Thesis title: Visuality and poetics in an expanded field – visualist practice, theory and audiences in late modernist poetry.
The term ‘visual poetry’ (together with related terms, such as graphic poetry) is an established descriptor, but has been applied to a varied range of practices. For the most part these have been closely related to concrete poetry, and tending to subsume the poetic beneath the visual. This research aims at restoring a balance between the two terms, and explores the possibility of devising a more encompassing theory of visual prosody than is currently available. The following questions develop the project aims:
- What constitutes a rigorous visual poetics in the expanding field of late modernist and current practices – a field in which poetic work engages with a wide variety of formats, sites and outputs?
- How can practical creative work in visual poetics embody a revised theory of graphic prosody?
- Can a toolkit be developed for future practitioners and researchers in graphic prosody, locating this within a fully expanded and networked field of visual poetries?
- What orders and categories can contain the diversity of practices in visual poetics, providing a flexible and encompassing taxonomy of visualist poetries?
This is a practice-based project, which includes the production of poetry which engages with visuality; the curating of visual poetries by others, for public display and critical framing; the study of prosody and poetics; examination of the affordances given to poetry through graphic layout, typography, sequential form, image/object-juxtaposition (or integration); visual and media arts practices which include text (these are diverse); the intertextual and the paratextual.
Supervisors: Dr Ahren Warner and Dr Eleanor Morgan