How should poetry look?

1. The question

Why is this an interesting question?• We may want to speculate about how will poetry fare in the future• Theories about text and image bring a new discourse to the question

‘what are we looking at’• Bibliographers are starting to pay attention to “layout” as an attribute of

textuality• Cultural critics are speculating about print technology and meaning • Historians are articulating the forming and activities of communities of

readers in relation to specific texts• The idea that the poem will ‘come to rest’ at some point in the

typographic and layout fluxuations it has seen is an inviting idea. Does it? Will it?

• Who decided how these poems should look? What were their choices? How else could we be seeing them? Was it arbitrary or deliberate?

Focusing the question

• To review how poetry has looked

– Compare the published record of three poems [of undisputed standing in the literature of English]

• Shakespeare’s sonnet “From fairest creatures . . .”

• Whitman’s Leaves of Grass “I celebrate myself . . .”

• Eliot’s Wasteland “The Burial of the Dead”

Focusing the question

• Printers’ “rules of thumb”

– Compositors• Barker, Moxon

– Typographers• Moxon, Gill

– Publishing houses, printing factories

– Graphic artists, skilled layout tradespeople

Focusing the question

• For comparison and analysis

– Compile a database of citations • Through time

• Tracking a range of attributes

– Compile a gallery of images to examine the history in print

• Determine a method of sampling the citation data for meaningful representation

– Describe the “drift”

Other ways of asking the question

• What is “conventional” about the way these poems look, have looked, can look

• What has changed over time

• What has not changed over time

• How do printers and publishers decide how poems should look

• How do poems not look

Audiences

• Poets as printers and readers

• Fine book printers and readers

• Trade presses

• Scholars

Structuring the problem

• Bibliographic model

• Cultural critical model

• Rules of thumb

Uncertainties

• Ways of looking at these findings

– Continuum 1: is it text or is it image

– Continuum 2: over time, what has changed and what has not changed

• does production technology influence print or not

• What is the meaning of changes that have occurred

– Continuum 3: readers and books; print is conservative, readers are free to change

Uncertainties

• Ways of looking at these findings

– Continuum 4: fine book arts or popular production trade press [high culture to low]

– De gustibus non est disputatum

What this inquiry is not about

• De gustibus non est disputatum

• Concrete poetry

2. Sources

Literature review

– Situate the question

– How do we approach a discussion of “layout”; what are our terms; what background discussion do we need to pick up the question and enter the field

– Note similar work on the print attributes and “layout” questions for these specific works

– Situate the observable “drift”

Sources that address the question: Research

• From bibliographers:

– Background: McKenzie,

– Further: Barker, Lowenstein,

• Cultural critics:

– Chartier

• Technical and production printers

– Adobe

Literature review: Shakespeare

Literature review: Whitman

Literature review: Eliot

Literature review: mez

3. Findings

Methodology

Citation tables

• Variables

– Sources

– Attributes

– Dates

– Edition

Evidence

• Copyright and permissions

• Acquiring images

• Citation data; developing, conflating, sorting these data

“small multiples” and analysis• Image/citation galleries• “Views” of pages, selected to investigate and display

cross tabulations on– Technology inflections– Audience stratification– Drift of practice through time– Printers rules of thumb

Argumentation map

4. Conclusions

Introduction?

• state the problem

• create a common ground of shared understanding

• unsettle the common ground with your statement of the problem

• state your response