ABSTRACT
Various elements of the multimodal approach have implications for poetry and poetics. A twenty-first-century poetics, then, would need to take into account that a single narrative direction is not the sole determinant of poetics, but that a more kaleidoscopic approach is more appropriate. A good way to start the discussion of what a new poetics might look like is via the example of Edwin Morgan's Instamatic Poems. Multimodality is grounded in social semiotic theory. Such theory suggests that meaningful signs are generated socially; that is to say, they only make sense in social context, whether they are produced by an actor/rhetor or received by an audience/reader. The social expectations that inform the choice of quatrains come partly from literary history. Gunther Kress gives a comprehensive account of multimodality as a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication.
