Short description:

This book includes conceptual printed works, poem-objects, texts for performance, and computational poetry that shape a posthumanist understanding which is ?situated?. Part of the material turn, it fashions modes of complex embodiment in relation to the global crises of our moment: environmental, economic and ethical.

Long description:

This book examines contemporary visual poetry and how conceptual writing, poem-objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding which is ?situated?. First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes feminist praxis. In Paula Claire and Maggie O?Sullivan ?vispo? becomes an ecological practice concerned with connectivity in the entanglements of natureculture. In O?Sullivan, Campanello, Bergvall, and Philip spatial and temporal sense (de)formation sustains radical forms of voicing and eyewitness. Finally, works by Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland expand our understanding of visual poetry in digital (electronic, VR and AI) contexts in which technology and affect are intimately connected. These visual texts open up Braidotti?s question with respect to how we are to ?visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language?.

Contemporary Visual Poetics not only offers an important rethinking of the history of ?extended poetics,? as its author Fiona Becket names it, but breaks essential new ground across technologies which many critics still feel unsure of how to read. This book provides a vocabulary and a profound understanding of ?posthuman? existence played out in the avant-garde poem, mapping new ways that such work is impacting its society and environment. Becket's connection of her core investigation to ecocritical thinking ? and therefore our current (we hope not final) emergencies ? also makes this intervention timely, even urgent.

--Romana Huk, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Chapter 1          Introduction Reclaiming Vision 

Chapter 2          Textual Bodies: Visual Poetry as Feminist Praxis

Chapter 3          The ?Multiple Body?: Visual Poetry?s Natural Histories

Chapter 4          Eye Witness and the Curated Language of Others

Chapter 5          Computational Environments and the Extended Poet

Bibliography

Index