Visuality and Free Verse
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Date
2023-07-06
Authors
Roethle, Christopher
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
More than a hundred years after Whitman, vers libre, and the Imagist movement, many poets still have a remarkably indistinct understanding of what it means to write in free verse, as the form is too often defined by what it is not rather than by what it is. In this dissertation, I examine work by Sadakichi Hartmann, Marcel Broodthaers, Philip Metres, and Derik Badman at the limit of what we might consider free verse poetry to argue that free verse is not just a linguistic form but a visual construct that must be “seen” in those terms to be understood. Following my Introduction, Chapter Two examines the early and nearly unclassifiable vers libre of Sadakichi Hartmann, a Whitman acquaintance and early adopter of French Symbolism whose characteristic line in 1898’s Naked Ghosts combines elements of prose poetry, free verse, meter, and rhyme in a package explained as much by his interpretation of Japanese painting as by Whitman or the Symbolists. Even before Imagism, Hartmann wrote verse that functioned, in some ways, like an image itself. Chapter Three investigates the groundbreaking museum installations of Belgian visual artist Marcel Broodthaers, which some critics consider a form of three-dimensional free verse. Broodthaers’s installations encourage a multiperspectival approach to “reading” that consistently breaks its own protocols, shedding light on itself and other linguistic systems to expose the insufficiency of the signifier/signified chain. This chapter also examines the more recent verbal-visual poetry of American poet Philip Metres, who applies Broodthaers’s techniques to page-based free verse. Finally, Chapter Four examines the hybrid form of contemporary American comics poetry, with emphasis on Derik Badman’s Colletta Suite, to argue that comics poetry may be a new form of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” and possibly the revitalized dramatic poetry Olson anticipated at the end of his 1950 essay.
In each case, free verse steps into the realm of a visuality that was always there ahead of it, waiting for the linguistic elements of the prosody to catch up. By examining these works, we may begin to perceive a more positive than negative definition of the form.
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Keywords
American literature, Comics poetry, Free verse poetry, Installation art, Modernist, Visual art and aesthetics