How did you first come to visual poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I was a Martian poet in the early 1980s; early influences were Ezra Pound, Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, with their brilliant images. 11 of 12 poems I wrote in 1982 were published in little magazines, but I then suffered writers’ block. Influenced by Roman Jakobson’s linguistic work on sound shapes (his co-authored book: ‘The sound shape of language’), I then developed a series of 12 highly alliterative sound poems using different forms, including a sonnet, a rondeau, and a sestina, using personae drawn from the Zodiac. The last five of these poems were pattern poems, including images of a house, a key, and a boat. I had been reading John Hollander’s book ‘Rhyme’s Reason’, which includes an example of a microdot-shaped poem that had been written using a monospaced font, and could immediately see the possibilities. John Hollander’s most famous pattern poems, by the way, include images of a swan reflected in the water, and a domestic cat.
I love the way that the words and image can interact in a pattern poem, sometimes mysteriously, surprisingly or starkly, and to dramatic or comic effect. My map poem ‘Britain’, for example, is narrated by a drunken Scotsman travelling south (and east and west) through the island looking for work; there are lots of geographical references. My poem ‘Not a cat’ includes, as part of the cat’s collar, the names of famous cat lovers (T.S. Eliot and Florence Nightingale); my poem ‘Atalanta’ (published in talking about strawberries all of the time) imprints its image more clearly upon the reader’s imagination as the story it tells unfolds.
How does a poem begin?
I have always written poems in sequences, so there are different levels of sub-consciousness involved. In 1985 I wrote a sequence of 24 pattern poems. These included six poems using colours as personae (the most dynamic being the diamond-shaped ‘Yellow’), six poems using the personae of various Shakespeare characters, three map poems (including ‘Africa’ and ‘China’), three poems about substances (in the shape of a bottle, a pipe, and a syringe sharing their perspectives). More recently, I have written a 60-poem sequence retelling stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and am currently working on a sequence retelling stories from the Old Testament. So, new poems emerge in the context of whichever sequence I am working on.
When I get the idea for a new poem, I need to conceptualize it sufficiently to determine the shape. I work out the shape using first graph paper and then x’s on a computer screen. Once I have a shape that I think will work, I calculate how many monospaced characters (letters + spaces + punctuation marks) I need for each line. For example, I might determine that I need 5 characters for the first line, 9 for the second, 12 for the third line (as in the start of ‘Atalanta’), but the precise configuration will of course depend entirely on the intended shape of the poem. With these mathematical constraints in mind, I will play around with words in my head, searching for inspiration.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
The years in which I have been most prolific as a poet have been 1985, 2024 and 2025, which tells a story in itself. All the poems I have written since 1992 have been in patterns, but, from then up until 2023, I was consumed by academic work. In fact, between 2003 and 2023, during which time I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of academic text (articles, book chapters, edited books), I produced only three short poems. Subsequently, I found that semi-retiring from university work in 2023 was entirely liberating for me as a poet. I have written many poems since then, which has been deeply fulfilling.
Having said that, I still do some consultancy work in language education (in fact, when I was invited to this interview, I was in Mongolia), and whenever I am working on a project this again puts poetry temporarily on the backburner. However, the balance is so much better now than it was. In the last year, I have usually been able to write several poems each month. When I am working on a poem, it sometimes comes in fits and starts. When I have an idea how to continue, I tend to drop whatever else I am doing to write the next line(s). Many poems are finished in the early hours of the morning.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I have a place in my heart for all the magazines that have published me. For the readers of talking about strawberries all of the time, I would like to pick out two UK-based webzines that might be of particular interest. Ink Sweat and Tears explains on its website that it ‘publishes and reviews poetry, prose, prose-poetry, word & image pieces and everything in between’. Its tastes are ‘eclectic’, its quality really good, and it publishes new work every day. It has been running since 2007. Another very highly regarded, and long-running (since 2008) UK-based webzine is Streetcake Magazine. Streetcake Magazine publishes a new issue every two months. The editors explain on their website that they like poetry and fiction that surprises them, makes them laugh, ‘looks downright weird’ and out of the ordinary. They enjoy a whole range of experimental and innovative forms. Again, definitely worth exploring!
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
There are so many, but I would like to highlight
here the work of two poets whose pattern poems have appeared in Poetry:
Sumita Chakraborty (whose shaped poems are based on photographs taken by her
surgeon of a hysterectomy) and Tishani Doshi. Pattern poetry lying at the
verbal end of the visual poetry continuum is often disregarded in the
mainstream and needs all the champions it can get. As well as producing highly
entertaining pattern poetry herself (see, for example, ‘The comeback of
speedos’), Doshi has written very eloquently in defence of the form. A big shout-out, too, to Kei Miller, whose poem-jar about the effects of colonialism is celebrated here by Ruth Padel.
Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His pattern poems have appeared in various magazines, including Ambit, Antifa Lit Journal, Cosmic Daffodil, Dust Poetry, Full Bleed, Ink Sweat and Tears, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, Libre, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Moss Puppy Magazine, Osmosis, The Plentitudes, Radon Journal, Re-Mediate, Sontag Mag, Streetcake Magazine, Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, Tupelo Quarterly, and Typo. Two of his poems were recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.