Understanding the interaction of visual and verbal rhetoric

This week, I spent some time looking at the work I have produced for my thesis so far and tried to specifically pinpoint the role visual and verbal rhetorical devices play in each piece.

As Willard Bohn writes in “Metaphor and Metonymy in Apollinaire’s Calligrams,” “In a picture-poem the network of action, reaction and interaction at the imagistic level is far more complex than normal poetry…Relationships exist (1)between visual and non-visual images (visual-textual); (2) between visual images (visual-visual); and (3) between non-visual images (textual-textual).”

I am trying to understand this complex relationship in order to inform and make my future explorations stronger. Upon analyzing my collage pieces from week two, I noticed that the visual and verbal rhetorical devices I used were oftentimes redundant. Moving forward, I would like to challenge myself to create a less straightforward “read” for my viewers. I want to leave more space for imagination, allowing viewers to inject their own meanings and experiences, hopefully personalizing the poetry more. An understanding of the complex interplay of visual and verbal rhetoric will help make my use of each more intentional, avoiding redundancy and oversimplified messages.

Attached are slides from the in-class work in progress presentation I gave.
In it, I reviewed my secondary and primary visual research, my goals for my thesis, and my next steps. I also attempted to break down how visual and verbal rhetoric establish meaning in visual poetry using diagrams, as well as by dissecting one of my collage poems for the class.

View the slides here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/01zalw3mo8asku9/Workshop_WIP_presentation1.pdf?dl=0