Reflections & Essays
What Is Visual Poetry?
Visual poetry is what happens when a poem refuses to live only on the page — when words are brought together with photographs, film, music and meaningful imagery, so a story can be seen and heard as well as read.
A poem on a page asks something of us: a quiet room, a willingness to slow down, an inner voice to read it with. A visual poem meets us somewhere else. The words are still the foundation — the poem is still written, still crafted line by line — but around it gather the things words have always reached for: a face in an old photograph, light moving across a kitchen table, a piece of music that seems to remember something we forgot.
Poetry you can see and hear
Visual poetry is not an illustration of a poem, and it is not a video with words placed on top. In a true visual poem, the imagery and sound are woven around the language — each element chosen because of what the words are carrying. A photograph of a grandmother's hands does not decorate a line about her; it deepens it. A few notes of music do not accompany the reading; they hold the silence between the lines.
The result is something that can be experienced rather than only read — and, just as importantly, returned to. A visual poem can be watched on an anniversary, shared with family across an ocean, kept beside a memory that asks to be held in more than one way.
Where the form comes from
Poets have always been interested in what words look like. Centuries before film, poets shaped their lines into pictures on the page — wings, altars, waves — believing that how a poem appears is part of what it means. Today's visual poetry continues that same impulse with new instruments: the camera, the edit, the recorded voice, the score. The tools have changed; the longing has not. We still want our most meaningful words to take a shape we can return to.
What a visual poem can hold
Because a visual poem begins with an original poem, it can hold almost anything a life contains: a love story told through a handful of photographs; the history of a family gathered into a few minutes of film; the memory of someone gone, honoured in words and light; an ordinary day, seen clearly at last as the extraordinary thing it was. The poem gives the piece its spine. The imagery, film and music give it a body.
My own work in this form began with I AM This Moment, a visual poem exploring presence, impermanence and the beauty hidden within an ordinary life. Each piece I create now begins the same way: with a conversation, and then with the words.
If you are curious what a visual poem feels like, you can watch I AM This Moment and explore visual poetry, or begin a conversation about a story of your own.