In 2023, Charlie Godet Thomas began a series entitled Unfolding Landscapes. Comprising hundreds of individual works, each piece collapses the space between the written word and the visual image – a liminal space that is at the heart of the British-Bermudian artist’s practice. The works all make use of salvaged envelopes, which have previously been used to transport the written word through differing terrains. These envelopes provide the artist with parameters and suggestions as to how to build on them, be it through folds, shapes, stamps, and markings left on their surfaces. This issue of Moko features a selection from this series as part of a special supplement comprised entirely of visual poetry, for that, in a sense, is what each of these pieces is.

The history of visual poetry is as long as it is contentious. What is a visual poem? Artist Andrew Venell defines a visual poem as “one that must be seen to be fully understood.” Poet Nico Vassilakis describes the Vispo or visual poetry movement as “a mongrel of visual language and lexical image on steroids… vispo is all eyes, is the delirium of alphabet shift.” There is contention over whether visual poetry is different from concrete poetry, shape poetry, pattern poetry, poster-poems, photometry and erasures or simply all of the above. However categorized, visual poetry’s great gift is the collapsing of form and content, of text and image; language is set free to become non-language, is not just language, is something altogether more miraculous and human.

This might all seem a bit arcane and out there, especially at this fraught and distressing moment of global undoing, until we consider just how much of this kind of intermingling is already a part of the world around us—from graffiti on city streets to subtitles in films; from centuries-old illuminated manuscripts to modern and garish advertising billboards.

But the collapse of genre boundaries takes on added significance within the Caribbean’s literary lineage. Think of: Kamau Brathwaite’s legendary Sycorax video style, Norman Pritchard’s The Matrix, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Derek Walcott’s strong interest in painting and ekphrasis, as well as the works of innumerable contemporary artists who often incorporate textual elements in their practices such as Christopher Cozier. Recently, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, the Bocas Lit Fest, put on a special workshop dedicated entirely to visual poetry.

Visual poetry has been, and remains, a tool to explore post-coloniality; it is a powerful protest against the rabid re-assertion of imperial borders now laying claim to global political discourse. And it can be a meaningful, or meaningless, response to the degradation of human agencies through newfound technological instrumentations. This issue aims to highlight all of this, as well as the range of approaches within Caribbean literary traditions. We seek to provide a glimpse of the myriad ways in which contemporary writers and artists are continuing a long tradition within the region, a tradition that itself reflects the ancient origins of art as something profoundly resistant to categorization. Also featured in this special supplement are Tracy Assing; Danielle Bodoo-Fortuné; Stewart Brown, who, as the publisher of the mimeographed literary magazine NOW, which was distributed by post decades ago, would have received contributions from figures like Brathwaite; Rex Dixon; Adeline Gregoire; Nicholas Laughlin; Kevin Morris and Mervyn Taylor, who frequently paints his poetry collections’ covers.

Thus are assembled works from painters who are also poets, poets who are painters, artists who are neither and both, curators who are artists, art administrators who are creatives and painters who are novelists and storytellers – all furnishing accounts of what it might mean to be Caribbean in today’s global world. The issue is also packed with its usual selections of incredible poetry and prose from around the region. I thank all for their shapely contributions.

–Andre Bagoo, managing editor

 

 

Cover image shows a detail from Charlie Godet Thomas’ ‘Unfolding Landscape (Juvenile Begging)’, 2025, salvaged envelope, acrylic, newsprint and glue. Image courtesy of the artist and Colector Gallery, Mexico/ US.