Another Dimension: Sweeney Reed's Visual Poetics

The Heide Museum's 2011 exhibition Born to Concrete offered a rare opportunity to survey the history of visual poetry—a "hybrid genre … in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa"—in Australia from the late 1960s onward (Bohn 100). It included a range of mixed and multimedia pieces, including typewritten texts, collages, prints, sculptures, and found objects, and it featured such figures as Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, ΠO, Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch, and Richard Tipping.

While some of these individuals are well known in other contexts, Danko for instance as a conceptual artist, the exhibition spotlighted a corpus of lively, creative text-based work largely excluded from surveys of Australian literary history. Reviewing the show for Jacket2, Michael Farrell reported that he felt as if he had entered "another dimension," viewing material that, "despite the overlap with poetry in verse," seemed to "operate" in ways entirely otherwise than Australian literature studied in the academy. Indeed, although the bibliography on visual poetics in other national traditions is extensive, one will find no mention of visual poetry as a genre or practice in field-defining monographs such as Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry (1987), Paul Kane's Australian Poetry (1996), Martin Harrison's Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004), and Philip Mead's Networked Language (2008).¹

Farrell also commented that he found Born to Concrete timely and compelling because it spoke to quite contemporary issues and debates within the Australian literary world: "As visual aspects of poetry become more popular there's a real excitement in discovering the visual aspects of poetry's heritage." Subsequent events support this claim. An expanded version of Born to Concrete was put on by the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2013. This second exhibition sought greater regional diversity, for example, showcasing the role of Brisbane's Nicholas Zurbrugg, and it added other important individuals such as Vernon Ah Kee, Eugene Carchesio, Gordon Hookey, and Grant Stevens. A selection of pieces from the revamped Born to Concrete then appeared in a 2014 issue of Australian Poetry Journal along with essays and reminiscences by insider-practitioners. Jaya Savige positively reviewed both the Queensland show and the special journal issue in the Australian, commending them for publicizing a "remarkable," "diverse and energetic" body of work.

This essay continues this process of reassessment and recovery by discussing three works by a central figure in Australian visual poetics, Sweeney Reed (1945–79). Today's younger poets have grown up surrounded by digital technologies, and they are accustomed to communicating multimodally, that is, freely blending text, image, and sound. Unsurprisingly, they no longer feel swayed by once-common arguments that visual poetry is gimmicky or unserious, that, as Wallace Stevens once proclaimed, typographical play and other forms of visual experiment have "nothing to do with being alive," "nothing to do with the conflict between the poet and that of which his poems are made" (168). Reed's poetry may predate the internet era by a quarter century, but it unequivocally demonstrates that the deep attention that humanists have long devoted to print-based texts is just as crucial—and just as rewarding—when applied to hybrid visual-verbal forms of expression.²

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The son of the modernist painters Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, Sweeney Reed was adopted at an early age by John and Sunday Reed, art patrons and founders of the Heide Museum. A year spent in London in 1964–65 was transformative. He befriended Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bob Cobbing, participants in the international Concrete Poetry movement, and he worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art during Jasia Reichardt's influential show Between Painting and Poetry. After returning to Australia, he began energetically promoting visually expressive poetry and text-based visual art via galleries that he ran in Melbourne, first in Carlton and later in Fitzroy. He held exhibitions, organized poetry readings, and published broadsides, catalogues, and books under his own imprint.

Reed himself was not prolific. As Linda Short explains, his finished works were often the outcome of "long gestation" and "continued notation and...