ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the work of Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall, both distinguished by the integration of visual and verbal processes in quite different bodies of poetry. Fraser's interest in a visual poetics - charted throughout her poetry, enacted in her formal innovations, and articulated in her essays - finds common ground with Mina Loy's modernist experiments with perception, art, and the visual page, and Fraser's collaborations with artists. Caroline Bergvall's very direct interest in Loy is claimed in her commentary on the modernist poet and implied in her poetics, both aesthetically and politically. Fraser's interest in formally exploring constructions of the contemporary spectatorial self mingles technologies of textuality and vision, bringing language into relation with the visual arts and the camera's methods of image reproduction across a range of media. During the 1990s, Caroline Bergvall's innovative treatments of language, form, and the visual page received increasing recognition among British and North American readers interested in a language-based poetics.
