The Dineffable: Writing (and Experimenting with) Visual Poetry with Tarik Dobbs

Douglas Kearney uses “the dineffable” to describe feelings or experiences so intense that they can only be expressed through what seems like noise. “Dintelligibility” is the sense within that noise, one reader might recognize meaning, while another might dismiss that noise entirely.

     Kearney is thinking about Black expression and how it gets misunderstood (and misheard): for example, a shout might carry fear that a listener mistakes for anger.

     In conversation with Cindy Juyoung Ok, Kearney asks: “When is it signal and when it is noise, and to whom and in what contexts?” We’ll start there, reading visual poems and asking what their experiments do. Then, we’ll try a few ways to use the letter-sized page as a canvas for a visual poem of our own.

     We’ll work with repetition and interruption to put different kinds of language in each other’s way and see what…