Semiotics and Poetry: Toward a Taxonomy of Page Space

My research into semiotics and the relational axes—syntagmatic and paradigmatic—has led me to consider how the use of page space may be conceptualized, toward a discussion of the specific uses of this important tool. Briefly, the syntagm is a sequential lexical unit (Saussure 121–22), whereas the paradigmatic axis has to do with less logical choices a poet makes around relationships between words, which occur outside the immediate "neighborhood" of the text (Pettit 8). The use of space is most commonly understood as syntagmatic (Chandler 110), though I have challenged this assertion, since there are cases where the use of space breaks the sequentiality of the syntagm (Bullock).

The use of space may be considered a natural counterpart to any discussion of the line. It is sometimes helpful to isolate these two elements and sometimes of benefit to bring them together. Overall, it seems as though the topic of space is somewhat neglected, perhaps the lesser force in the hierarchy of this particular binary. Eleanor Berry, a noted commentator on Charles Olson's poetics, collates and categorizes his experiments with page space ("Visual"; "Emergence"), but I have encountered no other attempt in the literary field to systematically articulate the variety of effects that space can yield, and this is work that I would like to extend here.

The article attempts a provisional taxonomy of the use of space via analysis of work by three contemporary New Zealand poets—Alistair Paterson, Alan Loney, and Michele Leggott—and is contrasted with Berry's work. Though a discussion of the use of line and space in any number of contemporary poets from New Zealand and elsewhere—Robert Sullivan, Lisa Samuels, Jen Crawford, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and so on—might yield interesting results, the work of the three poets discussed is especially susceptible to semiotic analysis. It denotes a range of experiments with page space and its intersection with form over long practice and is closely connected with Olson's ideas. Loney and Paterson are both much influenced by Olson—Loney notes the impact of The Maximus Poems on his writing (Wood), and Paterson's poetics is informed by it. Leggott was influenced by Louis Zukofsky, another poet who made significant experiments with page space.

The use of space to score music is an idea described by Olson in "Projective Verse" (339) and discussed in the New Zealand context by C. K. Stead (153), Paterson ("New" 30–31) and Loney ("Influence" 92–98). It has often been the justification for experimental typography but is in some ways a curious proposition that needs more investigation; I argue that scoring music is just one possible function of many. The materiality of the page is also associated with the long poem (McHale, Obligation 260–61), in which method and process are often made explicit. Each work discussed here is a long poem of at least three pages; some are book length.

Berry categorizes twelve functions of visual form in Olson's early poetry, in response to what she calls his "prosody of page space"; the first of these includes the familiar "scoring for performance" ("Visual" 107–8; "Emergence" 58–59). In a footnote to an essay on erasure, Brian McHale identifies several uses of space in recent American poetry, as a form of graphic design, or performance notes (like silence in music), as "semanticised figures," or as nonvisual referents, such as "the void" ("Poetry" 278). I have found numerous examples in the work of each of the poets studied of intriguing uses of space, but they do not always concern the idea of scoring music. It should be noted that the link or relationship between the visual and aural in a poem is uncertain. For example, when pondering Apollinaire's famous concrete poem "Il Pleut," Johanna Drucker writes about the difficulty of deciding at what point the visual produces an aural effect (106).

In the simplest sense, space may be understood as absence. We interpret gaps in texts by considering how they might be filled, or by giving them meaning as spaces (Culler, Structuralist 171); in so doing, we give...