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The Plasticity of Poetry
Author(s) -
Smith Jessica
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00338.x
Subject(s) - poetry , space (punctuation) , literature , architecture , art , politics , section (typography) , avant garde , art history , aesthetics , philosophy , visual arts , linguistics , computer science , law , political science , operating system
Abstract This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Twentieth Century Section. By comparing avant‐garde visual poetry to the avant‐garde architecture of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this essay describes how one virtually “moves through” poetic space. Appealing to examples from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery and Susan Howe and contemporary Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, I steer the reader through complex visual poems based on the grounds that a disruption of the reader’s sense of space has aesthetic and political implications.