Section VII: "Tipoemas y Anipoemas" by Ana Maria Uribe
In different ways, both Anipoemas and Tipoemas challenge notions of literature, literacy, alphabet, and how meaning is made symbolically and visually. What makes Uribe’s work brilliant, in my view, is that her poems make it easy for the viewer, or reader, to see letters and symbols which are usually fixed and static as alive and animated. The kinetic poems obviously do this by creating the phenomenon of movement. For example, in the three poems entitled “Gym…”, letters appear on the screen then turn into other letters, and return, creating what looks like letters working out. For example, in Gym 3, six P’s turn into six R’s, and the repeated switching looks much like a person doing leg lifts. I wonder if there is no real movement, just the illusion of movement, as one could argue the P becomes an R, while others may argue that no, the P extends itself as one might do at the gym while lifting weights. This argument brings to the fore how meaning is made: in the form, or in what a group of letters may signify when placed by other letters… In the case of Uribe’s poems, form takes control of the meaning making process, as the letters and symbols create meaning by coming alive, resembling the images they seek to represent as opposed to being fixed and ordered into words in a “literary” fashion in order to make proper poetry.
The seemingly silly poems and their challenge to meaning making reminds me of a book I read just before coming into ENG 561, entitled The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams. In the chapter “Animism and the Alphabet,” Abrams recounts the history of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets and compares words and sounds within them to indigenous words and sounds. In the process, he argues that alphabets and the words and sounds they create, commonly, are perceived as fixed and apart-from the things they seek to represent. Conversely, many letters and sounds find their origins and significance in the natural world, of which humans are a part. Abram’s ultimate argument is that humans have used our notion of literacy to separate ourselves from the natural world, much to the destruction of countless other species and other negative outcomes. Abrams argues that we should look closer and notice how our language, alphabet, sounds, etc. come from the natural world, and by viewing ourselves and our language in this way, we will see that we are a part of the world, which, hopefully, will help us live in harmony with it.
Uribe’s poetry may not explicitly make this argument, but in essence, by making letters and symbols into figures and things that perform actions and do not need to be organized into words, letters come alive, provide clear meaning, and create an entirely new (old, more inclusive?) form of literacy and meaning making.
