Home › Glossary › Letter I

invisible verse

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Poetry that emphasizes the unseen, implied, or absent rather than the visible

Detailed Definition
Invisible verse explores absence, silence, or the unsaid as central poetic material, using erasure, white space, or negation to make the void itself expressive, suggesting meaning through what is missing rather than what is present.
Example
Example in poetry:
John Cage’s mesostics erase authorial presence; Agnes Martin’s poetic grids suggest absence; In W.S. Merwin’s unpunctuated poems, the invisible hand of the poet recedes; In Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés,” white space becomes the poem’s silent core.
Additional Notes
Invisible verse minimizes the poet’s presence, using erasure, silence, or impersonal diction; influenced by conceptual and minimalist poetry—white space and omission become active compositional tools.
Also Known As
Erasure poem silent lyric absent presence ghost verse Infrared verse Phantom poem
Skip to main content