Poetry’s plastic medium: The example of W. S. Graham

Nowell Smith, David (2018) Poetry’s plastic medium: The example of W. S. Graham. Modernism/modernity, 3 (2). ISSN 1071-6068

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Abstract

Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting.”[1] Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics itself would emerge out of critical engagement with the work of the poets’ artist peers: adapting compositional practices and techniques; adopting conceptual vocabularies. At times, this leads to intermedia experiment (Calligrammes, collage, concrete work); at others, to a renewed focus on the medium–specificity of poetry: both the peculiar possibilities of language as material and resource for art–making, and the repertoire of techniques and conventions through which this material is deployed.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group
Related URLs:	https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	14 Sep 2017 05:05
Last Modified:	28 Mar 2025 08:22
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64860
DOI:	10.26597/mod.0061

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