The idea of performance in poetry is conventionally associated with a realtime event in which a live or recorded reading provides effective dimensions to a poetic work through the immediate experiences that constitute an event. But a visual performance of a poetic work on a page or canvas, as a projection or sculpture, installation or score, also has the qualities of an enactment, of a staged and realized event in which the material means are an integral feature of the work. Performance in this sense includes all of the elements that make the work an instantiation of a text, make it specific, unique, and dramatic because of the visual character through which the work comes into being. The specific quality of presence in such a work depends upon visual means—typefaces, format, spatial distribution of the elements on the page or through the book, physical form, or space. These visual means perform the work as a poem that can’t be translated into any other form.

Joanna Drucker, Visual Performance of the Poetic Text

 

Four Fallacies