As innovative as his sculpture, Andre's visually oriented poetry, however, has yet to receive the same rigor of attention as his sculpture. His inventive use of poetic and visual form, which he described as poetry mapped onto the visual arts, provides a compelling example of the interrelationship of word and image, a practice, although often overlooked, that suffuses twentieth-century visual art and poetry. Whereas Andre produced approximately 1,500 poems over many decades, this project focuses on his Words installation, the largest permanently installed collection of Andre's poems in the world. In 1995, Andre gifted 465 pages of poetry to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Andre's experiments with genre, including lyrics, autobiographies, novels, odes, and operas, push literary convention to the edge of irreconcilability. Despite the array of genres, I argue that all of the disparate kinds of writing found in Words demonstrate Andre's poetic sensibility. Until recently the critical discussion of Andre's poems proceeded as a one-sided discourse, which advanced the notion that this large body of work was best suited to enhancing the understanding of Andre's sculptural practice. To redress the one-sidedness of the discourse requires approaching Andre not only as a sculptor who made poems, but also as a poet deeply engaged in the visual qualities of his poetics. Engaging the spirit of the "make it new" sensibility of modernist poetics, Andre developed his own practice by "mapping language on the conventions and usages of 20thcentury abstract art."¹ Andre's poetry operates in the space between art and language. In this space we find Andre's engagement with poetic history, particularly the innovations of Ezra Pound, his relationship to important poetic developments such as fragmentation and quotation, and his experimentation with poetry as a visual medium. An examination of Andre's poetic oeuvre, the publication and exhibition history of his poems, and the manner of critical attention given to the poems from the 1960s onward contextualizes Andre's practice of mapping poetry onto the visual arts, while also bridging the gap in discourse between the fields of art and poetry. / text

En rapport avec la tradition du poète-historien du vingtième siècle, la poétique documentaire pratiquée par Ezra Pound et Susan Howe de manières distinctes mais liées sert de base à une étude de la matérialité complexe au sein du processus compositionnel des deux écrivains. Fondée sur les matériaux d'archives des deux séquences, une analyse détaillée des « Malatesta Cantos » de Pound et de « Marginalia de Melville » de Howe permet une réflexion sur le développement de la transformation typographique dans le domaine de la poésie. Tout au long de cette critique, Steven Paschall aborde les processus de la signification de la matérialité en parallèle aux conceptions et expériences Poundiennes et Howiennes de l'archive historique et de la production littéraire. Pour Pound l'interprétation du quattrocento et de la saga de Sigismond Malatesta, et pour Howe celle des notes marginales et des ébauches manuscrites, a mené à la composition des poèmes innovateurs qui, à partir des sources textuelles, redéfinissent les idées conventionnelles de l'historiographie et de la pratique interprétative poétique au moyen des techniques structurelles et formelles. En examinant les opérations de l'appropriation littéraire, de la révision du langage écrit et de la page visuo-spatiale, Paschall avance un lien généalogique entre la matérialité archivistique du « poème contenant l'histoire » de Pound et les expériences visuelles d'articulation effectuées dans les reconfigurations palimpsestiques de Howe. / Set against the tradition of the 20th-century poet-historian, the documentary poetics practiced in distinct yet related ways by Ezra Pound and Susan Howe serves as the basis of this study's investigation of the complex materiality underpinning each writer's compositional process. Pound's "Malatesta Cantos" and Howe's "Melville's Marginalia" are the focus of detailed analysis specifically grounded in the archival materials for each sequence in order to explore the development of typographic metaphrasis. Throughout this critical work, Steven Paschall sets the processes of materiality's signification in parallel to Pound and Howe's conceptions of, and engagements with, the historical archive and literary production. Pound's reading of the quattrocento and the saga of Sigismondo Malatesta, and Howe's reading of marginalia and manuscript drafts, resulted in unique source-based poems, the structural and formal techniques of which redefine conventional notions of historiography and interpretative poetic practice. In addressing the mechanics of literary appropriation, editing written language, and the visio-spatial page, Paschall asserts a genealogical thread between the archival materiality of Pound's "poem containing history" and the visual experiments in articulation of Howe's palimpsestic reconfigurations thereof.

