Seminar for Modernist Studies Association Conference

How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.

This seminar is open to all considerations of text as it merges into image, from typography issues to graphic design approaches and including electronic kinetic forms. I am particularly interested in relatively under-explored work, such as that by Veronica Forrest-Thomson or Anne Wysocki, but I am open to considerations of any work from any country or time period.

Works Cited

Thomas, Greg. Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland. Liverpool University Press, 2019.