Analyzes the verse of the French poets Stephane Mallarme and Guillaume Apollinaire, contrasting their purposes in suppressing normal punctuation in their work. (MM)

Examines the relationship of concrete poetry to "abstract" poetry (so labeled because its circular semantic play interferes with the image-forming aspect of representation). Analyzes the interrelations of these two types of poetry in the context of a poetic tradition centered in France. Asserts that both types aim to eradicate differences between…

Argues that the creative procedures of writing, performing, and interpreting poetry are subtly interrelated. Illustrates this argument with examples from the author's own poetry. (MM)

Examines how literary criticism exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. Argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading neutralizes spatial dynamics and reduces material identity to the status of a transparent medium. Suggests that appreciation of silent visual form is a convention of post modernist writing.…

Examines the role of visual form in the free verse of Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. Argues that this functional approach, entailing careful attention to how visual form affects the experience of printed poems, can contribute toward developing the "theory of graphic prosody" called for by John…

Examines how eighteenth-century critics treated the visual format of traditional verse as a determinant in readers' appreciation of form and meaning. Explores correspondences between eighteenth-century work and modern criticism. Argues that twentieth-century appreciations of the visual format of verse are limited by their concentration upon more…

Uses the author's poems to illustrate the interrelationships among a poem's rhythm, lineation, and syntax. (MM)

Argues that William Blake's illustrations for Thomas Gray's "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" testify to the contradictions in Gray's poetry. States that Blake's designs offer another language, a contra-diction, that deconstructs Gray's conscious discourse and liberates his unconscious discourse. (RS)

Analyzes several texts of Italian poetry to show that signs in poetic language are visual and that they may function independently of their relationship with spoken language. Maintains that poetic language is motivated in its visuality and that it is iconic in a fundamental way. (FL)

Explores how oral and print characteristics mesh or clash in "words-in-freedom," a form of visual poetry invented by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Analyzes Marinetti's poster-poem "Apres la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto," highlighting the different natures of the two media and the coding difficulties occasioned by…

Questions the notion that William Blake's epic poem "The Four Zoas" is simply a manuscript--it is a part of Blake's working through the problems of publication during the reign of a conservative, nationalistic government at war with France. Suggests that Blake's construction of the text makes the act of reading "both traitorous and…

Suggests that a poetic writing of traits, inviting readers to seek meaning in a poem's visual form, rests on a myth of the portrait in which marks of a written language are drawn directly from nature. (DF)

Puts four poems written by Vladimir Mayakovsky into social and historical context by performing a content analysis. Discusses the revolutionary nature of the poetic and typographic communication and the circumstances surrounding the poems' publication. (KEH)