ABSTRACT
Ever since poetry has been written and printed, its appearance on the page has been one of its central expressive resources. But can poetry become a form of visual art? This chapter examines the history of the richly mutual relationship between poetry and art, surveying collaborations and appropriations between poets and artists and the radical formal innovations that have resulted.
The chapter begins with definitions of the field, which serve as the basis for a categorisation of the diverse formal ways in which poetry might engage with the visual. Three central areas emerge, each of which is addressed through a chronological survey: 1) patterned poetry, 2) poetry and the material image, and 3) poetry in three dimensions. Within these accounts, particular emphasis is placed on the early modern and contemporary periods as the moments when the richest experimentation took place. Bold, cross-temporal comparisons seek to illuminate the longer histories of the modern genre of ‘vispo’. The first tradition is that of patterned poetry: at particular historical moments, poets have foregrounded the appearance of the text to make their works into self-reflexive visual artefacts. These practices have roots in classical and medieval pattern poems, but they became a focus for intensive experimentation in the early modern period through concrete poems, rebus and diagrammatic techniques. This history culminates in contemporary experimental poetry that uses abstract ‘asemic’ writing to create text that is spectacular but without semantic content. Secondly, poetry has been illustrated in illuminated manuscripts and a vibrant history of magnificent printed editions. The hybrid visual and verbal genre of the emblem, which was widely influential during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is particularly important because it combined poetry with physical images to make them interdependent carriers of meaning. Related techniques in contemporary collage and comic strip poetry also work to overturn the traditional hierarchy between text and illustration. Finally, some poetry is written with a self-conscious awareness that it will exist as a material text. The form of the codex has become a sculptural object, and the radical inventiveness of artists’ books is closely related to other sculptures that are inscribed with poetry. This study concludes by considering how the importance of material texts conferred by Reformation hostility towards images shapes the work of the foremost contemporary sculptor-poets.
