There are too many to mention, so I’ll just concentrate on one. Henri Michaux had a huge impact on my thinking about what a poem is and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. Michaux jettisoned the notion of the “poetic” (which even his contemporaries, the Surrealists, still clung to), allowing language free reign into new territories of thought and experience. His asemic writing bristles with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, returning written language to a state of pictographic innocence in which the mark on the page exerts its fierce life, its resistance to straitjackets of meaning imposed by writer and reader. Much of what we regard as most cutting-edge in contemporary poetry was prefigured by Michaux several decades ago.
Tuesday, 18 August 2020
James Knight : part three
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
There are too many to mention, so I’ll just concentrate on one. Henri Michaux had a huge impact on my thinking about what a poem is and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. Michaux jettisoned the notion of the “poetic” (which even his contemporaries, the Surrealists, still clung to), allowing language free reign into new territories of thought and experience. His asemic writing bristles with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, returning written language to a state of pictographic innocence in which the mark on the page exerts its fierce life, its resistance to straitjackets of meaning imposed by writer and reader. Much of what we regard as most cutting-edge in contemporary poetry was prefigured by Michaux several decades ago.
There are too many to mention, so I’ll just concentrate on one. Henri Michaux had a huge impact on my thinking about what a poem is and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. Michaux jettisoned the notion of the “poetic” (which even his contemporaries, the Surrealists, still clung to), allowing language free reign into new territories of thought and experience. His asemic writing bristles with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, returning written language to a state of pictographic innocence in which the mark on the page exerts its fierce life, its resistance to straitjackets of meaning imposed by writer and reader. Much of what we regard as most cutting-edge in contemporary poetry was prefigured by Michaux several decades ago.
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