Pre-poetic precursors: Blake, Patchen, Nichol, and the materials and ethics of verbal-visual poetry (William Blake, Kenneth Patchen, B. P. Nichol)

This study of William Blake (1756–1827), Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972), and bpNichol (1944–1988) offers new theoretical concepts which characterize the critical difficulties they faced as a result of poetic practices extending beyond (or “below”) conventional models of poetry and visual art. I use concepts of “prepoetics” and “geopoiesis” which describe an ethics composed of reader reception, institutional history, and the material nature of poems as written, drawn, and published objects. My “Introduction” discusses the critical history of each poet and explores the major historical, cultural and technical influences on their work. It also provides a definition of verbal-visual poetry; as both a material practice in continuous evolution, and as a historical object for cultural institutions. I show how literary interpretations rarely consider the physical carriers of poetic art as integral to both poem and its content, while these poets consistently did so, especially in such works as Jerusalem (Blake), The Journal of Albion Moonlight and painted “Picture-Poems” (Patchen), and the long poem The Martyrology (Nichol).; The second chapter, “Prepoetics,” more fully discloses the limit-points of critical models by studying responses to the work of these three poets. The term prepoetics indicates practices that extend the formal possibilities of the poem that are subsequently used by other poets, artists and publishers without recognition of the practical and ethical role they held for the earlier poet. I examine Kenneth Patchen's unique use of titles and his pioneering of the Jazz and Poetry movement, William Blake's integration of engraving into his poem's themes, and bpNichol's iconic, emblematic use of the letter “H” to define verbal-visual arguments and allegories.; In the third chapter, “Geographic Poiesis,” I use the lens of the geographical imagination and the Deleuzian notion of “deterritorialization” to analyze the prepoetic. I examine bpNichol's concrete and alphabetic poetics, and show how his letters fill perceptual space and exert an uncanny influence on our ability to read the signs of the everyday. I next read William Blake's Jerusalem as a poetic “gazetteer” of a destabilized topography of sexual difference and overlapping historical eras. Finally, Kenneth Patchen's picture-poems and his two anti-novels The Journal of Albion Moonlight and Sleepers Awake are refigured as works which border the modernistpostmodernist divide. In concluding the study, I reemphasize the importance of reading material practices as part of the ethical and historical evolution of the literary arts. Physical marks and markers are defined as ethical, and not purely aesthetic, acts because they demand a new understanding of how language is bound into the everyday matters by way of which our selves and our world is traversed.