26 February 2004. Today commences my now-hostile, longterm fanatical crusade to force rationality into the choice of poetics terms (and, for that matter, all arts-related terms, all of the English language still seeming out of reach). Just about everyone is against me. Hence, the hostility.

Consider the image above. It is the result of my latest session trying to master Paint Shop. For quite a while, I've been trying to figure out how to make outlines of letters that I could move over other images without moving their interiors along with them. I'm sure there's some simple way to do it, but I wasn't able to find it. Today, however, I did find a way, as my E, D and C indicates.

As I noodled around, trying various ways to accomplish what I wanted to that didn't work, I played with colors, trying hard, to make some kind of design with at least a little appeal, as I always do. I want to master colors while climbing toward mastery of Paint Shop operations. Shapes, textures and other things, too. When I finally figured out how to make moveable outlines of letters, and did enough to make sure I had it down pat, I considered my image as a design. It was so-so, at best. Then I made a negative image, which looked a lot better to me. I find that almost anything I do with color looks better when I make a negative of it. Perhaps that's only because that generally adds a lot of black, and black makes any colors it's with more dramatic. A second factor may be that I tire of my original colors, so overrate the new range of colors. In any case, I thought my design solidly so-so, now--though nothing great, for sure.

I put it here partly to keep my blog a fairly accurate record of what I'm doing with Paint Shop, but more to use in a tirade about naming kinds of artworks. Most people involved in what I but few others term "visio-textual art," or visual art in which text is prominently featured but not words, would call my image a visual poem. Because "poetry" has since ancient times been a verbal art, I have always objected to this. Poetry, for me (and Gregory St. Thomasino, my only ally on this issue so far as I know), should have words. Ironically, that means that this entry is not about poetry!

I term the work above a "textual illumage." No one else, including Gregory, uses this term. Its second word is mainly why, I suspect (aside from the desire of many letter-workers to grab the cachet of "poetry" for what they make). It comes from "illumagery," the word I made up to stand for "visual art" (after trying dozens of other words, most of them also my own coinages). I considered it necessary because "visual art" is too often shortened to "art," which also means "art-in-general," which can cause confusion. Sure, a writer can avoid any confusion by specifying a delimiting context, but isn't it preferable not to have to do that?

I also felt it disrespectful to visual art to imply it was a kind of subclass of art instead of an art in its own right like music, literature, drama--which aren't normally spoken of as "auditory art," "verbal art" and "staged verbal art." Finally, I considered "illumagistic" a better adjective than "visual-artistic" (though, of course, the latter isn't used, writers simply finding ways to avoid having to use an adjective to describe what it would because they have no adjective to do that--or they use "artistic," letting the context they use it in prevent confusion, and not caring the damage their in-context use does outside the context, since few are intelligent enough to be sensitive to that damage).

So far as I know, "textual illumagery," is the only word, except the ridiculous "language art," that anyone has used for averbal artworks in which textual and visual elements are more or less equally important aesthetically. "Visual poetry" so far has seemed adequate to the few people discussing such works. Even if we accept that a visio-textual work with no words in it is poetry (or that it's all right to call non-poetry "poetry" in a term that has an adjective distinguishing it from genuine poetry, as in "prose poetry"--another extremely stupid term), there will have to come a time when it will make sense to divide "visual poems" into those which have words and those which do not. I shudder to think what the linguipaths will come up with then.

I'd be much pleased, incidentally, if someone came up with a better word for visual artworks whose primary subject matter is averbal textual matter. My main hope is that what I call "textual illumagery" is given a terminological weight equal to poetry whose visual expressiveness almost equals its verbal expressiveness.