Toward a Poetics of Synethesia and a Tasteful Aesthetics: Gustatory and Tactile Imagery, Visual Poetics, and the Iconography of Musical Performance

Classical Persian poetry, like Arabic poetry, was practiced in a highly literate environment, in which visual elements of poems on the page could play an important role in the experience of the poem, from graphical techniques demonstrating the poet’s virtuosity, such as regular alternation of dotted with undotted letters (raqtā’) or word (khayfā’), not dissimilar to the effect of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel entirely lacking the letter “e”), or the inscribing, engraving or embossing of verses on palace walls and the calligraphing of album pages, in which a few lines are visually deployed to enhance architectural features, to turn a verse of poetry into a pictogram or material-culture artifact, or to heighten contemplation of the ethical meaning of a particular verse. At the same time, the composition and performance of poetry was held to be as much an oral as a scribal one, with poets expected to declaim at court and to produce impromptu verse, and with singers and musicians expected to perform poems. This paper considers the intersection of graphical layout and elements of what we might call visual poetry, or even concrete poetry, as an element of the creation of meaning in Persian poetry. Likewise, we consider the depiction in painting of poets and poetic acts, and the performance of poetry as a declamatory or musical artform. It also further looks at the question of deliberate synesthesia and bodies of poetry (such as the fifteenth-century corpus of Boshāq Shaykh-e Atʻema and Nezām Qāri Shaykh-e Albesa) that focus on depicting the culinary or textile world in the forms and thematics of poetry. What kind of emotions or intentions inform and dominate the poetics of synesthesia in Persian: Humor? Virtuosity? Didacticism? The Sublime? And are the assumptions revealed in the language of such poetry commensurate with the visual iconography of poetry and poets? What meaning is invested in the visual depiction of poetry and its performance?