the words of the poem would reflect and heighten the poem’s subject matter. Apollinaire seems to have taken Arbouin’s criticism to heart. As a result, his later Calligrames were less innovative, reminiscent of George Herbert’s 'Easter Wings,' (1633) and Lewis Carroll’s 'The Mouse’s Tail' from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

But one major characteristic of Apollinaire’s Calligrames continued in all of his subsequent poetry: motion.

For example, Apollinaire’s Calligram 'Il Pleut' (It’s Raining), originally sketched by hand and first published in the journal SIC in December of 1916, takes the form of five vertical streaks of words, meant to demonstrate the downward flow of rain on a window pane. The placement of the words imply motion, and the diagonal slant of the words causes the reader’s eyes to move downward, just as rain flows downward. The first streak reads from top down. “It’s raining women’s 8 voices, as if they were dead, in memory.” The second streak reads from top down, “It’s raining you too….” And so forth. The streaks of words evoke rain, establishing an atmosphere of sorrow that complements the message. Apollinaire’s poem, 'Il Pleut' is on the very edge of motion and strongly implies movement, but during his time it was not possible to animate the letters. He could only predict that one day it would happen.

And so it was that the contemporary poet and theorist, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, seeking to realize Apollinaire’s intention for the poem, conceived a way to make Apollinaire’s drops of rain actually fall, using the technology that Apollinaire predicted would be possible. Versions of this digitally rendered 'Il Pleut' collocated with Apollinaire’s handwritten rendition of the poem and typeset versions can be seen online at The Apollinaire Museum at Eratio.

Nearly one hundred years after Apollinaire predicted that poets would use motion and sound in their works, Digital Poetry has taken hold as an acceptable form of poetry, and one of the very poems Apollinaire created to show motion in poetry, 'Il Pleut,' has been animated. As Apollinaire once sketched his Calligrames and presented them to a typesetter to be published in book form, poets can now conceive of animated poems and explain their ideas to digital artists who specialize in animation and publish their works on the worldwide web.