Academic literature on the topic 'Visual poetry, Canadian (English)'

Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.

This dissertation focuses on five closely knit writers who, between 1962 and 1981, produced exemplary historiographic poetry that guided their contemporaries. Al Purdy, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, and Margaret Atwood were the chief voices of a literary mode that I term "modernist lyric historiography": a meditative modernist lyric that is self-critical, self-consciously incapable of claiming and skeptical about any claim to authority over history, and fundamentally historiographic (in the sense that it synthesizes, discards, and/or critically evaluates fragments of history). Arguably, Purdy was the inaugurator of lyric historiography: in the early 1960s, he experimented with a modernist lyric attentive to a broad vision of Canadian history. Newlove was one of many poets who saw Purdy's lyric historiography as a mode that could be used to provide insight into neglected prairie histories. As part of their search for more intimate connections to history that could sustain longer, narrative poems, McKinnon and Suknaski adapted lyric historiography to explore the familial past. Atwood reimagined lyric historiography as the search for Canadian "foremothers," proto-feminists that could serve as models for the second-wave feminist movement.Addressing the archives, creative writing, and historical contexts of these five writers, this dissertation proposes two primary claims. First, modernism persisted well into the 1970s (and even beyond) and shared with Canadian postmodernism a sophisticated approach to the idea of "history." Second, modernist lyric historiography was a continued investigation into one's ability to claim authority over historical narratives. Many modernists found some measure of such authority by exploring the most intimate connections to the past, which tended to be literal and figurative familial ones.<br>Cette thèse traite de cinq écrivains, qui, entre 1962 et 1981, ont créé des modèles de poésie historiographique, qui ont guidé leurs contemporains modernistes. Al Purdy, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski et Margaret Atwood ont été les figures principales d'un mode littéraire que nous appelons «l'historiographie lyrique moderniste». Ce terme désigne une poésie lyrique moderniste et méditative, qui est autocritique, réticente à revendiquer une quelconque autorité sur l'histoire et méfiante de cette autorité lorsqu'elle est invoquée, ainsi que fondamentalement historiographique. Au début des années 1960, Purdy expérimente avec la poésie moderniste sur l'histoire du Canada. Newlove considérait l'historiographie lyrique de Purdy comme une manière d'écrire qui pourrait offrir une nouvelle façon de voir le passé négligé des prairies. McKinnon et Suknaski ont adapté l'historiographie lyrique en examinant le passé de leur famille. Atwood a réinventé l'historiographie lyrique en tant que recherche des «aïeules» canadiennes, des proto-féministes qui pourraient servir de modèle à la deuxième génération de féministes. En tenant compte des archives, de l'écriture et des contextes historiques de ces cinq écrivains, cette thèse propose deux idées principales. Premièrement, nous affirmons que le modernisme a persisté durant l'après-guerre et qu'il partageait avec le postmodernisme canadien une approche sophistiquée et critique de l'histoire. Deuxièmement, nous soutenons que l'historiographie lyrique moderniste consistait en un questionnement persistant sur la capacité de revendiquer une certaine autorité concernant un récit historique. Plusieurs modernistes ont trouvé une certaine autorité en explorant les liens les plus intimes avec le passé, qui avaient tendance à être des liens familiaux littéraux et métaphoriques.

This thesis argues that as historians of English-Canadian poetry, A. J. M. Smith, John Sutherland, Northrop Frye, and Desmond Pacey explicitly promote the value of past conflict reconciled into present harmony. They do so by claiming that such reconciliation marks the maturity of English-Canadian culture. This thesis also argues, however, that the interactive progression of their histories implicitly undermines this value. It does so because each critic appreciates a different group of poets for realizing their shared cultural ideal, thereby establishing contradictory representations of what they all claim to be the culmination of English-Canadian literary history. The thesis concludes that while their lingering sense of present cultural maturity should now be fully renounced, the value these critics place on reconciliation is well worth preserving and transforming.

The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.