Axon: Creative Explorations

This essay defines the poetic form of the calligramme (also known as the pattern poem, or technopaignia), provides a micro-history of the form in Western literature, before exploring how, with reference to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) and Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe, the poems in Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press 2022) took shape. It also explores how, via Goethe, the calligrammes use colour, and why, via Piaget, their taking shape is a kind of poetic object permanence.