This week I have fallen in love with viewing and creating visual. Combining poetry with visual imagery makes literary creations more accessible to the DA community as many people are put off by long pieces and often feel as though they don't have the skills to judge whether a piece of writing is 'good'. By representing your words with images you're giving people who wouldn't usually read literature on DA the chance to do so as well as broadening your skills as an artist.

While browsing the visual poetry gallery yesterday I noticed a lot of miscategorization. The main miscat I noticed was the posting of found imagery as a deviation then putting poetry in the comments section, this implied that the deviant’s poetry wasn't the important part of their submission.

DA give us the option to put a preview image on our literature deviations, why haven't these people used this? Another miscat I noticed were deviations consisting of just an image; the deviant probably meant to convey a poetic sentiment but visual poetry is not the category to do so in. The gallery info. it states that pieces should 'combine a visual representation of an idea with words', 'words' being an integral part of poetry!

Unexceptional pieces of writing can become the opposite when combined with visual imagery. I implore everyone reading this article to try their hand at turning a piece of their writing into visual poetry. Browse the stock galleries to find images you can edit to fit your writing. You don’t need to be skilled in Photoshop or other programme in order to compose something beautiful. You can enhance your writing and reach a wider audience with the simplest of techniques.

Whilst browsing the visual poetry gallery I found pieces (which are listed below), from both unknown and relatively popular deviants, some are simple while others more complex, but all have pleasurable aesthetic qualities. The deviations below show different approaches to creating visual poetry, e.g. digital, traditional.

There are many more that I’d love to feature but haven’t in fear of clogging up this article.

… And here are a few of my own pieces:

Tips On Creating Visual Poetry:

Use imagery relevant to your theme
Use imagery as a tool; use it to explain metaphor, symbolism etc.
Use complimentary colours rather than contrasting, e.g. red-green, orange-blue, yellow-purple
Be subtle with your imagery if your poetry is subtle
Be bold with your imagery if your poetry is bold


Things To Avoid:

Using poetry/prose/quotes/lyrics you didn’t write; this is usually copyrighted material and won't expose your writing skills
Using unreadable fonts
Contrasting the font colour/s with image colour/s
One liners
Submitting a simple photograph or scan of the written piece


Some Poetry Groups: