An interview with Mike Johnson, on the subject of visual poetry, was published in the Ink Pantry blog on 14 June 2014. Ink Pantry Publishing was founded by a group of former students ‘whose paths crossed while studying Creative Writing with the Open University’.
In discussion, Mike explains that ‘visual poetry draws upon both visual and verbal semiotic modes’, making it ‘an example of multimodality’. As an illustration, he cites his visual poem entitled ‘Sunset’, in which ‘variations in the word ‘horizon, and the letter ‘O’, which feature in a different position in each line, … are potentially verbally, visually, and kinaesthetically meaningful, as they simulate the sun’s movement caused by the earth’s rotations.’
Mike is currently revising and assembling work for a crossover collection, challenging genre and generational boundaries, for publication later this year.
http://inkpantry.com/blog/inky-interview-mike-johnson-talks-semiotics-visual-poetry/