Asemic Writing

TL;DR: Asemic writing is a collection of marks that looks like script but has no semantic meaning or content.

TL;DR (but longer): Asemic writing is a collection of marks, signs, or traces that looks like script but has no semantic meaning or content. Meaning is derived from how these structures are presented through various aspects like the "emotional" charge of the drawing technique or how such structures are arranged within the piece. Poetically, asemic writing is difficult to integrate without being too clichéd.

This form of "writing" is more of an offshoot of abstract art rather than a poetic technique.

Semantically, asemic writing has no absolute meaning in the sense that the scribbles themselves carry no content. An asemic writing piece is meant to be, initially, viewed as a whole, much the same way abstract visual art pieces are consumed.

At this point, you should begin to examine individual structures within the piece, such as how the script visually looks: Do the marks resemble alphabetic characters? Or do they look like logography? Maybe they look entirely alien or foreign? Then, you should ask yourself, “How does this make me feel?”

When you boil a poem down to its most integral aspect, the emotion that it elicits is what you're left with. Emotion requires thought as well, and these aspects are what poetry shares with asemic writing.

With how poetry requires so much cerebral "interaction" from the reader due to the poet's use of denotations and connotations, asemic writing can convey virtually similar boiled-down emotions or feelings just through sight alone, as if almost injecting them directly into the reader's consciousness without their having to expend too much effort into dissecting the thought patterns required to extract the gold nugget that the poet was hiding. Asemic writing is, essentially, analogous to the emotional framework hidden within a poem.

Using asemic writing in a poem is pretty much only possible in concrete poems or in other types of visual poems because of how its most characteristic feature uses script-like characters that aren't encoded in ASCII or in any of the three Unicode Transformation Format types (UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32).

However, it is possible to use encoded characters, symbols, or even numbers to capture the essence of asemic writing when using a word processor. For example, you could use Mandarin logography as ideograms or logograms to represent ideas or use them to serve as indicators for emotions.

Here's a very clichéd and not-so-subtle explicit example of this: The Mandarin character for fire "火" could be repeated and placed on its own line underneath another poetic line where some speaker talks about some sort of heated rage brewing inside them.

"In a vial of silence, my rage simmers, a storm caged in glass, quietly thunderous. /// 火火火火火火火火火火火火火火"

Please notice the fact that I used 14 instances of the character "火," which is an unlucky number in Chinese culture. This places dramatic irony in the speaker's words. Only the reader knows that this speaker's rage is going to be their downfall.

Try not to use the essence of asemic writing with this level of cliché, however. It somewhat removes the elegance and flow of poetry when it's this blatant.

It would be a bit more original if you constructed a piece of asemic writing that resembles how a poem looks on paper, especially if you assembled the structures into rigid poetic forms like with sonnets or ghazals. These two poetic forms in particular have distinct silhouettes that would be easily regarded as poems by a passerby, but as they look closer, they'll notice that the "text" is actually just incomprehensible scratches and loops designed to look the part.