So far the concept of the hyperscape has been mainly restricted to the verbal landscape (whether spoken or written), but here I want to expand it to embrace visual media. That is, I want to move from the concept of hypertext to hypermedia, for the hyperscape is both visual and verbal and involves the hybridization of forms which is characteristic of postmodernism. In this chapter I will be arguing that in O'Hara's hyperscapes text and image, poetry and painting, and representation and abstraction do not simply coexist but also cross over or ‘cross-dress’. This, like O'Hara's adoption of the talk mode in Chapter 5, enormously extends the possibilities of what poetry can do. It also points the way towards contemporary multimedia work in which the visual is more predominant, and the visual and verbal are increasingly interdependent.

This cross-dressing of text and image in O'Hara's work is part of alternative tradition in American poetry in which verbal and non-verbal semiotic systems become intertwined in a non-hierarchical relationship. The modernist precursors were the Dadaists, Surrealists and Futurists: the work of Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, Tristan Tzara and others frequently straddled the visual, verbal and sonic, and also included numerous collaborations between musicians, painters and poets. Such movements re-emerged in the 1960s and 1970s internationally in visual and sound poetry. But the impact of the visual arts on O'Hara's poems is distinct from the concrete poetry of Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams (USA), Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland) and Dom Sylvester Houédard (England), where the word becomes an iconic sign in which form and meaning become fused. The relationship of verbal to visual in O'Hara's poetry is more like that in the work of Gertrude Stein, some of whose technical procedures run parallel to those of cubist painting.