HENK03911U CANCELED English - Free topic 13: Contemporary Experimental Poetry (exam form A,B,C)

This course will be study of the relationship between poetry and print, with a particular emphasis on questions of layout and technology and our focus will be as much in book history as in the criticism of poetry. The argument will be that poetry changes according to the technology available, and that ‘free verse’ became technically possible only in the twentieth century. We will trace the development of ‘spaced-out’ poetry (sometimes though not helpfully known as ‘concrete poetry’) from Mallarmé and Apollinaire in France to Ezra Pound, H.D. and William Carlos Williams, through the Black Mountain poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and two poets working in Britain, Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher. All poetry uses blank spaces: that is what distinguishes it from prose, whose only blank spaces mark the beginnings and ends of paragraphs. Until c. 1900 the blank spaces on the poetic page gave shape to lines and stanzas; in the ‘spaced-out poetry’ that we shall be studying the spaces have all sorts of functions yet to be properly investigated.