Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Starting in February, 2005, The Poetry School will run a ten week course on experimental poetry. Tutor, Robert Vas Dias,
explains to Brittle Star a little about what the course will offer. [editors]

The Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, writing in 1913, declared that
‘lyricism is the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life.... The
ability to colour the world with the unique colours of our changeable
selves.’ So Marinetti begins his discussion of one of the central ideas of  Futurism, ‘words-in-freedom,’a concept that was to have a profound effect on Modernist poets in England, where Futurist ideas found their expression in the Vorticist poems of Ezra Pound and
Wyndham Lewis.

   A decade later, the Surrealists, spearheaded by André Breton, had a crucial impact on the forming of modern cultural consciousness. Almost no New York School, post-World War II poets or painters would have denied the extensive influence of the Surrealist artists who directly preceded them. For the Surrealists, poetry was the veritable key to creation in whatever medium, whether writing, painting, or sculpture.

   Experimental and Avant-Garde Poetry traces the considerable
influence on modern and contemporary practice of the extraordinary experiments with language, sound, typography and spatial arrangement, and visual combinations of text and image, that characterised the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning with
Mallarmé’s seminal work Un coup de dés, in a remarkable typographic translation into English, the course includes a consideration of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the Italian and Russian Futurists, the effect of Cubist painters on poetry, the ‘simultanés’ of Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay as exemplified by La Prose du Transsibérien, the French Surrealist writers, and the sound poetry of Schwitters.

   The free-verse line in English and its arrangement on the page is examined in relation to the compositional concerns of the typographer and visual artist – the late 19th century renaissance of
printing – and as a means for scoring the musical resources of
poetry, as seen in the work of Pound, Zukofsky, cummings and others. The spatial expressiveness of the free-verse line in American poetry, as developed by Whitman and by Emily Dickinson’s graffiti-like ‘fascicle’ texts, is explored in the work of both contemporary
American and British poets.