Notre thèse explore les multiples voies proposées par Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim et Susan Howe pour organiser visuellement l’espace de la page. L’usage de la dimension visuelle en poésie ouvre des possibilités que le Verbe a toujours eues : dépeindre, se dédoubler, et produire un écho visuel et sonore. La dimension du voir permet également la création de paradoxes par des juxtapositions d’éléments. Tout cela met en question le statut du langage et du langage poétique. Cette thèse étudie les moyens par lesquels des poésies interpellent leurs lecteurs et continuent à produire des significations qui dépassent par leur multiplicité la formation traditionnelle du sens. Ces œuvres créent des significations que l’on doit voir, et non comprendre, par le biais d’une lecture plurielle de composants [iconographiques, linguistiques, abstraits, sériels]. On prend comme point de départ l’étude des typologies du fragment et illustre comment la discrétion visuelle du fragment est intimement liée au développement de chaque poète. On interroge le rapport du mot à l’image afin de dégager des antécédents des procédés utilisés sur la page. On confirme que ces œuvres emploient des techniques « iconiques », comme le faisaient les calligrammes d’Apollinaire, mais y associent les techniques mallarméennes en étendant la lecture sur plusieurs pages. Les poésies de Howe, d’Albiach et de Kim présentent une synesthésie totale des correspondances entre des formes jusqu’à-là exploitées séparément. Par conséquent, ces œuvres radicalisent la notion de possible poétique en assimilant les techniques de la publicité, de la pop culture, du collage et du montage. / This dissertation explores the diverse ways in which the work of Anne-Marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe visually organise the space of the page. The use of poetry’s visual dimension enlarges the traditional possibilities of the Word: to depict, multiply and produce an echo which is simultaneously resonant and visual. Exploiting the gaze also creates paradoxes through the juxtaposition of various elements. All of this calls into question the status of language, and poetic language in particular. This dissertation studies the ways these poets engage their readers as they produce a plurality of meanings which extend far beyond traditional sense-making. These works have significations which need to be seen rather than understood, via a reading process of its multifarious components [iconographic, linguistic, abstract, in series]. This study’s point of departure is the consideration of various types of fragments which illustrate how the fragment’s visual subtlety is intimately linked to each poet’s development. Connections between word and image are closely examined in order to locate the antecedents for the procedures being applied to the page. These works use “iconographic” techniques much as Apollinaire did in his calligrammes, while associating with these Mallarmé’s methods of drawing a poem’s reading out over numerous pages. The poetries of Howe, Albiach and Kim present a synesthesia of correspondences between all the forms which had heretofore been used separately. Consequently, these works radicalize the notion of what is possible in poetry by assimilating advertising, pop culture, collage and montage techniques.

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As an alternative to print media, digital media make us newly aware of the materiality of experimental poetic texts and require us to account for their media-specific differences. Although already several theoretical models have been put forward to define these differences, so far few poems have been analyzed in terms of their media-specific textual materiality. This thesis seeks to fill this gap in the applied media-specific analysis of experimental poetry. It combines traditional close reading with a media-specific approach in order to investigate the relationship between the physical characteristics and signifying strategies of four experimental poetic texts in various digital and non-digital media. It critically interrogates the specific use of the given medium in each poem, and illustrates that their respective textual materiality cannot be specified in advance based on general assumptions concerning the medium in question. A digital poem is not inherently more innovative than a non-digital poem. Rather, a poem is perceived as innovative if it resists conventional reading strategies by establishing a particularly complex, dynamic, and effectively anomalous sense of textual materiality, which necessarily only emerges from the direct interplay among text, object, and reader.

The American poet Susan Howe (1937-present) began her career as a visual artist, but owing to a dearth of information about her early collages it has been difficult to say anything substantive about how they might have shaped her poetic practice. In 2010, she placed her collages on archive. Along with a number of personal interviews with Howe, this heretofore unavailable material has enabled me to consider Howe's subsequent work in a new light and to establish significant links between her early visual aesthetics and the poetics of bibliography, historiography, and elegy for which she is now known. Howe's collages, like her poetry, focus on details that are at risk of vanishing from cultural memory and printed record. For this reason, I argue that her work evinces an 'elegaic materialism', or a way of reading, viewing, and thinking about texts that is attuned to loss. If “history is the record of the winners,” as Howe says, then one way of rescuing marginalized perspectives is by regarding manuscripts as drawings, thereby rescuing the concrete particulars deemed irrelevant by editors and historians. As Howe's late work turned increasingly toward elegy, her early aesthetic contributed to a nuanced poetics of personal loss and to a series of astonishing new formal tropes. The Introduction to this thesis discusses Howe's materialism in the context of current literary theory and textual scholarship. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Howe's art historical context. Chapter 2 analyses a selection of her word-drawings. Chapter 3 considers Howe's transition to poetry. Chapter 4 addresses her turn to archival documents in her middle period. Chapter 5 looks at the influence on Howe of documentary film, especially in connection with the task of representing a lost loved one, and Chapter 6 discusses her two most recent elegies, The Midnight and THAT THIS. A Coda completes the circle by once more considering Howe in the context of the visual arts at the moment she was selected to exhibit at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.